Bad Faith Good Faith

5. Sartre's Concept of "Authenticity

5 Sartre's Concept of "Authenticity', As I mentioned at the beginning of the preceding chapter, Same's references to "authenticity " in Being and Nothingness are sparse, and they generally refer to the possibility of "self-recovery" or of "deliverance and salvation."1 And his few references, both explicit and implied , suggest alternatively that authenticity is the same as and different from good faith! While Sartre sometimes describes attitudes as authentic when they reflect an acceptance and affirmation of one's freedom in the manner we have characterized good faith above,3 he also appears to suggest in places that authenticity, like sincerity, can become-perhaps on Heidegger 's terms-a form of bad faith, or a project of fleeing from one's freedom. Hence, it is to works other than Being and Nothingness to which we must turn for elucidation of Sartre's formative notion of authenticity.- Because of Sartre's self-proclaimed struggle for authenticity in the situation of "la dr6le de guerre/,s and because his wartime "Carnets" include a first record of his punctuated formulation of the ontology he systematizes in Being and Nothingness, I turn first to Sartre's War Diaries,6 where his discussion of authenticity is both more directive and more generous in scope. "Authenticity" in The War Diaries: Sartre's formative view Sartre's initial view of authenticity comes relatively early in The War Diaries (1939-1940). "Authenticity," he says, "can be under89 Copyrighted Material 90 CHAPTER 5 stood only in terms of the human condition, that condition of a being thrown into a situation.. .. Through the authentic realization of the being-in-situation, one brings to plenary existence the situation on the one hand and human reality on the other." To be authentic, he adds, "is to realize fully one's being-in-situation , whatever this situation may happen to be." "This presupposes ," he says, "a patient study of what the situation requires, and then a way ofthrowing oneselfinto it and determining oneselfto 'be-for' this situation."7 Although the present chapter is not the place to summarize all of the terms and ontological structure assumed by this characterization , we can see, by following some of Sartre's remarks and contentions in The War Diaries, that his view ofauthenticity here relates centrally to his view of the "human condition," to his phenomenological ontology, to his account of the human project and the way in which human reality faces its "condition ." Human reality is free; this means that "it is never anything without motivating itself to be it." It exists without foundation ; it "falls into the world"; it is a "gratuitous" nothingness. "Numbed" by this gratuitousness, human reality wants to be "its own foundation." "Throughout all [of human reality's] undertakings , he seeks, not to preserve himself . . . nor to increase himself, but to found himself." In fact, Sartre contends-with a brevity that is tantalizing-that''human reality is moral because it wishes to be its own foundation."8Yet each undertaking reveals anew to the human being that he or she is "gratuitous to the marrow." This "original fall" and "striving for redemption" make up human reality.9 But''human reality loses its way trying to found itself."10 Searching its own foundation, trying to "found substantiality for the future," it struggles to tie itself down, to flee its own gratuity. But it grows weary trying to "deliver itself from the torment offreedom."ll Out of weariness, it "self-motivates itself" to conceal from itself "the fact that it is condemned Copyrighted Material Same's Concept of "Authenticity" 91 to self-motivate itself."Iz In its search for substantiality, for the "absolute," it resigns itself to being a "buffeted consciousness," to becoming a "thing." This, Same says, is self-motivated inauthenticity . To anticipate Same's later language (still in The War Diaries), "Inauthenticity ... consists in seeking out a foundation in order to 'lift' the absurd irrationality of facticity"I3-that is, the irrationality of the gratuitous or superfluous character of human reality. Even in love, we posit the Other as the foundation of our existence; we desire the Other as lover to "lift our facticity." Thus our being-for-Other in love is also inauthentic. But this state of "uneasiness," this "unhappiness," can become a reason for consciousness to motivate itself to stop fleeing from itself, to take a more lucid view of itself. The complicit soldier, for example, tired...