Bad Faith — Central concept in Sartrean existentialism (French: mauvaise foi; literally “bad faith” in the sense of a faith or belief held in bad conscience). The attitude by which consciousness lies to itself, fleeing the anguish of freedom by pretending to be a determined thing. In Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre distinguishes the for-itself (consciousness, freedom, nothingness) from the in-itself (massive, full being, without fissure). Bad faith consists in the for-itself treating itself as in-itself — denying its radical freedom, refusing to acknowledge that it is always condemned to choose. To do so, it plays ambiguously on two aspects of the human condition: facticity (what we already are — past, body, situation) and transcendence (the openness toward what we are not yet). The person in bad faith now reduces themselves to sheer facticity (“this is just how I am, I cannot change”), now escapes into pure transcendence. Classic Sartrean examples: the waiter who performs his role with excessive rigidity, as if he were a waiter in the way a stone is a stone; the woman who ignores the seducer’s hand upon hers, dissociating body from consciousness. Bad faith is not simple lying (which presupposes deceiving another), for here the deceiver and the deceived are the same consciousness — a paradox possible because consciousness is structurally divided (it is what it is not and is not what it is). It is also distinguished from the Freudian unconscious: for Sartre, there is no hidden psychic agency — consciousness knows it is fleeing, and this flight is bad faith. The positive counterpart is authenticity — assuming freedom and responsibility without subterfuge.
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