No More Learning

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 a- mong 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 trans-
ference 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 an- guish 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 obsta- cles, just as sympathetic magic unites the spellbound person and the wax
54
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
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 symbol- ism. Similarly the conscious phenomenon is entirely colored by its sym- bolic 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, complement- ary 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 frig- ide:s "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 patho- logical 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 re\'eals to Stec-
kel that his wife has given objective signs of pleasure, but the woman when questioned will fiercely deny them. Here we find a pattern ot distraction. Admissions which Steckel was able to draw out inform us that these patho- logically 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. W e 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 psychoanlysis. 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 fii"st 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 explana- tion because their essence implies that they can appear only in the trans- lucency of consciousness. We find that the problem which we had at- tempted to resolve is still untouched.
'N. R. F.
----. . ,.
? ? BAD FAITII
55
II. PATIERNS OF BAD FAITII
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 descrip- tion will permit us perhaps to fix more exactly the conditions for the possi- bility of bad faith; that is, to reply to the question we raised at the outset: "\Vhat 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 parti- cular 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 devel- opment 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 attractivel" she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the speaker, the im-
mediate 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 recogni- tion of her freedom. But at the same time this feeling must be wholly de- sire; 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 any- more 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 hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and un- stable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. W e know what happens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she
. ,.
? 56 / BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
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 ap- prehend 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 transcen- dence, These tw,o 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 Qne, he can find him- self abruptly faced with the other.
W e 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 Sar- ment, I Am Too Great for Myself/ which also presents characters in bad
4 L'amour, c'est beaucoup plus que 1'amour. II Je suis trap grand pour moi.
? BAD FAITH
57
faith, thrQws 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 him- self. "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 tran- scendence and vice versa.
W e 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 hwersely "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 sur- passing 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. W e can equally well use another kind of duplicity derived from hu- man reality which we will express roughly by saying that its being-far-itself implies complementarily a being-far-others. Upon anyone of my conducts it is always possible to converge two looks, mine and that of the Other. The conduct will not present exactly the same structure in each case. But
611 est dcvenu ce qu'il etait.
Tel qu'en eutin I'eterniM Ie change.
? (
. ,. . .
58
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
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. W e 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
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 p,ast 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 hypochon- driacs in the calculations of physicians), we find again the same structure. W e 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 disintegra- tion 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" (ef. Gide, Kessel) can have validity for human reality as an ideal, the principle of identity must not represent a constitu- tive principle of buman 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 ceascs 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
? BAD FAITH
59
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 cafe. 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 in- flexible 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 reestab- lishes 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 cafe. 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 cafe 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 cer- emony. 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 imprisona 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 cafe can not be immediately a cafe 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
{
? 60 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
"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 cafe 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 cafe waiter through those gestures taken as an "analogue. "7 What I attcmpt to realize is a being-in-itself of the cafe 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 even though it meant getting fired. As if from the very fact that I sustain this role in existence I did not tran- scend it on every side, as if I did not co'nstitute myself as one beyond my condition. Yet there is no doubt that I am in a sense a cafe waiter-other- wise could I not just as wcll 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 beiJlg what I am lIOt.
Furthermore we are dealing with more than mere social positions; I am never anyone of my attitudes, anyone 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 role 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 Valery 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. .
But take a mode of being which concerns only myself: I am sad. One T CE. L'Imaginairc:. Conclusion.
? BAD FAITH 61
might think that surely I am the sadness in the mode of being what I am. What is the sadness, however, if not the intentional unity which comes to reassemble and animate the totality of my conduct? It is the meaning of this dull look with which I view the world, of my bowed shoulders, of my lowered head, of the listlessness in my whole body. But at the very moment when I adopt each of these attitudes, do I not know that I shall not be able to hold on to it? Let a stranger suddenly appear and I will lift up my head, I will assume a lively cheerfulness. What will remain of my sadness except that I obligingly promise it an appointment for latcr after the departure of the visitor? Moreover is not this sadness itself a conduct? Is it not consciousness which affects itself with sadness as a magical re-
course against a situation too urgent? 8 And in this case even, should we not say that being sad means first to make oneself sad? That may be, someone will say, but after all doesn't giving oneself the being of sadness mean to receive this being? It makes no difference from where I receive it.
The fact is that a consciousness which affects itself with sadness is sad preciscly for this reason. But it is difficult to comprehend the nature of conscious- ness; the being-sad is not a ready-made being which I give to myself as I can give this book to my friend. I do not possess the property or affecting myself with being. If I make myself sad, I must continue to make myself
sad from beginning to end. I can not treat my sadness as an impulse finally achieved and put it on file without recreating it, nor can I carry it in the manner of an inert body which continues its movement after the initial shock. There is no inertia in consciousness. If I make myself sad, it is be- catlse I am not sad-the being of the sadness escapes me by and in the very act by which I affect myself with it. The being-in-itself of sadness per- petually haunts my consciousness (of) being sad, but it is as a value which I can not realize; it stands as a regulative meaning of my sadne:;s, not as
its constitutive modality.
Someone may say that my consciousness at least is, whatever may be
the object or the state of which it makes itself consciousness. But how do we distinguish my consciousness (of) being sad from sadness? Is it not all one? It is true in a way that my consciousness is; if One means by this that for another it is a part of the totality of being on which judgments can be brought to bear. But it should be noted, as Husserl clearly underslood, that my consciousness appears originally to the Other as an absence. It is the object always present as the meaning of all my attitudes and all my con- duct-and always absent, for it gives itself to the intuition of another as a perpetual question:. . . . -still better, as a perpctual freedom. '\Vhen Pierre looks at me, I know of course that he is looking at me. His eyes, things in the world, are fixed on my body, a thing in the world-that is the objective fact of which I can say: it is. But it is also a fact in the world. The meaning
8 Esquisse crune tMarie des Hennann Paul. In English. The Emotions. Outline of a Theory. Philosophical Library. 1948.
? 62 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
of this look is not a fact in the world, and this is what makes meuncom- fortable. Although I make smiles, promises, threats, nothing can get hold of the approbation, the free judgment which I seek; I know that it is al- ways beyond. I sense it in my very attitude, which is no longer like that of the worker toward the things he uses as My reactions, to the extent that I project myself toward the Other, are no longer for myself but are rather mere presentations; they await being constituted as grace- ful or uncouth, sincere or insincere, etc. , by an apprehension which is al- ways beyond my efforts to provoke, an apprehension which will be pro- voked by my efforts only if of itself it lends them force (that is, only in so far as it causes itself to be provoked from the outside), which is its own
. mediator with the transcedent. Thus the objective fact of the being-in- itself of the consciousness of the Other is posited in order to disappear in negativity and in freedom: consciousness of the Other is as not-being; its being-in-itself "here and now" is not-to-be.
Consciousness of the Other is what it is not.
Furthermore the being of my own consciousness does not appear to me as the consciousnes of the Other. It is because it makes itsclf, since its being is consciousness of being. But this means that making sustains being; consciousness has to be its own being, it is never sustained by being; it sustains being in the heart of subjectivity, which means once again that it is inhabited by being but that it is not being: consciousness is not what itis.
Under these conditions what can be the significance of the ideal of sincerity except as a task impossible to achieve, of whic11 the vt:ry meaning is in contradiction with the structure of my consciousness. To be sincere, we said, is to be what one is. That supposes that I am not originally what I am. But here naturally Kant's "You ought, therefore you can" is implicitly understood. I can become sincere; this is what my duty and my effort to achieve sincerity imply. But we definitely establish that the original structure of "not being what one is" rcnders impossible in advance? all movement toward being in itself or "being what one is. " And this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrasing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our very incapacity to recognize ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are. It is this necessity which means that, as soon as. we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judg- ment, ba. sed on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori Ot empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being-
apd that not toward another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing. How then can we blame another for ':lot being sincere or rejoice in our own sincerity since this sincerity appears to us at the same time to be impossible? How can we in conversation, in confession, in introspection, even attempt sincerity since the effort will by its very nature be doomed
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to failure and since at the very time when we announce it we have a pre- judicative comprehension of its futility? In introspection I try to deter- mine exactly what I am, to make up my mind to be my true self without delay-even though it means consequently to set about searching for ways to change myself. But what does this mean if not that I am constituting myself as a thing? Shall I determine the ensemble of purposes and moti- vations which have pushed me to do this or that action? But this is al-
ready to postulate a causal determinism which constitutes the flow of my states of consciousness as a succession of physical states. Shall I uncover in myself "drives," even though it be to affirm them in shame? But is this not deliberately to forget that these drives are realized with my consent, that they are not forces of nature but that I lend them their efficacy by a perpetually renewed decision concerning their value. Shall I pass judg- ment on my character, on my nature? Is this not to veil from myself at that moment what I know only too well, that I thus judge a past to which by definition my present is not subject? The proof of this is that the same man who in sincerity posits that he is what in actuality he was, is indig- nant at the reproach of another and tries to disarm it by asserting that he can no longer be what he was. W e are readily astonished and upset when the penalties of the court affect a man who in his new freedom is no longer the guilty person he was. But at the same time we require of this man that he recognize himself as being this guilty one. What then is sincerity except precisely a phenomenon of bad faith? Have we not shown indeed that in bad faith human reality is constituted as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is?
Let us take an example: A homosexual frequently has an intolerable feeling of guilt, and his whole existence is determined in relation to this feeling. One will readily foresee that he is in bad faith. In fact it frequently happens that this man, while recognizing his homosexual inclination, while avowing each and every particular misdeed which he has committed, refuses with all his strength to consider himself "a paederast. " His case is always "different," peculiar; there enters into it something of a game,
of chance, of bad luck; the mistakes are all in the past; they are explained by a certain conception of the beautiful which women can not satisfy; we should see in them the results of a restless search, rather than the manifes- tations of a deeply rooted tendency, etc. , etc. Here is assuredly a man in bad faith who borders On the comic since, acknowledging all the facts which are imputed to him, he refuses to draw from them the conclusion which they impose. His friend, who is his most severe critic, becomes irritated with this duplicity. The critic asks only one thing-and perhaps then he will show himself indulgent: that the guilty one recognize himself as guilty, that the homosexual declare frankly-whether humbly or boast- fully matters little-"I am a paederast. " W e ask here: Who is in bad faith? The homosexual or the champion of sincerity?
? 64 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
The homosexual recognizes his faults, but he struggles with all his strength against the crushing view that his mistakes constitute for him a destiny. He does not wish to let himself be considered as a thing. He has an obscure but strong feeling that an homosexual is not an homosexual as this table is a table or as this red-haired man is red-haired. It seems to him that he has escaped from each mistake as Soon as he has posited it and recognized it; he even feels that the psychic duration by itself cleanses him from each misdeed, constitutes for him an undetermined future, causes him to be born anew. Is he wrong? Does he not recognize in him- self the peculiar, irreducible character of human reality? His attitude includes then an undeniable comprehension of truth. But at the same time he needs this perpetual rebirth, this constant escape in order to live; he must constantly put himself beyond reach in order to avoid the terrible judgment of collectivity. Thus he plays on the word being. He would be right actually if he understood the phrase, "I am not a paederast" in the sense of "I am not what I am. " That is, if he declared to himself, "To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of 'a paederast and to the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a paederast. But to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one. " But instead he slides surreptitiously towards a different connotation of the word "being. " He understands "not being" in the sense of "not-being-in-itself. " He lays elaim to "not being a paeder- ast" in the sense in which this table is not an inkwell. He is in bad faith.
But the champion of sincerity is not ignorant of the transcendence of human reality, and he knows how at need to appeal to it for his own advantage. He makes use of it even and brings it up in the present argu- ment. Does he not wish, first in the name of sincerity, then of freedom, that the homosexual reflect on himself and acknowledge himself as an homosexual? Does he not let the other understand that such a confes- sion will win indulgence for him? What does this mean if not that the man who will acknowledge himself as an homosexual will no longer be the same as the homosexual whom he acknowledges beiag and that he will escape. into the region of freedom and of good will? The critic asks the man then to be what he is in order no longer to be what he is. It is the profound meaning of the saying, "A sin confessed is half pardoned. " The critic demands of the guilty one that he constitute himself as a thing, pre- cisely in order no longer to treat him as a thing. And this contradiction is constitutive of the demand of sincerity. Who can not see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is a statement such\as, "He's just a paederast," which removes a disturbing freedom ,from a trait and which aims at henceforth constituting all the acts of the Other as conse- quences following strictly from his essence. That is actually what the critic is demanding of his victim-that he constitute himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a fief, in order that
? BAD FAITH 6,
the friend should return it to him subsequently-like a suzerain to his
vassal. The champion of sincerity is in bad faith to the degree that in order to reassure himself, he pretends to judge, to the extent that he demands that freedom as freedom. constitute itself as a thing. We have here only one episode in that battle to the death of consciousnesses which Hegel calls "the relation of the master and the slave. " A person appeals to another and demands that in the name of his nature as consciousness should radically destroy himself as consciousness, but while making this appeal he leads the other to hope for a rebirth beyond this destruction. Very well, SOmeone wiII say, but our man is abusing sincerity, playing one side against the other. W e should not look for sincerity in the relation of the Mit-scin but rather where it is pure-in the relations of a person with himself. But who can not see that objective sincerity is constituted in the same way? Who can not see that the sincere man constitutes him- selfas a thing in order to escape the condition of a thing by the same act of sincerity? The man who confesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing "frcedom-for-evil" for an inanimate character of evil; he is evil, he clings to himself, he is what he is. But by the same stroke, he escapes from that thing, since it is he who contemplates it, since it de- pends on him to maintain it under his glance or to let it collapse in an infinity of particular acts. He derives a merit from his sincerity, and the de- serving man is not the evil man as he is evil but as he is beyond his evilness. At the same time the evil is disarmed since it is nothing, save on the plane of determinism, and since in confessing it, I posit my freedom in respect
to it; my future is virgin; everything is allowed to me.
Thus the essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of
bad faith since the sincere man constitutes himself as what he is in order not to be it. This explains the truth recognized by all that one can fall into bad faith through being sincere. As Valery pointed out, this is the case with Stendhal. Total, constant sincerity as a constant effort to adhere to oneself is by nature a constant effort to dissociate oneself from oneself. A person frees himself from himself by the very act by which he makes himself an object for himself. To draw up a perpetual inventory of what one is means constantly to redeny oneself and to take refuge in a sphere where one is no longer anything but a pure, free regard. The goal of bad faith, as we said, is to put oneself out of reach; it is an escape. Now we see that we must use the same terms to define Sincerity. What does this mean?
In the final analysis the goal of sincerity and the goal of bad faith are not so different. To be sure, there is a sincerity which bears on the past and which docs not concern us here; I am sincere if I confess having had this pleasure or that intention. We shall see that if this sincerity is possible, it is because in his fall into thepast, the being of man is constituted as a being-in-itself. But here our concern is only with the sincerity which aims at itself in present immanence. What is its goal? To bring me to confess
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to myself what I am in order that I may finally coincide with my being; in a word, to cause myself to be, in the mode of the in-itself, what I am in the mode of "not being what I am:" Its assumption is that fundamentally I am already, in the mode of the in-itself, what I have to be. Thus we find at the base of sincerity a continual game of mirror and reflection, a perpet- ual passage from the being which is what it is, to the being which is not what it is and inversely from the being which is not what it is to the being which is what it is. And what is the goal of bad faith? T o cause me to be what I am, in the mode of "not being what one is," or not to be what I am in the mode of "being what one is. " We find here the same game of mirrors. In fact in order for me to have an intention of sincerity, I must at the outset simultaneously be and not be what I am. Sincerity does not assign to me a mode of being or a particular quality, but in relation to that quality it aims. at making me pass from one mode. of being to another mode of being. This second mode of being, the ideal of sincerity, I am pre- vented by nature from attaining; and at the very moment when I struggle to attain it, I have a vague prejudicative comprehension that I shall not
attain it. But all the same, in order for me to be able to conceive an inten- tionin bad faith, I must have such a nature that within my being I escape from my being. If I were sad or cowardly in the way in which this inkwell is an inkwell, the possibility of bad faith could not even be conceived. Not only should I be unable to escape from my being; I could not even imagine that I could escape from it. But if bad faith is possible by virtue of a simple project, it is because so far as my being is concerned, therc is no difference between being and non-being if I am cut off from my project.
Bad faith is possible only because sincerity is conscious of missing its goal inevitably, due to its very nature. I can try to apprehend myself as "not being cowardly," when I am so, only on con,dition that the "being cowardly" is itself "in question" at the very moment when it exists, on condition that it is itself one question, that at the very moment whcn I wish to apprehend it, it escapes me on all sides and annihilates itself. The condition under which I can attempt 3n effort in bad faith is that in one sense, I am not this coward which I do not wish to be. But if I were not cowardly in the simple nlode of not-being-what-one-is-not, I would be "in good faith" by declaring that I am not cowardly. Thus this inappre-
hensible coward is evanescent; in order for me not to be cowardly, I must in SOme way also be cowardly. That does not mean that I must be "a little" cowardly, in the sense that "a little" signifies "to a certain degree cowardly-and not cowardly to a certain degree. " No. I must at once both be and not be totally and in all respects a coward. Thus in this case bad faith requires that I should not be what I am; that is, that there be an imponderable difference separating being from non-being in the mode of being of human reality.
But bad faith is not restricted to denying the qualities which I possess,
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to not seeing-Fhe being which I am. It attempts also to constitute myself as being what I am not. It apprehends me positively as courageous when I am not so. And that is possible, once again, only if I am what I am not; that is, if non-being in me does not have being even as non-being. Of course necessarily I am not courageous; otherwise bad faith would not be bad faith. But in addition my effort in bad faith must include the ontological comprehension that even in my usual being what I am, I am not it really and that there is no such difference between the being of "being-sad," for example-which I am in the mode of not being what I am -and the "non-being" of not-being-courageous which I wish to hide from myself. Moreover it is particularly requisite tharthe very negation of being should be itself the object of a perpetual nihilation, that the very meaning of "non-being" be perpetually in question in human reality. If I were not courageous in the way in which this inkwell is not a table; that is, if I were isolated in my cowardice, propped firmly against it, incapable of putting it in relation to its opposite, if I wcre not capable of determining
myself as cowardly--":that is, to deny courage to myself and thereby to escape my cowardice in the very moment that I posit it-if it were not on principle impossible for me to coincide with my not-being-courageous as well as with my being-courageous-then any project of bad faith wouid be prohibited me. Thus in order for-bad faith to be possible, sincerity itself must be in bad faith. The condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in the intra- structure of the pre-reflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is.
III. THE "FAITH" OF BAD FAITH
WE have indicated for the moment only those conditions which render bad faith conceivable, the structures of being which permit us to form concepts of bad faith. W e can not limit ourselves to these considerations; we have not yet distinguished bad faith from falsehood. The two-faced concepts which we have described would without a doubt be utilized by a liar to discountenance his questioner, although their two-faced quality being established on the being of man and not on some empirical circum- stance, can and ought to be evident to all. The true problem of bad faith stems evidently from the fact bad faith is faith. It can not be either a cynical lie or certainty-if certainty is the intuitive possession of the object. But if we take belief as meaning the adherence of being to its object when the object is not given or is given indistinctly, then bad faith is belief; and the essential problem of bad faith is a problem of belief.
How can we believe by bad faith in the concepts which we forge ex- pressly to persuade ourselves? We must note in fact that the project of
r
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bad faith must be itself in bad faith. I am not only in bad faith at the end of my effort when I have constructed my two-faced concepts and when I have persuaded myself. In truth, I have not persuaded myself; to the extent that I could be so persuaded, I have always been so. And at the very mo- ment when I was disposed to put myself in bad faith, I of necessity was in bad faith with respect to this same disposition. For me to have repre- sented it to myself as bad faith would have been cynicism; to believe it sincerely innocent would have been in good faith. The decision to be in bad faith does not dare to speak its name; it believes itself and does not believe itself in bad faith; it believes itself and does not believe itself in good faith. It is this which from the upsurge of bad faith, determines
the later attitude and, as it were, the Weltanschauung of bad faith.
Bad faith does not hold the norms and criteria of truth as they are accepted by the critical thought of gOCld faith. What it decides first, in fact, ,is the nature of truth. With bad faith a truth appears, a method of thinking, a type of being which is like that of objects; the ontological characteristic of the world of bad faith with which the subject suddenly surrounds himself is this: that here being is what it is not, and is not what it is. Consequently a peculiar type of evidence appears; non-persuasive evidence. Bad faith apprehends evidence but it is resigned in advance to not being fulfilled by this evidence, to not being persuaded and trans- fonned into good faith. It makes itself humble and modest; it is not igno- rant, it. says, that faith is decision and that after each intuition, it must decide and wi11 what it is. Thus bad faith in its primitive project and in its coming into the world decides on the exact nature of its requirements. It stands forth in the finn resolution not to demand too much, to count itself satisfied when it is barely persuaded, to force itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain truths. This original project of bad faith is a decision in bad faith on the nature of faith. Let us understand clearly that there is no question of a reflective, voluntary decision, but of a spontaneous determination of our being. One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes to sleep and one is in bad faith as one dreams. Once this mode of being has been realized, it is as difficult to get out of it as to wake oneself up; bad faith is a type of being in the world, like waking or dreaming, which by itself tends to perpetuate itself, although its structure is of the metastable type. But bad faith is conscious of its structure, and it has taken precautions by deciding that the metastable structure is the struc- ture of being and that non-persuasion is the structure of all convictions. It
follows that if bad faith is faith and if it includes in its original project its? own negation (it determines itself to be not quite convinced in order to convince itself that I am what I am not), then to start with, a faith which wishes itself to be not quite convinced must be possible. What are the conditions for the possibility of such a faith?
I believe that my friend Pierre feels friendship for me. I believe it in
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