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 one does not have decision-making capacity. Let’s understand it better below.
“Bad faith” (“mauvaise foi” in French) is a philosophical concept that was coined by existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and 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 we believe
Bad faith is a form of lying, a deception that people make on themselves and that they end up believing
Sartre tries to present his idea more clearly by distinguishing between two types of everyday lies. We could call one of them “plain lies.” This is the typical behavior of deceiving others, of distorting or not telling the truth. It is the lie related to the world of things, a type of behavior that we use in our daily lives in our social relationships, believing that it will bring us some type 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 typology of Sartrean lying is “bad faith”, bad faith but towards ourselves. It is about the behavior we carry out trying to hide from the unavoidable fact of our freedom that is, that we are radically free beings, that we cannot escape from our own freedom, no matter how 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 type of capacity to decide for ourselves. Despite this, people prefer to convince themselves that what we are and what we do is not the direct result of our decisions, but rather 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 decision-making capacity.
In other words, bad faith conduct It makes us believe that we are always at the mercy of circumstances It is in this sense that we would talk about reifying ourselves, since people treat ourselves as if they were things, objects that are subject to the wills of elements external to them and that cannot decide what to do or what will happen to them on their own. .
The fundamental feature of objects is that they are not subjects of being nothing more than the consequence of something foreign to themselves, of being neither owners nor authors of themselves.
This reality about objects is the same vision that we apply to ourselves by convincing ourselves that we have not been able to make decisions and that what we are right now is not our responsibility, but rather a decision of destiny. This is precisely how we treat ourselves when we live in bad faith.
The areas of bad faith
It is important to highlight two important areas of bad faith conduct: the scope of valuing what 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 maintained that we are what we are as a consequence of our decisions and, therefore, we have chosen to be as we are and everything we have or have done.
Starting from this, there is no potentiality in us nor any hidden talents that we have not yet taken advantage of because it has not been possible for us, but simply We have not taken advantage of them because we have decided so This reality can be difficult to accept, especially when things don’t go the way we wanted or 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 do is try to blame how our life has gone on what others have done or said, in addition to blaming to our fate. 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 we excuse ourselves by indicating that we cannot stop doing what we do, our conduct is in bad faith.
Sartre’s examples
To try to make himself better understood, Sartre presents several examples about 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 is presented to us as a person whose movements and way of speaking are too determined by his profession Her voice denotes a desire to please, carrying meals in a rigid and ostentatious manner. He shows an exaggerated, almost stereotypical behavior, typical of an automaton pretending to be a waiter. He assumes his role as a waiter so much that he forgets about his own freedom, because before being a waiter he is a person with free will and no one can completely identify with his social role, in this case that of a 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 which the girl accepts as if they were directed at her non-corporeal being. At one point during her date, he takes her hand while the girl remains motionless, not rejecting her contact but also not returning her gesture. Thus, the girl does not respond, delaying the decisive moment. She considers her hand to be merely a thing. She does not take one or the other option, staying with the third: doing nothing.
In these two examples, Sartre maintains that both, the waiter and the girl, act with “evil,” in the sense that both deny their own freedom through this same freedom. They both know 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 both conscious and, to a certain extent, unconscious of being free.
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, 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 system of values, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom of decision-making, but actually doing this is a decision in itself, that is, the decision of pretend to yourself that you do not have the freedom of decision. Thus, as Sartre said, the human being is condemned to be free.
