Bad Faith Good Faith

6. Authenticity and Good Faith: An Analytic Differentiation

6 Authenticity and Good Faith: An Analytic Differentiation My attempt in the two preceding chapters to reconstruct and analyze Sartre's sometimes elusive notions of good faith and authenticity return us to one of the central questions that generated my inquiry of the last two chapters. If one is to redeem any constructive sense of good faith in the early formative writings of Sartre-as I have tried to do-how is one to distinguish it from Sartre's concept of authenticity, to which Same gives more repeated attention and detait and in respect to which he offers greater clarity? I have argued that Sartre's analysis allows a positive sense of "good faith" at both an epistemological and an ontological level. At the epistemological levet I have contended that good faith is an attitude that is open to the metastability of consciousness, to the ambiguity and incompleteness of all belief, to critical evidence . In respect to the ontological levet I have suggested that good faith may be viewed as an attitude that confronts and affirms , rather than flees from, the freedom and responsibility to which (for Sartre) we have been abandoned. And I have also contended that, in spite of human reality'S desire for Being, it can affirm its freedom, its nothingness, its lack of being, without making that affirmation a bad-faith project. But, in my interpretation of "authenticity" in Sartre, I have 110 Copyrighted Material Authenticity and Good Faith 111 shown, likewise, that, for Sartre, authenticity, as a willed "conversion " from one's "natural" attitude of trying to flee one's freedom to a lucid recognition of one's situation, also invokes the acceptance, affirmation, valorizing, and living of one's freedom , one's "non-coincidence" of being, one's ontological abandonment to responsibility. At a number of places in the foregoing chapters, I have alluded to the marked resemblances among commonly held interpretations of Sartre's "good faith" and "authenticity," whether these views were adopted before or-as in our case above-after close analysis of the Sartrean texts. And I have even suggested that Joseph Catalano, one of the pioneers among North American inquirers on these topics, has sometimes conflated the two concepts." The question remains: How, after analysis, are we to differentiate -if at all-these two important Sartrean concepts? Are we to assume, following our immediately preceding conclusions , that (1) "conversion" is a necessary condition of "selfrecovery " ~d of authenticity, but not of ontological good faith; and (2) it is the case, as Joseph Catalano sometimes insists, that while good and bad faith are categories of the non-reflective consciousness, authenticity is a category ofthe reflective, voluntary consciousness? And, finally, (3) may we conclude, following the highlights of our characterizations of good faith and authenticity , that, whereas good faith may be salvaged as a creative ontological and epistemological "attitude," it does not share authenticity 's ethical or moral dimension; namely, a moral "conversion " from corrupted being,> from ontological bad faith, to a new moral attitude in which, as Jeanson interprets the matter, I reclaim my freedom and valorize and live my "non-coincidence "? Let us look at these overlapping issues, one at a time. "Conversion" as a necessary condition First, I must restate, at the price of sounding repetitious, that both Sartre's discussions of authenticity, as we have viewed Copyrighted Material 112 CHAPTER 6 them above, and Jeanson's approved interpretation elucidate and corroborate Sartre's contentions, made principally in footnotes in Being and Nothingness, that "deliverance," "self-recovery ," authenticity, is possible only after a "radical conversion" (a change in one's fundamental project) with respect to "corrupted " being.3 But, though we saw grounds for saving the concept of good faith in Sartre, for purging it of the bad-faith connotations to which interpreters normally condemn it, we did not posit for it the "conversion" requirement or prerequisite that we attributed to authenticity. Although we granted that human reality, as non-self-coincidence, is perennially susceptible to bad faith, good faith, as a contrasting ontological attitude, appears not to be a willed attitude or an attitude adopted through a "willed," reflective conversion from ontological bad faith. If anything, the redeemed sense of good faith which I was suggesting appeared to be a spontaneous self-choosing in which freedom, though tempted by the inevitable passion for being, non-reflectively-that is, without attending to itself-accepts its abandonment to...