The Inescapability of Bad Faith Instances

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French existentialist whose book “Being and Nothingness” is regarded as one of the most influential and important works in contemporary existentialism and in philosophy. The ontology proposed by Sartre is very problematic due to its ambiguous language. In his writings, he expands on what he calls bad faith, a form of deception that prevents the reconciliation of transcendence and facticity. Sartre says that to be outside of bad faith, people must begin to live with authenticity; consequently, living in bad faith could constitute living with what he refers to as “sincerity.” I agree with a scholar named Ronald Santoni, in which sincerity must be reconfigured to be understood as “living self-consciously of the fact that one is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (Santoni, 159). Simply put, one must configure sincerity to mean living with “honest self-awareness” (Santoni, 159). This reconfiguration prevents equivocation between two meanings of sincerity while preserving Sartrean terminology, but it still maintains that consciousness is susceptible to bad faith. I suggest reflection as a possibility of limiting the physical appearance of bad faith and elaborate on how the ‘unreal’ instances of bad faith are inescapable, given Sartrean metaphysics.