Summary: Being and Nothingness (page 5)

In truth, human beings cannot escape the fact of their freedom ¹. To flee from one’s freedom and the accompanying anguish is to act in bad faith.

What is bad faith?

We can adopt negative attitudes toward the world and toward ourselves—irony, resentment, and so on. In bad faith, however, consciousness does not direct its negation outward but turns it inward ².

Bad faith fundamentally differs from lying. While the liar deceives another person, the person in bad faith deceives themselves. This creates a paradox:

The one who is lied to and the one who lies are the same person. The deceiver and the deceived are one and the same: I must know the truth in order to hide it from myself. ³.

More concisely: I must know the truth in order to conceal it from myself ⁴.

Sartre provides well-known examples to illustrate this concept. One is the woman who allows her hand to rest in the hand of a suitor while denying the sexual implications of this act. Another is the café waiter who overplays his role, adopting exaggerated mannerisms typical of his profession. In both cases, the individual reduces themselves to a mere thing, a being-in-itself, rather than acknowledging their freedom.

How is it possible to lie to oneself?

Bad faith is possible because I am not what I am—or, as Sartre phrases it, I exist in the mode of not being what I am ⁵. My freedom prevents me from crystallising into a fixed identity, as a mere thing. For example, one is not inherently sad; rather, one makes oneself sad. If I were sad or cowardly in the same way that an inkwell simply is an inkwell, the very notion of bad faith would be inconceivable ⁶.

From these conclusions, Sartre proceeds to undertake an ontological study of consciousness ⁷.

Part II: Being-for-itself

How should consciousness be analysed? What method should be used?

Sartre, after a brief comparative analysis, argues that the cogito must be the starting point (contrary to Heidegger) but also move beyond it (contrary to Descartes and Husserl, who remain within it).

He returns to the conclusions from the previous chapter: unlike the massive being-in-itself—full of itself, without the slightest void or fissure through which nothingness could slip ⁸—consciousness, by contrast, is a decompression within being ⁹, since it cannot coincide with itself.

Nevertheless, the for-itself exists ¹⁰. This leads Sartre to define the facticity of consciousness.

Human beings find themselves in conditions they did not choose: for instance, members of the bourgeoisie, French, in 1942. They exist as beings thrown into the world, placed in situations ¹¹ that are contingent because they were not chosen.

Facticity is thus the ever-elusive contingency of the in-itself that haunts the for-itself, attaching it to being-in-itself without ever being fully graspable ¹².

Desire, Sartre explains, is nothing other than the for-itself’s attempt to become in-itself: Desire is a lack of being ¹³. Thus, this being, perpetually absent yet haunting the for-itself is fixed within itself; it represents the impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself ¹⁴.

Only God achieves this synthesis.

The human being, by nature, is unhappy, perpetually haunted by a wholeness they aspire to but can never achieve. They cannot reach the in-itself without losing themselves as for-itself ¹⁵.

The possible, like nothingness, is not originally contained within being-in-itself. Rather, possibility is brought into the world by consciousness.

¹ ibid.
² II, 1, p.82
³ ibid., p.83 ⁴ ibid.
⁵ ibid., p.102
⁶ ibid., p.101
⁷ II, 3, p.105
⁸ Part 2, I, 1, p.110
⁹ ibid.
¹⁰ I, 2, p.115
¹¹ ibid.
¹² ibid., p.119
¹³ I, 3, p.124
¹⁴ ibid., p.126
¹⁵ ibid.