'Flux' and Bad Faith

To begin with, I would like to briefly run over the key concepts of Sartre’s ontology, for my own sake and for yours Oli, so that you can analyse my progress on the subject. I will then work my own reflections and responses into this.

Existence for Sartre is the earthly or ‘corporeal’ being. ‘Existence’ in itself then, can be the only thing with regards to a being-for-itself (the conscious being) that is non-transient.
Our essence, everything that we have done and thought, is ephemeral or transient by its nature.
I wish to take a moment and reflect on this.
The word transient I think, assigned to Sartre's human 'essence', suggests a certain level of unimportance. As does the word ephemeral. I don’t know how much importance Sartre assigns to ones essence; or furthermore to the very idea of the conscious being-for-itself, in a state of constant flux. If our essence, the sum total of everything that we have been, is in very simple terms, here one moment and gone the next, how much meaning can it have? Has it bared no mark on our own personal conditions? Or does it have no importance, and bare no relevance to our individual identities at all? In saying that our transient essence, is not ‘who we are’, it can be further seen that one is suggesting that our past experiences and previous roles have no bearing on our identity. In later dialogue I would like to look into this a little further.

So to follow on, the being-in-itself is ‘as the table is round or square, as the wall colouring is blue or gray’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55), as this desk is flat and brown. The being-for-itself, is the conscious being, and that which sets us corporeal beings apart from others.

Now for a being-for-itself to act in Bad Faith, to my understanding, is as follows.

Very simply to begin with, Bad Faith is ones ‘bad faith’ in their own transience. It is their knowing negation of this, in whatever action or thought implied. But furthermore it is the concealment of ones knowledge of this transience say, from themselves. The deceiver is also the deceived in a single unity. As Sartre claims, ‘…in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth.’ (Sartre 1993 pg 49)

Take the example of the young woman in the café. The very act of this woman, say choosing to withdraw her hand as he places his own upon hers, does not make her ‘the woman who withdrew her hand’. She will not exist in this ‘self’ as it were, as a stone will exist as a stone. Her deliberation over whether to withdraw her hand or to take his, in the thinking that either one of these actions will define her in a sense, is absurd according to Sartre. To approach the situation in this way is to deny ones transience from oneself. To do so isn’t right or wrong. Rather, to attempt to work against oneself as a transient being is not merely ridiculous for Sartre, but very impossible.

Perhaps another example of Bad Faith in this particular passage is the young woman’s perceptions of the young man’s sincerity;

‘If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behaviour of the speaker, the immediate meanings…’ (Sartre 1993 pg 55)

The ‘qualities’ she then assigns to the young man are somewhat permanent and fixed. Is she acting in Bad Faith in this instance also? In doing so perhaps she is not only attempting to deny him his transience through her own perceptions, but also perhaps her own.

In attaching these permanent qualities, to both herself and the young man, she is being sincere to ‘herself’: perhaps in a way protecting herself from her own transience, because in some way the notion of her as a 'being of transience', questions the authority she has over her identity. It removes her freedom and/or power over the creation of herself, and this is an unsettling thought. Thus to be sincere (or kind) to herself, allows her to permit the idea that she and others can be as they make themselves. They can be ‘the dancer’ or ‘the woman who took his hand’ for example, and so project this identity into the external world.

However this cannot be the case. The ‘flux’ of the being-for-itself is a transient one. I, the conscious being, can therefore never be a ‘fixed permanence’. (Sartre 1993 pg 55) The Bad Faith of the conscious being, comes into play when one is sincere to oneself in the attempt to project a concrete identity. In doing so one is attempting to establish themselves as a static being, which simply cannot be done for Sartre. We are, perhaps without being aware of it (?) constantly remaking and reinventing ourselves. We thus cannot be ‘defined’ as the actor, the girlfriend, or the sister. We may have been all these;(our ‘facticity – all that we have been’), but all these do not make us ‘who we are’.