Bad Faith

As a youth I read Jean-Paul Sartre's magnum opus, "Being and Nothingness" One of the sections that most intrigued me was the concept of Bad Faith or inconsistent faith. The disconnect of a runner that smokes, or a race car driver that abuses alcohol. Such vices are an admittance to failure. This work is a probe into some of the contradictions we embrace every day and incorporate into our being. The reconciliation of these foibles to our goals is the true test of life. My hope in this work was to explore this aspect of being. For Sartre this attitude is manifestly self-deceiving. As human consciousness, we are always aware that we are not whatever we are aware of - we cannot, in this sense, be defined as our 'intentional objects' of consciousness, including our facticity of personal history, character, bodies, or objective responsibility. Thus, as Sartre often repeated, 'human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is': it can only define itself negatively, as 'what it is not'; but this negation is simultaneously the only positive definition it can make of 'what it is'. From this we are aware of a host of alternative reactions to our objective situation - i.e., of freedom - since no situation can dictate a single response. Only in assuming social roles and value systems external to this nature as conscious beings can we pretend that these possibilities are denied to us; but this is itself a decision made possible by our freedom and our separation from these things. It is this paradoxical free decision to deny to ourselves this inescapable freedom which is 'bad faith'.