Lying is a
negative
atti- tude, we will agree to that.
Sartre - BeingAndNothingness - Chapter 2 - On Lying
?
CHAPTER TWO
Bad Faith
I. BAD FAITH AND FALSEHOOD
THE human being is not only the being by whom negatites are di:>- closed 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 eX:lmined 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 nothingaess 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 negatite. 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 ques- tion: 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 47
. . . .
? 48 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ranked under this heading are too diverse; we risk retaining only the ab- stract 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 con- sciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitide, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).
Frequently this is identified with falsehood. W e 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 atti- tude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not bear on conscious- ness itself; it aims only anhe 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 atti- tude 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 dis- position of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek tq hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; On the contrary, he 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 itl")-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 con- stitute it bear on objects which by this fact are removed from conscious-
? lless. The lie then does not require special ontological foundation, and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are valid without cbange 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 com- mon, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate aspects of it; they repre- sent 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-
? BAD FAITII
49
sein. "1 It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my exist- ence 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 over-all 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
by nature as hidden from tIle OtIler; it utilizes for its own profit the on- tological 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 IHit? 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 lIll- man 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. 'I1lCre must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project im- plies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehen- sion (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 re- establish 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 suppressed?
To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total trans- lucency of consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith since the being of consciousness is conscious- ness 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 tomyself, 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
1 A "being-with" others in the world. Tr.
? 50 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself well within my project as its very condition. W e have here an evanes- cent 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 con- tinually 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 "metastablc,"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 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 com- prehend 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 estab. lishes 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 situa- tion 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 privi- leged 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
2 Sartre's own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or Tr.
. . . . . . -
? BAD FAITH 51
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 psy- chic facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to hypotheses about their origin and true meaning, just as the scholar makes conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenome- non. This theft, for example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by the rarity, the interest, or the of the volume whicl\ 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 im- pulse toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by more or less probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth wiII be the number of conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of view it w:Jl be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of this truth wiII 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 Otller. 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 out- side, abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or with the cooperaticm of a techni- cian, theywiII 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 re- sults 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 under- stand 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 condi- tion 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
\
!
? BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
approaching the truth. 111is 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 thc psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of him- sclf 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 rcactions 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 probabilitywould appear to the ego to border on cer- tainty, 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 tIle 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 emanat- ing 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 ccnsor 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 ncar 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 psycho- analysis, we perceive that the censor in order to apply its activity with dis- cernment 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 otllerwise that the cen- sor 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 de- ceived 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
? BAD FAITII
53
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 resist- ance 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 connec- tion by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psy- choanalytic 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) be- ing 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 (? s, lch, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very es- sence 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 10-
eate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and dis- guise 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 phe- nomenon 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 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.
----. . ,.
?
Lying is a negative atti- tude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not bear on conscious- ness itself; it aims only anhe 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 atti- tude 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 dis- position of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek tq hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; On the contrary, he 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 itl")-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 con- stitute it bear on objects which by this fact are removed from conscious-
? lless. The lie then does not require special ontological foundation, and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are valid without cbange 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 com- mon, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate aspects of it; they repre- sent 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-
? BAD FAITII
49
sein. "1 It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my exist- ence 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 over-all 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
by nature as hidden from tIle OtIler; it utilizes for its own profit the on- tological 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 IHit? 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 lIll- man 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. 'I1lCre must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project im- plies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehen- sion (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 re- establish 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 suppressed?
To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total trans- lucency of consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith since the being of consciousness is conscious- ness 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 tomyself, 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
1 A "being-with" others in the world. Tr.
? 50 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself well within my project as its very condition. W e have here an evanes- cent 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 con- tinually 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 "metastablc,"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 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 com- prehend 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 estab. lishes 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 situa- tion 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 privi- leged 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
2 Sartre's own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or Tr.
. . . . . . -
? BAD FAITH 51
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 psy- chic facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to hypotheses about their origin and true meaning, just as the scholar makes conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenome- non. This theft, for example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by the rarity, the interest, or the of the volume whicl\ 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 im- pulse toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by more or less probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth wiII be the number of conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of view it w:Jl be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of this truth wiII 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 Otller. 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 out- side, abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or with the cooperaticm of a techni- cian, theywiII 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 re- sults 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 under- stand 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 condi- tion 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
\
!
? BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
approaching the truth. 111is 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 thc psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of him- sclf 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 rcactions 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 probabilitywould appear to the ego to border on cer- tainty, 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 tIle 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 emanat- ing 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 ccnsor 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 ncar 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 psycho- analysis, we perceive that the censor in order to apply its activity with dis- cernment 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 otllerwise that the cen- sor 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 de- ceived 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
? BAD FAITII
53
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 resist- ance 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 connec- tion by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psy- choanalytic 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) be- ing 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 (? s, lch, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very es- sence 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 10-
eate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and dis- guise 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 phe- nomenon 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 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.
Bad Faith
I. BAD FAITH AND FALSEHOOD
THE human being is not only the being by whom negatites are di:>- closed 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 eX:lmined 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 nothingaess 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 negatite. 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 ques- tion: 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 47
. . . .
? 48 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
ranked under this heading are too diverse; we risk retaining only the ab- stract 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 con- sciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitide, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).
Frequently this is identified with falsehood. W e 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 atti- tude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not bear on conscious- ness itself; it aims only anhe 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 atti- tude 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 dis- position of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek tq hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; On the contrary, he 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 itl")-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 con- stitute it bear on objects which by this fact are removed from conscious-
? lless. The lie then does not require special ontological foundation, and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are valid without cbange 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 com- mon, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate aspects of it; they repre- sent 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-
? BAD FAITII
49
sein. "1 It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my exist- ence 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 over-all 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
by nature as hidden from tIle OtIler; it utilizes for its own profit the on- tological 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 IHit? 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 lIll- man 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. 'I1lCre must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project im- plies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehen- sion (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 re- establish 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 suppressed?
To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total trans- lucency of consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith since the being of consciousness is conscious- ness 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 tomyself, 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
1 A "being-with" others in the world. Tr.
? 50 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself well within my project as its very condition. W e have here an evanes- cent 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 con- tinually 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 "metastablc,"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 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 com- prehend 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 estab. lishes 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 situa- tion 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 privi- leged 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
2 Sartre's own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or Tr.
. . . . . . -
? BAD FAITH 51
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 psy- chic facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to hypotheses about their origin and true meaning, just as the scholar makes conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenome- non. This theft, for example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by the rarity, the interest, or the of the volume whicl\ 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 im- pulse toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by more or less probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth wiII be the number of conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of view it w:Jl be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of this truth wiII 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 Otller. 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 out- side, abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or with the cooperaticm of a techni- cian, theywiII 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 re- sults 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 under- stand 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 condi- tion 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
\
!
? BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
approaching the truth. 111is 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 thc psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of him- sclf 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 rcactions 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 probabilitywould appear to the ego to border on cer- tainty, 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 tIle 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 emanat- ing 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 ccnsor 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 ncar 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 psycho- analysis, we perceive that the censor in order to apply its activity with dis- cernment 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 otllerwise that the cen- sor 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 de- ceived 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
? BAD FAITII
53
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 resist- ance 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 connec- tion by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psy- choanalytic 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) be- ing 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 (? s, lch, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very es- sence 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 10-
eate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and dis- guise 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 phe- nomenon 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 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.
----. . ,.
?
Lying is a negative atti- tude, we will agree to that. But this negation does not bear on conscious- ness itself; it aims only anhe 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 atti- tude 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 dis- position of the liar is positive; it could be the object of an affirmative judgment. The liar intends to deceive and he does not seek tq hide this intention from himself nor to disguise the translucency of consciousness; On the contrary, he 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 itl")-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 con- stitute it bear on objects which by this fact are removed from conscious-
? lless. The lie then does not require special ontological foundation, and the explanations which the existence of negation in general requires are valid without cbange 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 com- mon, popular forms of the lie are also degenerate aspects of it; they repre- sent 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-
? BAD FAITII
49
sein. "1 It presupposes my existence, the existence of the Other, my exist- ence 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 over-all 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
by nature as hidden from tIle OtIler; it utilizes for its own profit the on- tological 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 IHit? 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 lIll- man 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. 'I1lCre must be an original intention and a project of bad faith; this project im- plies a comprehension of bad faith as such and a pre-reflective apprehen- sion (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 re- establish 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 suppressed?
To this difficulty is added another which is derived from the total trans- lucency of consciousness. That which affects itself with bad faith must be conscious (of) its bad faith since the being of consciousness is conscious- ness 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 tomyself, 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
1 A "being-with" others in the world. Tr.
? 50 BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
itself well within my project as its very condition. W e have here an evanes- cent 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 con- tinually 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 "metastablc,"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 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 com- prehend 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 estab. lishes 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 situa- tion 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 privi- leged 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
2 Sartre's own word, meaning subject to sudden changes or Tr.
. . . . . . -
? BAD FAITH 51
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 psy- chic facts, in so far as I receive them passively and am obliged to resort to hypotheses about their origin and true meaning, just as the scholar makes conjectures about the nature and essence of an external phenome- non. This theft, for example, which I interpret as an immediate impulse determined by the rarity, the interest, or the of the volume whicl\ 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 im- pulse toward the theft contains a truth which can be reached only by more or less probable hypotheses. The criterion of this truth wiII be the number of conscious psychic facts which it explains; from a more pragmatic point of view it w:Jl be also the success of the psychiatric cure which it allows. Finally the discovery of this truth wiII 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 Otller. 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 out- side, abstract schemes and rules already learned. As for the results, whether they are obtained by my efforts alone or with the cooperaticm of a techni- cian, theywiII 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 re- sults 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 under- stand 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 condi- tion 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
\
!
? BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
approaching the truth. 111is 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 thc psychoanalytic treatment. It is a fair question to ask what part of him- sclf 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 rcactions 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 probabilitywould appear to the ego to border on cer- tainty, 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 tIle 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 emanat- ing 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 ccnsor 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 ncar 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 psycho- analysis, we perceive that the censor in order to apply its activity with dis- cernment 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 otllerwise that the cen- sor 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 de- ceived 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
? BAD FAITII
53
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 resist- ance 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 connec- tion by which it compares the truth of the repressed complex to the psy- choanalytic 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) be- ing 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 (? s, lch, Ueberich expressing themselves through the censor) has resulted in a mere verbal terminology. The very es- sence 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 10-
eate the thing to be concealed and on the other hand to repress and dis- guise 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 phe- nomenon 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 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.
