Bad Faith

I am very interested in the concept of “Bad Faith”, and how Sartre portrays it as being in a state of self denial concerning the objective state of affairs of the world and the subjective meanings or values that conscious beings assign to things. Sartre introduces his concept of Bad Faith with an anecdote of a woman on a date. Throughout the evening, the woman is constantly attempting to live in denial of the objective facts, or facticity as Sartre called it, while also being consciously aware of the subjective implications of her actions. While this seems to be a harmless enough set of circumstances, Sartre claims that this woman is living an example of Bad Faith by failing to live with a proper synthesis of her facticity and her transcendence. What I found most interesting about this anecdote was how familiar it sounded to what would popularly be considered normal and socially acceptable actions. Sartre emphasizes the fact that this woman frequently distances the meanings that actions represent from the actions themselves. For example, Sartre states that, “If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of it’s sexual background” (Solomon 224). Sartre included this specific sentence in his short anecdote representing Bad Faith because he believes this is a symptom of someone living in Bad Faith, yet this seems to be a standard attitude for many dating age men and women that I associate with. Sartre claims that bad faith, concerning facticity and transcendence, “does not wish either to coordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis” (Solomon 226). Obviously a state that one would wish to avoid, and yet the signs of bad faith being pervasive throughout popular culture today seem quite prevalent. The disassociation of objective actions and subjective value seems prevalent in today's society, and it makes me what the long term consequences of such bad faith could have on an entire society such as our own.

Solomon, Robert C. Existentialism. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.