Defining Sartre's ontology, and the consequences this has for 'bad faith'.

I think we should take what you said in your last post, Helen, and elaborate on it a little further. Then we subsequently arrive a stronger position to see what this means in terms of Sartre's idea of 'bad faith'.

When you say 'Sartre maintains that humans are not exactly as one might consider them to be at any given point in time', and also that you do consider us to be in something of a state of flux, you arrive at a position that allows us to examine Sartre's ontology further. In other words, you establish some fundamental principles of his thought in Being and Nothingness.

Sartre's ontology:

We fundamentally must understand that Sartre's ontology exhibits some very key concepts and terminology.

They are; 1. That existence is the real and tangible (corporeal) being. This is subjective being; 2. That essence is what you have been, or the sum of your decisions and actions. This is a transient essence that is constantly determined and ever-evolving. It is not 'who we are', since we as being are, as you quite rightly pointed out Helen, in a constant state of flux; 3. The notion of being must be defined here. Being is objective and of two kinds. Being-in-itself is non-conscious and exists independent from observation, whereas Being-for-itself is a conscious being. This consciousness sets this being apart from other beings in the world.

In addition to this, we must understand that Sartre identifies facticity all that we have been, and transcendence as the possibilities of everything we can be.

A key to Sartre's thought here is the transience of being, and this has implications for the example of bad faith concerning the woman in the cafe that I shall now exhibit.

Bad faith:

We must understand bad faith as the instance when an individual, knowingly, renegades against the subjective desire under the context of freedom established by the circumstances that reside over the possibilities. This excludes, in my understanding, the case of the actions of an individual that are undertaken unknowingly in relation to subjective desires (although perhaps we can further elaborate and tease out this point further through dialogue).

There is more to be said about lying here (Sartre, 1993, pp.48-50) but again perhaps we can discuss this further through dialogue.

The notion of sincerity is key to Sartre's conception of bad faith, particularly in relation to the case of the woman in the cafe. It seems that, to a certain degree, she has posited a certain idea of what it would be to be sincere to 'herself', and in doing so she establishes a static conception of self that renegades against the transient nature of her being that is inescapable. For example, "she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behaviour to what is in the present..." (Sartre, 1993, p.55). In addition "The qualities thus attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux" (Sartre, 1993, p.55). I think this may help you Helen, interpret the concept of 'flux', which you touched upon in your previous post, in a slightly more developed light. I would be interested in hearing how you respond to this. The 'flux' we talk of is very much a transient flux. The emergence of bad faith, in the instance of positing sincerity, is that one is implying some sort of declaration of self, which is nonsensical to Sartre since it involves some kind of proposition of a fixed and static being. This is contra to Sartre's conception of being. His conception of being is one that is constantly recreating itself, has no fixed and static reality, and subsequently cannot be defined as being 'of such a sort or of a certain kind'.