Although our characters consist in projects that we freely pursue and can revise, according to Sartre, we generally prefer to consider them to be fi xed natures over which we have no control. We would rather not acknowledge our responsibility for the way we are, the way things seem to us, and the way we respond to them. This is the basic aim of bad faith, as we saw in the last chapter, and it is not an honest mistake. Sartre frequently describes it as a project and, as we will see, this project is not merely a cognitive exercise but involves the way we relate to the world around us. The behaviour of the café waiter provides a good example:
his gestures are not just those we would expect from someone with fi xed waiterly characteristics, they do not merely manifest a belief that the waiter has about himself, but are exaggerations that together present a caricature of such a person, conscientiously enacted to persuade himself and his customers that he is nothing but a waiter. Since bad faith is the project of hiding our freedom from ourselves, the very idea of it raises the diffi cult and intricate question of how it is even possible for people to hide things from themselves.
This is not just a question for Sartre’s philosophy, of course, since it is generally agreed that people do deceive themselves about various things in life. The puzzle arises because it seems that deceiving oneself, like deceiv- ing other people, is a purposive activity that requires the deceiver to know the falsity of the belief to be inculcated and to know their own intention to deceive. We cannot deceive other people without keeping these things from them, it seems, since if they know the falsity of what we want them to believe or if they know that we intend to deceive them, they will simply not fall for it. So self-deception seems to require one and the same person to both know and not know the falsity of the belief they are is trying to incul- cate and to both know and not know of their intention to deceive. How is it possible to both know and not know the same things? This is a puzzle rather than an argument against the possibility of self-deception since it is generally agreed that self-deception is possible, even quite common. The point of the puzzle is that solving it should tell us something about the ways in which our minds work.
It might be thought that we do not need to consider this puzzle in order to assess the plausibility of Sartre’s theory of the nature and knowledge of character. Since we all agree that self-deception is possible, the argument might run, this is no more a problem for accepting Sartre’s philosophy than it is a problem in general. This is not an acceptable response, however. Bad faith involves a specifi c kind of self-deception, on Sartre’s view, in which one is continuously presented with evidence that we do not have fi xed natures, in the form of an awareness that we ourselves need not behave in the ways in which we do behave. It therefore requires that self-deception is possible not in cases where one chooses to forget evidence once it is out of sight or in cases in which one chooses not to go looking for any evidence on the matter, but in the face of the continuing presence of evidence to the contrary of the cherished belief.
If we are to accept Sartre’s diagnosis of bad faith as a strategy for deny- ing our freedom over our character, moreover, then we also need to know that self-deception is not simply a matter of being deceived by some uncon- scious part of the mind whose operations cannot really be said to be strat- egies that the agent pursues. Sartre devotes some pages at the beginning of his discussion of bad faith to dismissing this picture of self-deception, which he ascribes to Sigmund Freud. This picture presents self-deception as an activity aimed at keeping in the unconscious something that one would rather not consciously acknowledge. Sartre’s argument here is somewhat obscured by his confl ation of terms from different phases of the develop- ment of Freud’s thought and by his focus on the notion of resistance, which is the purported phenomenon of a psychoanalytic patient engaging in a variety of strategies to prevent the analyst from getting to the truth. We can pare down Sartre’s argument, however, into a form that makes it indepen- dent of the acceptability of any particular set of Freudian terminology and even of the veracity of reports of resistance.
The central point is that the purported activity of censorship must involve recognising evidence for the truth that the agent is denying, whether this evidence is in the form of the analyst’s probing or any other form, and burying that evidence by outright denial or more evasive strategies such as changing the subject of discussion or simply thinking about something else. The activity of censorship, that is, involves awareness of facts about oneself or one’s environment that might constitute evidence, awareness of the nature of the truth to be hidden, awareness that that truth is to remain hidden, awareness of the confl ict between the potential evidence and the aim of keeping the truth hidden, and deployment of mental and behav- ioural strategies in response to this confl ict. Far from being mechanical and unthinking, this censorship seems much like any sophisticated conscious activity. Rather than an activity of the nonrational drives and impulses of the unconscious, this seems to involve a process of reasoning.
If this is right, then the Freudian picture of self-deception either collapses or requires an implausible view of the agent, depending on the relation
between this conscious activity of censorship and the conscious beliefs the agent possesses. If one thinks that the agent is simply self-deceived about the activity of censorship, engaging in it but somehow hiding this fact, then we are back where we started: the possibility of this self-deception needs to be explained. It appears that the only other option is to consider the activity of censorship to be the work of a second, distinct, autonomous, rational, conscious mind that is capable of directing my thought and my behaviour in response to information from my own senses. This takes us a long way from Freud’s intended functional division of our mental activi- ties between the rational ones we are aware of and the nonrational ones we are unaware of.
We do not need to assess the impact of this argument on Freudian psy- choanalysis, since our concern in this chapter is with Sartre’s alternative account of self-deception. This reconstruction of the argument does, how- ever, tell us three things about Sartre’s account. The fi rst, and most obvious, is that he wants to explain bad faith without the kind of unconscious activ- ity that is central to the Freudian understanding of the mind. The second is that he has not here attempted a general critique of the Freudian idea of the unconscious, since his argument has nothing to say about the possibility of drives and appetites that are unconscious but not actively censored. Sartre does present such a general critique in Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions.
His argument there is essentially that since experiences and actions mani- fest the aims and projects that rationalise and explain them, there is simply no causal-explanatory role available for purportedly unconscious drives and appetites that cannot be manifested in or rationalise the experiences and actions that they cause (STE: 28–34). We will return to this argument at the end of the chapter, when we consider in more detail just what Sartre’s opposition to the Freudian unconscious involves.
The third is that he takes this critique to show that we should not model self-deception on lying to someone else. It is not simply an internal mental procedure in which I quietly tell myself something that I know not to be true and then somehow end up believing it. We can think of bad faith as lying to oneself, Sartre writes, but only ‘on condition that we distinguish the lie to oneself from lying in general’ (B&N: 71; see also B&N: 90–1).
It is to argue for this distinction that Sartre raises the notion of the Freud- ian unconscious in the fi rst place, which he presents as the only candidate solution to the puzzle of self-deception available if we continue to think of self-deception on the model of lying to someone else. His argument is that on closer inspection this presents no solution at all.
Rather than a refl exive form of lying, Sartre argues, bad faith is more like a refl exive form of distraction (B&N: 77). One does not tell oneself something untrue, but tries to steer one’s mind away from the truth and perhaps towards things that suggest some contrary idea. Such distraction is not some purely internal exercise of which behaviour can be only an effect, but rather involves behaviour as part of the strategy. This does not, on its
own, solve the puzzle of self-deception that Sartre is faced with, however.
In order to distract you from the nearby cliff-edge that fi lls you with fear, I need to be aware that the cliff-edge is there and fi lls you with fear and I need to be aware that I am distracting you from it. You can be successfully distracted even if you are aware that this is what I am doing, but only by being absorbed by my behaviour to the exclusion of thinking about the cliff edge or my reasons for behaving in this way now. It is not clear how one could do this to oneself, since one’s motivation for continually doing so involves an awareness of precisely what one would be trying to exclude from one’s awareness.
Understanding bad faith as self-distraction rather than self-deception is, nevertheless, integral to Sartre’s account of bad faith. Before unpacking that account, we need to be aware of two ways in which Sartre’s theory of bad faith is more complicated than the discussion in the last chapter implies. Where that chapter describes Sartre as using the term ‘bad faith’ in two senses, one general and the other more restricted, this is not quite true.
It is true that he uses it in both of those senses. It is also true that he uses it in a general sense to indicate the aim of seeing oneself as having a fi xed nature and in a restricted sense to indicate the aim of seeing oneself as hav- ing a fi xed nature that does not include certain traits that one does in fact possess. But it is also true that Sartre sometimes uses the term in another sense, one in which it has already been used in this chapter. This sense does not refer to the content of the strategies of self-deception that he discusses, but rather to the structure or form of those strategies. He uses the term in this sense interchangeably with ‘self-deception’, and bad faith in this sense is what this chapter is all about. What is more, as we will see, Sartre also uses the term ‘bad faith’ to refer to a certain attitude towards evidence that is involved in this self-deception or self-distraction. All of this has gener- ated some confusion.
The second complication is that, in addition to the two forms of bad faith in the general sense discussed in the last chapter, sincerity and the restricted sense of bad faith, Sartre talks about an aspect of bad faith that he calls ‘l’esprit de sérieux’, usually translated as ‘the spirit of seriousness’
but which might be better rendered ‘serious-mindedness’ or just ‘serious- ness’ (B&N: 601). This is the attitude that takes the demands the world appears to make to be genuinely independent of one’s own projects, genu- inely objective values in the world that are there to be recognised by anyone and that make the same demands of all of us. This should not be under- stood as another form of bad faith, one that is concerned with the structure of the world rather than with one’s own character, however. It is rather a strategy that one can pursue as part of the project of seeing people as hav- ing fi xed natures, as we will see later in this chapter.
At the heart of Sartre’s account of the structure of bad faith, of the self- deception or self-distraction involved in seeing ourselves as having fi xed natures, is his insistence on understanding it not simply as an action or
an event or a process, but as the ongoing pursuit of a goal—in short, as a project. The exaggerated behaviour of the waiter is part of this project, since he engages in it in order to provide himself with evidence of his fi xed waiterly nature. So too is the attitude of his customers, since this manifests their requirement that the waiter provides for them evidence that people have fi xed natures, or at least does not provide evidence to the contrary.
Sartre does not mean his descriptions of characters in bad faith to simply show symptoms of this condition: the behaviour is not caused by an inner mental condition of bad faith, but is itself part and parcel of the project of bad faith.
This is not to say that Sartre thinks that bad faith always and necessarily involves such excessive behaviour as displayed by his example of the waiter, however. Were it his view that we can only attempt to display a fi xed nature by caricaturing it, then his apparent view that bad faith is very common, even socially pervasive, would seem to be at best a diagnosis of a certain kind of requirement made by the society around him at the time, at worst plainly false. After all, in Paris these days, it is only in the cafés near the busy crossroads now named Place Sartre-Beauvoir—the Flore and the Deux Magots that Sartre and his colleagues famously frequented—that the wait- ers behave in the extravagant yet mechanical way Sartre describes while their customers carry the accoutrements and strike the poses of archetypal post-war French intellectuals without the merest hint of irony.
Most people in bad faith engage in rather more subtle behaviour: Sartre’s other examples, of the woman on a date, the unhappy homosexual, and his friend the champion of sincerity, do not involve the kind of self-conscious caricaturing that the waiter engages in. Pursuing a project, moreover, does not require that the behaviour aimed at pursuing it is explicitly thought of in this way by the person engaging in it, and part of the point of understanding bad faith as a project is that this will help us understand how this self-decep- tion is possible. I need not constantly think about the goal of getting to my offi ce or about the procedure of walking in order to be walking to my offi ce.
All that is required for the pursuit of a project is that an ongoing pattern of behaviour is unifi ed by a single goal. It does not require ongoing explicit thought about that goal or about the actions involved in pursuing it.
Walking to the offi ce does require awareness of the environment and of one’s goal, of course, but this awareness need not be precisely and explicitly articulated. In order to navigate the environment successfully to achieve this goal, one must engage in intelligent and responsive behaviour, but this need not involve conceptual thought. In terms of some of the sartrais discussed in the last chapter, it requires only non-thetic awareness of one’s environ- ment and goal, not thetic awareness of them; one need only be aware of these things in the extensional sense of ‘awareness’.
The pursuit of a project does, however, structure one’s experience. The articulation of one’s surroundings as having this sense or that, the constitu- tion of one’s situations, the mobiles and motifs that explain one’s behaviour,
result from the projects one is pursuing, according to Sartre, as we saw in chapter 3. Since bad faith is a project, therefore, the person in bad faith lives in a world constituted at least in part by this bad faith. This is why Sartre describes bad faith as involving a ‘weltanschauung’—a worldview, or outlook (B&N: 91). For the behaviour of the waiter to provide him with evidence of his fi xed nature, for it to form part of the project of distraction from his awareness that he need not behave in the ways in which he does, he needs to see that behaviour as manifesting a fi xed waiterly nature rather than see it as a comedy routine, as evidence of bad faith, or in some other way. This is not only true of the waiter himself, of course: his customers must see his behaviour in this way in order for it to reinforce their view of people as having fi xed natures. Bad faith must be a project that, like other projects, constitutes the world a certain way.
It is part of the very motivation for bad faith, however, that we are dimly aware of the dependency of the articulation of the world, it having the meanings it has for us, on the projects that we are pursuing. So it is already built into Sartre’s account that the constitution of the behaviour of others as manifesting their fi xed natures will never be wholly convincing. The person in bad faith will always be aware of the contingency of seeing this behav- iour in this way and of their preference for seeing it this way. The waiter’s customers are therefore nervous that the waiter will do something that will disrupt their comforting worldview. This is why they positively require him to restrict himself to waiterly behaviour. The champion of sincerity, simi- larly, sees the behaviour of his friend as manifesting a fi xed homosexual nature, but at the same time he wants his friend to confi rm this. Such a confi rmation is ‘reassuring’, Sartre tells us, because it ‘removes a disturb- ing freedom from a trait’ (B&N: 88). The freedom is disturbing because it shows the comforting worldview to be the pretence that it really is.
This requires, however, that there is more to the constitution of the world in bad faith than just seeing people’s behaviour as manifesting their fi xed natures. Our awareness of our own lack of a fi xed nature and of our proj- ect of pretending that people do have fi xed natures, albeit an inexplicit and non-thetic awareness, threatens to undermine our confi dently seeing the world as providing evidence for the idea that people have fi xed natures. For this reason, bad faith in general needs to involve a certain kind of attitude towards evidence itself, one that will protect the confi dent belief in fi xed natures from this threat. Such an attitude towards evidence is also required by the form of bad faith that involves considering one’s own fi xed nature to exclude certain traits that one does in fact possess, which we called in the last chapter ‘bad faith in the restricted sense’. In this form of bad faith, one needs somehow to play down the weight of evidence against one’s preferred understanding of one’s character. The unhappy homosexual needs to focus on his awareness that he is not homosexual in the way in which the red- haired man is red-haired in order to conclude that he is not homosexual at all, despite the evidence presented by his behaviour.