What is bad faith according to existentialism?

Human beings are free to do what we want, but we are not aware of it and we convince ourselves that we are at the mercy of circumstances.

This idea defended by existentialists such as Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is what is known as bad faith., a quite paradoxical concept since it is choosing the decision to consider that you do not have decision-making capacity. Let's understand it better below.

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What is bad faith in existentialism?

The "bad faith" ("mauvaise foi" in French) is a philosophical concept that was coined by existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre Y Simone de Beauvoir. This term describes the strange but everyday phenomenon in which people deny our absolute freedom, considering ourselves the result of causes beyond our control, which prevent us from freely making decisions.

It is the free decision to consider that we do not have freedom of decision, considering ourselves no more free than inert objects are.

The lies that we believe

Bad faith is a form of lies, a deception that people make to themselves and that they end up believing.

Sartre tries to present his idea more clearly by distinguishing between two types of everyday lies. One of them could be called a "plain lie". This is the typical behavior of deceiving others, of misrepresenting or not telling the truth. It is the lie related to the world of things, a type of behavior that we use in our day to day in our social relationships, believing that it is going to bring us some kind of benefit. We may also lie without realizing it, but the point is that this type of lie is what we tell other people.

The other type of Sartrean lie is "bad faith", bad faith but towards ourselves. It is about the behavior we carry out trying to hide ourselves from the unavoidable fact of our freedomIn other words, that we are radically free beings, that we cannot flee from our own freedom, however small and apparently scarce it may seem to us.

It is true that there will be conditions that reduce our options, but we will always have some kind of capacity to decide for ourselves. Despite this, people prefer to convince ourselves that what we are and what we do is not the direct result of our decisions, but a series of consequences due to external factors such as social pressure along with some internal aspects such as our social role, personality or certain capacity to decision.

In other words, the conduct of bad faith makes us believe that we are always at the mercy of circumstances. It is in this sense that we would speak of self-dosing, since people treat each other as if we are things, objects that are subject to the wills of elements external to them and who cannot decide what to do or what will happen to them on their own account.

The fundamental feature of objects is that of not being subjects, that of not being more than the consequence of something alien to themselves, not being the owners or authors of themselves.

This reality about objects is the same vision that we apply about ourselves by convincing ourselves that we have not been able to make decisions and that who we are right now is not by our responsibility, but by decision of the destination. This is how we treat each other precisely when we live in bad faith.

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The areas of bad faith

Two important areas of bad faith conduct are important to highlight: the scope of the assessment of who we are and the scope of our choices.

To understand the presence of bad faith when we value what we are, it is necessary to highlight the essential thesis of existentialism. In this current of thought it is held that we are what we are as a consequence of our decisions and, therefore, we have chosen to be who we are and everything we have or have done.

Starting from this, there is no potentiality in us or hidden talents that we have not yet taken advantage of because it has not been possible, but simply We have not taken advantage of them because we have decided so. This reality can be difficult to accept, especially when things do not go the way we wanted or we had planned and we can't get used to the idea that they won't get better no matter how hard we try.

For this reason, and to alleviate our conscience and not face the fact that our failures are due to ourselves, what we usually to do is to try to blame how our life has gone for what others have done or said, in addition to blaming our own otherwise. We can also believe that the bad or unwanted thing that happened to us was totally inevitable, that we could do absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening.

Bad faith is also evident in the election. For example, when we choose not to choose or when we give up making a decision or excuse ourselves stating that we cannot stop doing what we do, our conduct is in bad faith.

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Sartre's examples

To try to understand better, Sartre presents several examples of his idea of ​​bad faith. Among them we can highlight that of the waiter and that of the young girl on a date.

In the example of the waiter, he presents him to us as a person whose movements and manner of conversation are too determined by his profession. His voice denotes an eagerness to please, carrying meals rigid and bulky. He shows exaggerated, almost stereotypical behavior, typical of an automaton pretending to be a waiter. He assumes the role of his waiter so much that he forgets his own freedom, because before being a waiter he is a person with free will and no one can fully identify with his social role, in this case that of waiter.

The other example is that of the young girl who is on a first date with a boy.. The boy makes comments praising her beauty that have an obvious sexual connotation, but that the girl accepts as if they were directed to her non-corporeal being. At one point during the date, he takes her by the hand while the girl remains motionless, not rejecting her contact but not returning her gesture. Thus, the girl does not respond, delaying the decisive moment. He considers her hand to be merely one thing. He does not take one or the other option, staying with the third: do nothing.

In these two examples, Sartre argues that both the waiter and the girl act "evil" in the sense that both deny their own freedom through this same freedom. They both know that they can make choices on their own, but they reject it. In this sense, bad faith is paradoxical since, acting with "evil" a person is simultaneously aware and, to a certain extent, unconscious of being free.

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Philosophical implications

For Sartre, people can pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make decisions, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, that they are conscious human beings who really have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, professional and social roles and value systems.

By adopting certain pragmatic concerns or adopting certain social roles and following a value system, a person can pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make decisions, but actually doing this is a decision in itself, that is, the decision to pretend to yourself that you do not have the freedom to decision. Thus, as Sartre said, the human being is condemned to be free.