Summary: Being and Nothingness (page 5)

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

What is bad faith?

Man can adopt negative attitudes towards the world and himself—irony, resentment, and others. 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 man of bad faith deceives himself. This creates a paradox:

The one who is lied to and the one who lies are the same person, meaning that I, as the deceiver, must know the truth that I hide from myself as the deceived ³.

Put 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 embracing their free consciousness.

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 solidifying myself 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.

Building on these insights, Sartre proposes to undertake an ontological study of consciousness ⁷.

Part II: Being-for-itself

How should consciousness be analysed? What method should we use?

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

He recalls 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 of 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, bourgeois, French, in 1942. They exist as beings thrown into the world, left in situations ¹¹ that are contingent because they were not chosen.

Facticity is thus the perpetually fleeting contingency of the in-itself that haunts the for-itself, attaching it to being-in-itself without ever allowing itself to be fully grasped 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 perpetually absent being that haunts the for-itself is frozen within itself; it represents the impossible synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself ¹⁴.

Only God achieves, for himself, this synthesis.

Man, by nature, is unhappy, perpetually haunted by a totality that he is but cannot fully become. He cannot reach the in-itself without losing himself as for-itself ¹⁵.

The possible, like nothingness, is not originally contained within being-in-itself. Rather, it is consciousness that brings the possible into existence.

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.