On Bad Faith and BoHo Philosophy
A brief polemical exploration of Sartre’s idea of bad faith
Prologue
One of the last tasks in my formal philosophy studies was to choose and critique some philosophical propositions from the Continental tradition. One I chose represents a key tenet of Jean-Paul Sartre’s version of existentialism (‘the proposition’).
We cannot escape bad faith, yet are without excuse.
The primary reference was Existentialism is a Humanism (Sartre, 2007). This includes a transcript of a public lecture Sartre gave in October 1945 in Paris in response to critics of his existentialist doctrine in his first major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1943, 2018).
The transcript invites a polemical interpretation of Sartre. This could be said to be objectionable for failing to account for the “rather more sophisticated arguments developed in Being and Nothingness” (). This seems plausible, except for an obvious question.
If Sartre’s existentialism as the universal human condition is a universal truth, then surely it is also universally understandable in a way that is accessible to those it purports to universally be true of? In other words, it needs no “rather more sophisticated arguments”.
Apparently not. By Sartre’s own estimation, his existentialism “is the least scandalous and the most austere [of all philosophical doctrines]:
[I]t is strictly intended for specialists and philosophers. Yet it can be easily defined.” (Existentialism is a Humanism, 20 — my emphasis).
It is not a little ironic, therefore, that it required more than six hundred pages of “rather more sophisticated arguments” to be “easily defined”. Yet, Sartre’s public pronouncements suggest his existentialism is no less a choice between polemics and paternalism, as it is between being a waiter and a boho philosopher.
This essay offers a slightly polemical perspective on the proposition. It begins with situating Sartre’s existentialism in a very loosely generalised historical context. It then looks at the idea of bad faith from the perspective of his atheistic premise, before briefly considering the question of being without excuse. A discussion of the proposition being problematic leads to a conclusion that it is at best trivial, if not irrational.
Life is a Bitch… Apparently.
Life is an inexcusable series of bad faith choices from which we have no escape. Or so Sartre claims.
According to Sartre, when we are in a café, both the person serving us as ‘waiter’, and ourselves as ‘customer’, have no excuse for these inescapable bad faith life-choices. We are both ‘playing’; acting in roles and, in so doing, necessarily denying the intrinsic human condition. Them for serving us, us for passing judgement on them.
Yet, there we both are. In the moment. Getting on with our lives. In our own personal ways and to differing degrees. Presumably, taking something positive from the brief, passing shared experience of those lives. Spoiling this by judging a person on a mere passing fragment of their entire life seems rather a pity. Not unlike judging a book by its cover.
In this light, the proposition can be said to be trivial, if not irrational. For what is the point of a negative, condemnatory, allegedly apodictic, ‘truth’ that is inescapable? Its seeming profundity hides its triviality. But then, maybe this is too harsh in light of the times from which it arose, and the inherent appeal of the idea?
Context Helps
Sartre’s existentialism is best situated in view of the Enlightenment lifting the veil of mystery surrounding two fundamental aspects of life. The world, and the human experience of participating in it.
Science and philosophy opened the door to questioning the world, and being in it, in a secular way. The former was a runaway success that the latter struggled to emulate as the world was found to be an increasingly complex place throughout the 18th century.
During the 19th century, both expanded significantly to influence all aspects of the upper layers of western culture. A seminal part of this picture was a decline of the dominance of Christianity and rise of secularism and atheism, at least among intellectuals.
It culminated in an extended period of political, social, and economic turmoil and conflict that ended with World War II. More than six years of the worst kind of existential turmoil imaginable, during which we can only speculate on how often the seeming abandonment of humans by God was invoked.
Also of significance was the shift in the focus of European philosophy away from a supposed ‘God’s Eye’ perspective of the world, towards a human one. The emergence of phenomenology from the expanding science of psychology was highly influential. It helped shift focus from a world of objects independent of each other, to the inescapability of subjectivity as the only plausible perspective from which such a world could be understood and explained.
For Sartre, the phenomenological perspective was not about passively fitting into the world as it passes us by. It was that by which humans actively constitute their lives in virtue of what he posits as the universal truth of the human condition — radical freedom and responsibility. This is his existentialist doctrine that “makes human life possible” (Existentialism is a Humanism, 18). To either ignore, deny, or even be ignorant of it is to act in bad faith.
It should be noted in passing that existentialism was considered to be an ethos, or movement, rather than a ‘philosophy’ as such. There was no homogeneous ‘school’ or doctrine. It was more a revolutionary, or maybe better put, bolshie, attitude that was exponentially charged by the sheer explosive exuberance of renewal and positivity following the end of World War II.
Sartre happened to be the right person, in the right place, at the right time, with a bag load of brilliance, attitude, and self-belief. A boho philosopher and public intellectual par excellence. That he was not as smart as his long-time partner and collaborator, Simone de Beauvoir, is a fascinating side-bar interest. De Beauvoir was considered the better philosopher (Bakewell, 2016), and a significant cultural influence, in her own right. This tends to get lost in the romantic narrative of boho philosopher as cafe-dwelling intellectual agent provocateur that has surrounded Sartre.
From Nothing Comes Bad Faith
Sartre’s concept of bad faith can be approached from different directions, e.g. Solomon (2006), or Reynolds and Renaudie (2022). But, all point to his conception of existentialism resting solidly on an atheistic premise. The non-existence of God means there is no a-priori, i.e. pre-existing, ‘human nature’ (think: immortal soul) and no a-priori (think: ‘God-given’) moral creed.
The implications are significant. Free of being determined by God, we intentionally, willfully, act in such ways as to create who we are as a person from the moment we are born to the moment we die. Put into Sartre’s catchy little slogan:
Existence precedes essence
And at every point along the way, the possibilities available to us to choose from are because we are radically free. We are not determined by an immortal soul or a God-given moral creed. For Sartre, this is the universal, absolute, truth of human existence.
Sartre adopts ’ conclusion that the one thing we can be certain of is that we exist. He then posits that the non-existence of God entails radical freedom within which this existence arises. There is no binding pre-existing supernatural law-giving entity, no binding pre-existing moral laws, no binding pre-existing idiosyncratic ‘soul’ — we are existentially free.
To suppose our choices and actions are determined by any preconceived state, entity, standard or creed other than radical freedom, denies this truth. In doing so, we fall into ‘bad faith’. The radicalism, or maybe better put, fanaticism, lies in Sartre’s position that nothing but full commitment to this truth will do. Even exercising the apparently absolute freedom by choosing to be free of it will not do. In other words, it is paradoxically inescapable.
The famous example Sartre offers is that of a waiter in a café. The person working as a waiter is ‘playing’ at being ‘waiter’ to fit into societal expectations. The role of waiter is expressed by quite specific actions that are all choices made by the person in the role. In doing so they are at least unaware of, if not denying, the ‘absolute truth’ of their situation. They are radically free, but are ‘fleeing’ from this into the role of waiter. In spite of choosing to be, or play the role of, waiter, they are nonetheless acting in bad faith.
No Faith is No Excuse
If limiting radical freedom in such a way is an inescapable state of affairs, why is it that we have no excuse? Because Sartre’s existentialist is “extremely disturbed” by God abandoning them when they decide She doesn’t exist. The two a-priori principles of human existence that are attributed to Her — an immortal soul and a moral creed — are, for Sartre, inseparable from Her.
The implication is significant. The abandonment, or maybe better put, deicide, extinguishes our existential anchors. We are left with nothing except our own existence which necessarily precedes all else.
The absence of God leads Sartre to conclude there are no excuses for our choices and actions. In other words, it necessarily follows that the absence of such existential anchors — a divine cause of existence and morality — leaves us with nothing but our own devices to create our existence from the radical freedom of this nothingness. We might be excused for wondering if Sartre was remounting Nietzsche’s cautions about pride and free will in Beyond Good and Evil (2009), only without Nietzsche’s cynicism over the idea of ‘free will’?
“The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense […] to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God […] involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Münchhausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.” (§21)
We come into existence with radical freedom. We create ourselves by actions that follow our free choices. We are fully responsible for our decisions. We cannot escape this existential inevitability to which an authentic person must fully commit, and so, we are without excuse. Otherwise, we are inauthentic losers bussing coffees in cafes to boho philosophers.
Mmmmmm? Really?
A charitable reading of Sartre says he stands on the shoulders of those who preceded him. From there, he pulls back the veil of Christian hypocrisy hiding the truth of the human condition made inescapably real by the events of his times. It is hard for most, if not all, alive in western societies today to imagine what it would truly be like to be in the middle of one of the most appalling acts of collective human madness that went on for over six years.
However, the sheer starkness of what he claims this ‘truth’ to be might be said to have not just touched a nerve, but purposely and specifically pinched it to the point of going beyond polemic into fanaticism. Sartre claiming Dostoevsky’s proposition, “If God does not exist, everything is permissible”, as the “starting point of existentialism” is instructive in this regard (Existentialism is a Humanism, 28/29).
Sartre sets up a false dichotomy with the atheist premise. Our choices are either:
- Determinism = universal (God + immortal soul + pre-existing moral creed)
or
- Freedom = universal not-(God + immortal soul + pre-existing moral creed)
The universality remains untouched after negating the supernatural and immortality.
There is no middle ground. Any and all deviations from strict adherence to this universal claim about the human condition are simply, summarily, some would say, fanatically, dismissed as bad faith. But, it is a distraction from the option of secular morality. Sartre dismissed the failed attempts of French philosophy in the late 19th century to find a middle ground of secular morality (Existentialism is a Humanism, 28). It is also problematic.
God =?≠ Morality
In Sartre’s ‘God-scenario’, immortal soul and universal moral creed are necessary a-priori conditions in God’s specification for human existence. But is this ‘existence’ as an individual, or as a species? For Sartre, it matters not in spite of an obvious observation of human society.
Irrespective of the existence of God, or the origin of the species, or even a multiplicity of gods, every individual comes into existence in a society replete with its own culture of pre-existing moral traditions and customs. In this light, Sartre’s supposition that such a moral creed is inseparable from God’s existence invites criticism.
The concept of God entails absolute being; there is nothing contingent to see here. So, if God does not exist, then God never existed, in which case, ‘God’ is a construct from the start. It follows that immortal souls and a universal moral code are also constructs.
The existence of an immortal soul is a matter of faith and therefore open to doubt. A general moral creed, however, undoubtedly existed, and continues to exist. It is inescapably baked into the cultural customs and traditions of society. That it is ‘a-priori’ the existence of an individual is, therefore, also undoubted.
Sartre’s linking of morality to God is dubious at best, as is his dismissal of secular morality. In dismissing secular morality, Sartre clears the existential ground for a-priori absolute freedom. In other words, he begs the question by excluding the middle.
Mere observation refutes Sartre’s conflation of morality and God. How and when such moral creeds started is irrelevant to the fact they certainly exist in spite of the uncertainty of the existence of a divine supernatural entity.
Freedom — If, and Only If, Altruistic Determinism
The contradiction of being subject to absolute freedom is just as ironic. We cannot escape the absolute freedom of the universal human condition, even by exercising it.
It is little wonder that Solomon suggests Sartre’s conception of ‘bad faith’ is little more than a secular remount of the Christian Original Sin. We are born free to choose to eat/not-eat the apple, yet cannot escape being determined because it has already been eaten before we came into existence. Heads we lose, tails we don’t win.
However, limiting Sartre’s bad faith to freedom is a little uncharitable. Doing so overlooks an important aspect of his doctrine, a countervailing, yet equally radical, responsibility that complements, and is inseparable from, radical freedom. This can be summarised in a cliched popular culture form:
With great freedom comes great responsibility
In a nutshell, for Sartre, every time we exercise our freedom to choose how to act, we do so on behalf of all humanity. Yes, let’s just take a moment for this to sink in:
every choice we make we, necessarily, represent, bind even, all of humanity.
My choices, no matter their ethical character, are in effect your choices. We are intrinsically both radically egoistic and altruistic in equal measure.
No matter the particulars we find ourselves in, unconditionally committing to our choices and actions unconditionally commits both ourselves and “humanity as a whole” (Existentialism is a Humanism, 44). We are inescapably free and responsible at both individual and universal levels. There is a sense about the universality of a moral creed grounded by a freedom-responsibility binary that invites the question of whether this is also a remount, only this time of Kant’s categorical imperative.
While Sartre’s extreme freedom-responsibility binary is clearly an impractical ideal, a charitable reading dials it back towards common moral responsibility. Exercising freedom inevitably has consequences against which we are judged and held accountable. Freedom in the absence of responsibility is, after all, an irrational, meaningless concept. Just as rights in the absence of obligations, or up in the absence of down, or absolute in the absence of relative, are.
The problem with such charity is that it rinses Sarte’s existentialism of what gave it traction in the public realm. A kind of deeply inherent appeal to egoism made all the more seductive by Sartre’s brilliance, oratory skills, and what, these days, we would call a ‘rockstar’ status as a public intellectual of his times. It dressed the irrationality of radical egoism up in the ‘respectability’ of public intelligentsia to promise something it couldn’t deliver on — universal freedom and altruism in equal measure as inseparable absolute commitments.
Saying this is not realisable because bad faith is inescapable is just nonsense. But, it was nonsense that was lapped up, and continues to be so, by those carried away with the romanticism of the boho philosopher maverick individual narrative. In light of Sartre’s other remounts, we might wonder if it was just a radical disguise of the eternal reward offered by the Abrahamic faiths?
Conclusion
Setting aside the proposition being problematic, Sartre’s existentialism, whether doctrine, philosophy, ‘ethos’, or way of life, presents a bolshie attitude to the fundamental characteristic of human relations:
They are collective relativities, not absolute individual abstractions
However, dropping the bolshie attitude opens to door to valuable insights into the human condition courtesy of Sartre’s literature rather than his philosophy. In other words, they lean more towards psychology than philosophy. This is the paradox of Sartre — his literature expresses deep insights into what it is to be human in ways his philosophy can only dream of attaining. They are still immediate, raw, intuitive, accessible, brilliant over seventy years on.
One obvious insight is that the conscious choice to be a waiter is but one vignette from the whole life of the person waiting on us. Their actions are inseparable from our experience of ‘café’ that keeps us returning to enjoy the experience anew, or not if their actions do not meet our expectations. Yet, as we can draw from Sartre’s No Exit (, 1964), there is clearly far more going on behind the temporary public facades we present to the world, and in this respect we can be said to be not always our ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ self.
In spite of questions about authenticity this invites, the waiter’s proficiency in ‘playing’ this choice as an important causal element of our enjoyment of ‘café’ is nonetheless directly proportional to the existence of ‘café’ and our existence in it. Just as our proficiency in ‘playing’ boho philosopher, or even just normal customer, being served by them is as important a causal element of our enjoyment and the existence of ‘café’.
By sticking to a generally held social norm of respect as means of having an enjoyable interaction with a fellow ‘radically free’ human who has, for whatever reason, chosen to participate in a particular way, we can find our experiences of life to be all the more enjoyable for the interaction. Even more so if we do so genuinely, authentically, in the moment while being, for Sartre, inauthentic. Funny thing that, eh?
We could pass judgement on them for acting in bad faith, or not, according to our ‘absolute’ principles. However, we certainly cannot fault them for finding satisfaction in plying their craft, their learned skills and talents, in this one particular vignette of the continuum of their existence, no matter what else is going on in their life they are choosing not to publicly manifest. Something we would undoubtedly be thankful for if they were, instead, say, our mother, our surgeon, or our banker. In this light, to charge any of these with acting in bad faith is at best trivial, if not irrational.
Epilogue
We might be forgiven for wondering if Sartre’s legendary status was one of lunchtimes in cafes that got out of hand — a ‘going viral’ of the times. To mash up something from Tom Wolfe and , it escaped, or maybe better put, was set free from, the compound of “specialists and philosophers” into the ‘wild’ of the world.
Sartre’s purported apodictic truth of the universal human condition was let loose on the very beings it claimed to tell the ‘truth’ of. We might be thankful that it was only intended for those drinking apricot cocktails in cafes looking down their noses at other people. We can be critical, if only impotently so, that only half of it went viral — the ‘freedom’ half.
Yes, this is facetious and polemic, and not a little bit arrogant. That Sartre brought brilliant, unique and insightful observations about the human condition to the world at a very unique inflection point in the history of western societies is undoubted. But, as the old biblical adage goes that he may well have summarily dismissed — when we take up the sword we can expect to perish with it. After all, surely in the context of philosophy, it stands to reason?
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