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Bad faith

I. Bad faith and falsehood

The human being is not only the being by whom négatités are disclosed in the world;

he is also the one who can take negative attitudes with respect to himself. In our

Introduction we defined consciousness as “a being such that in its being, its being is in

question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.” But now that we have

examined the meaning of “the question,” we can at present also write the formula thus:

“Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of

its being.” In a prohibition or a veto, for example, the human being denies a future

transcendence. But this negation is not explicative. My consciousness is not restricted

to envisioning a négatité. It constitutes itself in its own flesh as the nihilation of a

possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it

must arise in the world as a Not; it is as a Not that the slave first apprehends the

master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape sees the guard who is watching

him. There are even men (e.g., caretakers, overseers, gaolers) whose social reality is

uniquely that of the Not, who will live and die, having forever been only a Not upon

the earth. Others so as to make the Not a part of their very subjectivity, establish their

human personality as a perpetual negation. This is the meaning and function of what

Scheler calls “the man of resentment”—in reality, the Not. But there exist more subtle

behaviors, the description of which will lead us further into the inwardness of

consciousness. Irony is one of these. In irony a man annihilates what he posits within

one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to

deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its

nothingness. Thus attitudes of negation toward the self permit us to raise a new

question: What are we to say is the being of man who has the possibility of denying

himself? But it is out of the question to discuss the attitude of “self-negation” in its

universality. The kinds of behavior which can be ranked under this heading are too

diverse; we risk retaining only the abstract form of them. It is best to choose and to

examine one determined attitude which is essential to human reality and which is such

that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself.

This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Frequently this is identified with falsehood. We say indifferently of a person that

he shows signs of bad faith or that he lies to himself. We shall willingly grant that bad

faith is a lie to oneself, on condition that we distinguish the lie to oneself from lying in

general. Lying is a negative attitude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not

bear on consciousness itself; it aims only at the transcendent. The essence of the lie

implies in fact that the liar actually is in complete possession of the truth which he is

hiding. A man does not lie about what he is ignorant of; he does not lie when he spreads

an error of which he himself is the dupe; he does not lie when he is mistaken. The ideal

description of the liar would be a cynical consciousness, affirming truth within himself,

denying it in his words, and denying that negation as such. Now this doubly negative

attitude rests on the transcendent; the fact expressed is transcendent since it does not

exist, and the original negation rests on a truth; that is, on a particular type of

transcendence. As for the inner negation which I effect correlatively with the affirmation

for myself of the truth, this rests on words; that is, on an event in the world. Furthermore

the inner disposition of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative

judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek to hide this intention from

himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; on the contrary, he has

recourse to it when there is a question of deciding secondary behavior. It explicitly

exercises a regulatory control over all attitudes. As for his flaunted intention of telling

the truth (“I’d never want to deceive you! This is true! I swear it!”)—all this, of

course, is the object of an inner negation, but also it is not recognized by the liar as his

intention. It is played, imitated, it is the intention of the character which he plays in

the eyes of his questioner, but this character, precisely because he does not exist, is a

transcendent. Thus the lie does not put into the play the inner structure of present

consciousness; all the negations which constitute it bear on objects which by this fact

are removed from consciousness. The lie then does not require special ontological

foundation, and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are

valid without change in the case of deceit. Of course we have described the ideal lie;

doubtless it happens often enough that the liar is more or less the victim of his lie, that

he half persuades himself of it. But these common, popular forms of the lie are also

degenerate aspects of it; they represent intermediaries between falsehood and bad

faith. The lie is a behavior of transcendence.

The lie is also a normal phenomenon of what Heidegger calls the “Mit-sein.”1 It

presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my existence for the Other, and

the existence of the Other for me. Thus there is no difficulty in holding that the liar

must make the project of the lie in entire clarity and that he must possess a complete

comprehension of the lie and of the truth which he is altering. It is sufficient that an

overall opacity hide his intentions from the Other; it is sufficient that the Other can

take the lie for truth. By the lie consciousness affirms that it exists by nature as hidden

from the Other; it utilizes for its own profit the ontological duality of myself and

myself in the eyes of the Other.

The situation can not be the same for bad faith if this, as we have said, is indeed a

lie to oneself. To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth

or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure

of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from

myself that I am hiding the truth. Thus the duality of the deceiver and the deceived

does not exist here. Bad faith on the contrary implies in essence the unity of a single

consciousness. This does not mean that it can not be conditioned by the Mit-sein like

all other phenomena of human reality, but the Mit-sein can call forth bad faith only by

presenting itself as a situation which bad faith permits surpassing; bad faith does not

come from outside to human reality. One does not undergo his bad faith; one is not

infected with it; it is not a state. But consciousness affects itself with bad faith. There

must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project implies a

comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehension (of) consciousness

as affecting itself with bad faith. It follows first that the one to whom the lie is told and

the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my

capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one

deceived. Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more

carefully—and this not at two different moments, which at a pinch would allow us to

reestablish a semblance of duality—but in the unitary structure of a single project.

How then can the lie subsist if the duality which conditions it is suppressed?

To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total translucency of

consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad

faith since the being of consciousness is consciousness of being. It appears then that

I must be in good faith, at least to the extent that I am conscious of my bad faith. But

then this whole psychic system is annihilated. We must agree in fact that if I deliberately

and cynically attempt to lie to myself, I fail completely in this undertaking; the lie falls

back and collapses beneath my look; it is ruined from behind by the very consciousness

of lying to myself which pitilessly constitutes itself well within my project as its very

condition. We have here an evanescent phenomenon which exists only in and through

its own differentiation. To be sure, these phenomena are frequent and we shall see that

there is in fact an “evanescence” of bad faith, which, it is evident, vacillates continually

between good faith and cynicism: Even though the existence of bad faith is very

precarious, and though it belongs to the kind of psychic structures which we might call

“metastable,”2 it presents nonetheless an autonomous and durable form. It can even be

the normal aspect of life for a very great number of people. A person can live in bad

faith, which does not mean that he does not have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or to

good faith, but which implies a constant and particular style of life. Our embarrassment

then appears extreme since we can neither reject nor comprehend bad faith.

To escape from these difficulties people gladly have recourse to the unconscious.

In the psychoanalytical interpretation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a

censor, conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport division, currency

control, etc., to reestablish the duality of the deceiver and the deceived. Here instinct

or, if you prefer, original drives and complexes of drives constituted by our individual

history, make up reality. It is neither true nor false since it does not exist for itself. It

simply is, exactly like this table, which is neither true nor false in itself but simply real.

As for the conscious symbols of the instinct, this interpretation takes them not for

appearances but for real psychic facts. Fear, forgetting, dreams exist really in the

capacity of concrete facts of consciousness in the same way as the words and the

attitudes of the liar are concrete, really existing patterns of behavior. The subject has

the same relation to these phenomena as the deceived to the behavior of the deceiver.

He establishes them in their reality and must interpret them. There is a truth in the

activities of the deceiver; if the deceived could reattach them to the situation where the

deceiver establishes himself and to his project of the lie, they would become integral

parts of truth, by virtue of being lying conduct. Similarly there is a truth in the

symbolic acts; it is what the psychoanalyst discovers when he reattaches them to the

historical situation of the patient, to the unconscious complexes which they express,

to the blocking of the censor. Thus the subject deceives himself about the meaning of

his conduct, he apprehends it in its concrete existence but not in its truth, simply

because he cannot derive it from an original situation and from a psychic constitution

which remain alien to him.

By the distinction between the “id” and the “ego,” Freud has cut the psychic whole

into two. I am the ego but I am not the id. I hold no privileged position in relation to

my unconscious psyche. I am my own psychic phenomena in so far as I establish

them in their conscious reality. For example I am the impulse to steal this or that book

from this bookstall. I am an integral part of the impulse; I bring it to light and I

determine myself hand-in-hand with it to commit the theft. But I am not those

psychic facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to

hypotheses about their origin and their true meaning, just as the scholar makes

conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenomenon. This theft, for

example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by the rarity, the

interest, or the price of the volume which I am going to steal—it is in truth a process

derived from self-punishment, which is attached more or less directly to an Oedipus

complex. The impulse toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by

more or less probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth will be the number of

conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of view it will

be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of

this truth will necessitate the cooperation of the psychoanalyst, who appears as the

mediator between my unconscious drives and my conscious life. The Other appears

as being able to effect the synthesis between the unconscious thesis and the conscious

antithesis. I can know myself only through the mediation of the other, which means

that I stand in relation to my “id,” in the position of the Other. If I have a little

knowledge of psychoanalysis, I can, under circumstances particularly favorable, try

to psychoanalyze myself. But this attempt can succeed only if I distrust every kind

of intuition, only if I apply to my case from the outside, abstract schemes and rules

already learned. As for the results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or

with the cooperation of a technician, they will never have the certainty which intuition

confers; they will possess simply the always increasing probability of scientific

hypotheses. The hypothesis of the Oedipus complex, like the atomic theory, is

nothing but an “experimental idea;” as Pierce said, it is not to be distinguished from the

totality of experiences which it allows to be realized and the results which it enables

us to foresee. Thus psychoanalysis substitutes for the notion of bad faith, the idea of

a lie without a liar; it allows me to understand how it is possible for me to be lied to

without lying to myself since it places me in the same relation to myself that the Other

is in respect to me; it replaces the duality of the deceiver and the deceived, the essential

condition of the lie, by that of the “id” and the “ego.” It introduces into my subjectivity

the deepest intersubjective structure of the Mit-sein. Can this explanation satisfy us?

Considered more closely the psychoanalytic theory is not as simple as it first

appears. It is not accurate to hold that the “id” is presented as a thing in relation to the

hypothesis of the psychoanalyst, for a thing is indifferent to the conjectures which we

make concerning it, while the “id” on the contrary is sensitive to them when we

approach the truth. Freud in fact reports resistance when at the end of the first period

the doctor is approaching the truth. This resistance is objective behavior apprehended

from without: the patient shows defiance, refuses to speak, gives fantastic accounts of

his dreams, sometimes even removes himself completely from the psychoanalytic

treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of himself can thus resist. It can not be

the “Ego,” envisaged as a psychic totality of the facts of consciousness; this could not

suspect that the psychiatrist is approaching the end since the ego’s relation to the

meaning of its own reactions is exactly like that of the psychiatrist himself. At the

very most it is possible for the ego to appreciate objectively the degree of probability

in the hypotheses set forth, as a witness of the psychoanalysis might be able to do,

according to the number of subjective facts which they explain. Furthermore, this

probability would appear to the ego to border on certainty, which he could not take

offence at since most of the time it is he who by a conscious decision is in pursuit of

the psychoanalytic therapy. Are we to say that the patient is disturbed by the daily

revelations which the psychoanalyst makes to him and that he seeks to remove

himself, at the same time pretending in his own eyes to wish to continue the treatment?

In this case it is no longer possible to resort to the unconscious to explain bad faith; it

is there in full consciousness, with all its contradictions. But this is not the way that

the psychoanalyst means to explain this resistance; for him it is secret and deep, it

comes from afar; it has its roots in the very thing which the psychoanalyst is trying to

make clear.

Furthermore it is equally impossible to explain the resistance as emanating from

the complex which the psychoanalyst wishes to bring to light. The complex as such is

rather the collaborator of the psychoanalyst since it aims at expressing itself in clear

consciousness, since it plays tricks on the censor and seeks to elude it. The only level

on which we can locate the refusal of the subject is that of the censor. It alone can

comprehend the questions or the revelations of the psychoanalyst as approaching

more or less near to the real drives which it strives to repress—it alone because it alone

knows what it is repressing.

If we reject the language and the materialistic mythology of psychoanalysis, we

perceive that the censor in order to apply its activity with discernment must know

what it is repressing. In fact if we abandon all the metaphors representing the repression

as the impact of blind forces, we are compelled to admit that the censor must choose

and in order to choose must be aware of so doing. How could it happen otherwise that

the censor allows lawful sexual impulses to pass through, that it permits needs (hunger,

thirst, sleep) to be expressed in clear consciousness? And how are we to explain that

it can relax its surveillance, that it can even be deceived by the disguises of the instinct?

But it is not sufficient that it discern the condemned drives; it must also apprehend

them as to be repressed, which implies in it at the very least an awareness of its

activity. In a word, how could the censor discern the impulses needing to be repressed

without being conscious of discerning them? How can we conceive of a knowledge

which is ignorant of itself? To know is to know that one knows, said Alain. Let us say

rather: All knowing is consciousness of knowing. Thus the resistance of the patient

implies on the level of the censor an awareness of the thing repressed as such, a

comprehension of the end toward which the questions of the psychoanalyst are

leading, and an act of synthetic connection by which it compares the truth of the

repressed complex to the psychoanalytic hypothesis which aims at it. These various

operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious (of) itself. But what type

of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness (of) being

conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not be conscious of it.

What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith?

Psychoanalysis has not gained anything for us since in order to overcome bad faith,

it has established between the unconscious and consciousness an autonomous

consciousness in bad faith. The effort to establish a veritable duality and even a trinity

(Es, Ich, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere

verbal terminology. The very essence of the reflexive idea of hiding something from

oneself implies the unity of one and the same psychic mechanism and consequently a

double activity in the heart of unity, tending on the one hand to maintain and locate the

thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and disguise it. Each of the two

aspects of this activity is complementary to the other; that is, it implies the other in

its being. By separating consciousness from the unconscious by means of the censor,

psychoanalysis has not succeeded in dissociating the two phases of the act, since the

libido is a blind conatus toward conscious expression and since the conscious

phenomenon is a passive, faked result. Psychoanalysis has merely localized this

double activity of repulsion and attraction on the level of the censor.

Furthermore the problem still remains of accounting for the unity of the total

phenomenon (repression of the drive which disguises itself and “passes” in symbolic

form), to establish comprehensible connections among its different phases. How can

the repressed drive “disguise itself” if it does not include (1) the consciousness of

being repressed, (2) the consciousness of having been pushed back because it is what

it is, (3) a project of disguise? No mechanistic theory of condensation or of transference

can explain these modifications by which the drive itself is affected, for the description

of the process of disguise implies a veiled appeal to finality. And similarly how are we

to account for the pleasure or the anguish which accompanies the symbolic and

conscious satisfaction of the drive if consciousness does not include—beyond the

censor— an obscure comprehension of the end to be attained as simultaneously

desired and forbidden. By rejecting the conscious unity of the psyche, Freud is obliged

to imply everywhere a magic unity linking distant phenomena across obstacles, just as

sympathetic magic unites the spellbound person and the wax image fashioned in his

likeness. The unconscious drive (Trieb) through magic is endowed with the character

“repressed” or “condemned,” which completely pervades it, colors it, and magically

provokes its symbolism. Similarly the conscious phenomenon is entirely colored by

its symbolic meaning although it can not apprehend this meaning by itself in clear

consciousness.

Aside from its inferiority in principle, the explanation by magic does not avoid the

coexistence—on the level of the unconscious, on that of the censor, and on that of

consciousness—of two contradictory, complementary structures which reciprocally

imply and destroy each other. Proponents of the theory have hypostasized and

“reified” bad faith; they have not escaped it. This is what has inspired a Viennese

psychiatrist, Steckel, to depart from the psychoanalytical tradition and to write in La

femme frigide:3 “Every time that I have been able to carry my investigations far

enough, I have established that the crux of the psychosis was conscious.” In addition

the cases which he reports in his work bear witness to a pathological bad faith which

the Freudian doctrine can not account for. There is the question, for example, of

women whom marital infidelity has made frigid; that is, they succeed in hiding from

themselves not complexes deeply sunk in half physiological darkness, but acts of

conduct which are objectively discoverable, which they can not fail to record at the

moment when they perform them. Frequently in fact the husband reveals to Steckel

that his wife has given objective signs of pleasure, but the woman when questioned

will fiercely deny them. Here we find a pattern of distraction. Admissions which

Steckel was able to draw out inform us that these pathologically frigid women apply

themselves to becoming distracted in advance from the pleasure which they dread;

many for example at the time of the sexual act, turn their thoughts away toward their

daily occupations, make up their household accounts. Will anyone speak of an

unconscious here? Yet if the frigid woman thus distracts her consciousness from the

pleasure which she experiences, it is by no means cynically and in full agreement with

herself; it is in order to prove to herself that she is frigid. We have in fact to deal with

a phenomenon of bad faith since the efforts taken in order not to be present to the

experienced pleasure imply the recognition that the pleasure is experienced; they

imply it in order to deny it. But we are no longer on the ground of psychoanalysis.

Thus on the one hand the explanation by means of the unconscious, due to the fact

that it breaks the psychic unity, can not account for the facts which at first sight it

appeared to explain. And on the other hand, there exists an infinity of types of

behavior in bad faith which explicitly reject this kind of explanation because their

essence implies that they can appear only in the translucency of consciousness. We

find that the problem which we had attempted to resolve is still untouched.

II. Patterns of bad faith

If we wish to get out of this difficulty, we should examine more closely the patterns of

bad faith and attempt a description of them. This description will permit us perhaps

to fix more exactly the conditions for the possibility of bad faith; that is, to reply to

the question we raised at the outset: “What must be the being of man if he is to be

capable of bad faith?”

Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man

for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking

to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later

for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the urgency; she concerns

herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She

does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first

approach;” that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development

which his conduct presents. She restricts this behavior to what is in the present; she

does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than

their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this

phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behavior

of the speaker, the immediate meanings, which she imagines as objective qualities. The

man who is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round

or square, as the wall coloring is blue or gray. The qualities thus attached to the person

she is listening to are in this way fixed in a permanence like that of things, which is no

other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux.

This is because she does not quite know what she wants. She is profoundly aware of

the desire which she inspires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and

horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect. In

order to satisfy her, there must be a feeling which is addressed wholly to her

personality—i.e., to her full freedom—and which would be a recognition of her freedom.

But at the same time this feeling must be wholly desire; that is, it must address itself

to her body as object. This time then she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it

is; she does not even give it a name; she recognizes it only to the extent that it

transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect and that it is wholly absorbed in

the more refined forms which it produces, to the extent of no longer figuring anymore

as a sort of warmth and density. But then suppose he takes her hand. This act of her

companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave

the band there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to

break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to

postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next;

the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it.

She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all

intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of sentimental

speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows herself in her essential aspect—

a personality, a consciousness. And during this time the divorce of the body from the

soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—

neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.

We shall say that this woman is in bad faith. But we see immediately that she uses

various procedures in order to maintain herself in this bad faith. She has disarmed the

actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to

existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the

extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is, will recognize its transcendence.

Finally while sensing profoundly the presence of her own body—to the degree of

being disturbed perhaps—she realizes herself as not being her own body, and she

contemplates it as though from above as a passive object to which events can happen

but which can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its possibilities are

outside of it. What unity do we find in these various aspects of bad faith? It is a certain

art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the

negation of that idea. The basic concept which is thus engendered, utilizes the double

property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two

aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad

faith does not wish either to coordinate them nor to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad

faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences. It must affirm

facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way

that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly

faced with the other.

We can find the prototype of formulae of bad faith in certain famous expressions—

which have been rightly conceived to produce their whole effect in a spirit of bad faith.

Take for example the title of a work by Jacques Chardonne, Love Is Much More than

Love.4 We see here how unity is established between present love in its facticity—

“the contact of two skins,” sensuality, egoism, Proust’s mechanism of jealousy, Adler’s

battle of the sexes, etc.—and love as transcendence—Mauriac’s “river of fire,” the

longing for the infinite, Plato’s eros, Lawrence’s deep cosmic intuition, etc. Here we

leave facticity to find ourselves suddenly beyond the present and the factual condition

of man, beyond the psychological, in the heart of metaphysics. On the other hand, the

title of a play by Sarment, I Am Too Great for Myself,5 which also presents characters

in bad faith, throws us first into full transcendence in order suddenly to imprison us

within the narrow limits of our factual essence. We will discover this structure again in

the famous sentence: “He has become what he was” or in its no less famous opposite:

“Eternity at last changes each man into himself.”6 It is well understood that these

various formulae have only the appearance of bad faith; they have been conceived in

this paradoxical form explicitly to shock the mind and discountenance it by an enigma.

But it is precisely this appearance which is of concern to us. What counts here is that

the formulae do not constitute new, solidly structured ideas; on the contrary, they are

formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration and so that we may slide at any time

from naturalistic present to transcendence and vice versa.

We can see the use which bad faith can make of these judgments which all aim at

establishing that I am not what I am. If I were only what I am, I could, for example,

seriously consider an adverse criticism which someone makes of me, question myself

scrupulously, and perhaps be compelled to recognize the truth in it. But thanks to

transcendence, I am not subject to all that I am. I do not even have to discuss the justice

of the reproach. As Suzanne says to Figaro, “To prove that I am right would be to

recognize that I can be wrong.” I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me since

what I really am is my transcendence. I flee from myself, I escape myself, I leave my

tattered garment in the hands of the fault-finder. But the ambiguity necessary for bad

faith comes from the fact that I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of

being of a thing. It is only thus, in fact, that I can feel that I escape all reproaches. It is

in the sense that our young woman purifies the desire of anything humiliating by being

willing to consider it only as pure transcendence, which she avoids even naming. But

inversely “I Am Too Great for Myself,” while showing our transcendence changed

into facticity, is the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures or our weaknesses.

Similarly the young coquette maintains transcendence to the extent that the respect,

the esteem manifested by the actions of her admirer are already on the plane of the

transcendent. But she arrests this transcendence, she glues it down with all the facticity

of the present; respect is nothing other than respect, it is an arrested surpassing which

no longer surpasses itself toward anything.

But although this metastable concept of “transcendence-facticity” is one of the

most basic instruments of bad faith, it is not the only one of its kind. We can equally

well use another kind of duplicity derived from human reality which we will express

roughly by saying that its being-for-itself implies complementarily a being-for-others.

Upon any one of my conducts it is always possible to converge two looks, mine and

that of tile Other. The conduct will not present exactly the same structure in each case.

But as we shall see later, as each look perceives it, there is between these two aspects

of my being, no difference between appearance and being—as if I were to my self the

truth of myself and as if the Other possessed only a deformed image of me. The equal

dignity of being, possessed by my being-for-others and by my being-for-myself

permits a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape from

the for-itself to the for-others and from the for-others to the for-itself. We have seen

also the use which our young lady made of our being-in-the-midst-of-the-world—i.e.,

of our inert presence as a passive object among other objects—in order to relieve

herself suddenly from the functions of her being-in-the-world—that is, from the being

which causes there to be a world by projecting itself beyond the world toward its own

possibilities. Let us note finally the confusing syntheses which play on the nihilating

ambiguity of these temporal ekstases, affirming at once that I am what I have been (the

man who deliberately arrests himself at one period in his life and refuses to take into

consideration the later changes) and that I am not what I have been (the man who in the

face of reproaches or rancor dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his

freedom and on his perpetual re-creation). In all these concepts, which have only a

transitive role in the reasoning and which are eliminated from the conclusion (like

hypochondriacs in the calculations of physicians), we find again the same structure.

We have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not and which is not

what it is.

But what exactly is necessary in order for these concepts of disintegration to be

able to receive even a pretence of existence, in order for them to be able to appear for

an instant to consciousness, even in a process of evanescence? A quick examination of

the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of bad faith, will be very instructive in this connection.

Actually sincerity presents itself as a demand and consequently is not a state. Now

what is the ideal to be attained in this case? It is necessary that a man be for himself

only what he is. But is this not precisely the definition of the in-itself—or if you

prefer—the principle of identity? To posit as an ideal the being of things, is this not to

assert by the same stroke that this being does not belong to human reality and that the

principle of identity, far from being a universal axiom universally applied, is only a

synthetic principle enjoying a merely regional universality? Thus in order that the

concepts of bad faith can put us under illusion at least for an instant, in order that the

candor of “pure hearts” (cf. Gide, Kessel) can have validity for human reality as an

ideal, the principle of identity must not represent a constitutive principle of human

reality and human reality must not be necessarily what it is but must be able to be

what it is not. What does this mean?

If man is what he is, bad faith is for ever impossible and candor ceases to be his ideal

and becomes instead his being. But is man what he is? And more generally, how can he

be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If candor or sincerity is a

universal value, it is evident that the maxim “one must be what one is” does not serve

solely as a regulating principle for judgments and concepts by which I express what I

am. It posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us

an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it is

necessary that we make ourselves what we are. But what are we then if we have the

constant obligation to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of being is having the

obligation to be what we are?

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little

too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too

quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a

little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to

imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his

tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable,

perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement

of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to

chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his

gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and

pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he

playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a

waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out

and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory

of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it. This

obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition

is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a

ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which

they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an

auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a

grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as

a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct

regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and

not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the

sight “fixed at ten paces”). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in

what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might

break away and suddenly elude his condition.

In a parallel situation, from within, the waiter in the café can not be immediately a

café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass. It is by no

means that he can not form reflective judgments or concepts concerning his condition.

He knows well what it “means:” the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of

sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot

going, etc. He knows the rights which it allows: the right to the tips, the right to belong

to a union, etc. But all these concepts, all these judgments refer to the transcendent. It

is a matter of abstract possibilities, of rights and duties conferred on a “person

possessing rights.” And it is precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter

in question) and who I am not. It is not that I do not wish to be this person or that I

want this person to be different. But rather there is no common measure between his

being and mine. It is a “representation” for others and for myself, which means that I

can be he only in representation. But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am

separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this

nothing isolates me from him. I can not be he, I can only play at being him; that is,

imagine to myself that I am he. And thereby I affect him with nothingness. In vain do

I fulfill the functions of a café waiter. I can be he only in the neutralized mode, as the

actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by

aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter through those gestures taken as an

“analogue.”7 What I attempt to realize is a being-in-itself of the café waiter, as if it were

not just in my power to confer their value and their urgency upon my duties and the

rights of my position, as if it were not my free choice to get up each morning at five

o’clock or to remain in bed, even though it meant getting fired. As if from the very fact

that I sustain this role in existence I did not transcend it on every side, as if I did not

constitute myself as one beyond my condition. Yet there is no doubt that I am in a

sense a café waiter— otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or a

reporter? But if I am one, this can not be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a waiter

in the mode of being what I am not.

Furthermore we are dealing with more than mere social positions; I am never any

one of my attitudes, any one of my actions. The good speaker is the one who plays at

speaking, because he can not be speaking. The attentive pupil who wishes to be

attentive, his eyes riveted on the teacher, his ears open wide, so exhausts himself in

playing the attentive tole that he ends up by no longer hearing anything. Perpetually

absent to my body, to my acts, I am despite myself that “divine absence” of which

Valéry speaks. I can not say either that I am here or that I am not here, in the sense that we say “that box of matches is on the

table;” this would be to confuse my “being-in- the-world” with a “being-in the midst of the world.” Nor that I am standing, nor

that I am seated; this would be to confuse my body with the idiosyncratic totality of which it is only one of the structures. On

all sides I escape being and yet—I am.

Notes

1 A“being-with” others in the world. Tr.

2 Sartre’s own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or transitions. Tr. 3 N.R.F.

4 L’amour, c’est beaucoup plus que l’amour.

5 Je suis trop grand pour moi.

6 Il est devenu ce qu’il était. Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change.

7 Cf. L’Imaginaire. Conclusion