Bad Faith Good Faith

1. Bad Faith and Sincerity: Does Sartre's Analysis Rest on a Mistake?

1 Bad Faith and Sincerity: Does Sartre's Analysis Rest on a Mistake? In this opening chapter, I intend to deal with an issue that vexed my earliest confrontation with Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Although it may strike the reader as indirect and somewhat off center with regard to my announced topic and project, this issue--I remind the readermade evident to me the need to study Same closely, and generated my intense inquiry into bad faith and its corollary and alternate ways of "existing." Specifically, I want to focus on Sartre's view of "sincerity" as it is developed in Being and Nothingness-in particular, on his contention that sincerity is a "phenomenon of bad faith. "1 Sartre 's argument that the phenomenological structure and goals of sincerity parallel those of bad faith is to me problematic and highly misleading. In what follows, I shall attempt to show the equivocation and related difficulties that plague Same's analysis in this regard. In addition, before concluding, I shall suggest very briefly an alternative, more constructive account of sincerity that is consistent with, even implied in, Same's terms and ontological framework. Finally, I shall attempt to respond to a few of the criticisms leveled against my earlier formulation of my charge of equivocation in Sartre's analysis. 1 Copyrighted Material 2 CHAPTER 1 Before proceeding to these tasks, it seems to me imperative to provide at least a skeletal account of the background and main points of reference from which the analysis and contentions of this chapter, and this book, must be viewed. The reader will come to understand that, though somewhat indirect with respect to my book's main analysis and differentiation, the present chapter begins to provide the necessary foundation and framework for what is to come. It is a building block for understanding the challenge of Sartre's complex concept of bad faith. General background A number of central Sartrean contentions and terms must be born in mind while approaching his analysis of sincerity. Here I shall give only a brief account of those necessary for a confrontation with the issues of this chapter. I shall provide greater, more refined, detail regarding all of these as my overall analysis, reconstruction, and differentiation of key Sartrean concepts unfold in this book. First, it must be remembered that Sartre adopts Husserl's view that all consciousness is consciousness ofsomething! This is an indirect endorsement of Brentanos' earlier contention that intentionality is an essential feature of consciousness. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something means for Same that "there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object," or, in other words, "that consciousness has no 'content'." Consciousness is "positional"; "it transcends itself in order to reach an object"; it is directed toward the outside for its "content" (e.g., the table). This means, as Spiegelberg has pointed out, that "consciousness of" involves "in the first place a reference from the intending act to the intended object beyond as a distinct entity."3 Transcendence for Sartre is thus the "constitutive structure" of consciousness; Copyrighted Material Bad Faith and Sincerity 3 or, to put it another way, consciousness is "congenitally oriented toward" being other than itself.' It is precisely this view of the intentionality or transcendence of consciousness that pushes Sartre to make his fundamental distinction between two types of being: on the one hand, being for-itself (i'etre pour-soO, or the being of consciousness, and on the other hand, being initself a'etre en-soO, or the being that transcends consciousness, the being that consciousness "intends," or, to paraphrase Spiegelberg , the being to which being for-itself refers by virtue of its intentionality.5 Hence, in its innermost nature, pour-soi, seen in terms of intending consciousness, may be said to relate to and imply a being other than itself (en-soO, which is at once both a transcendent and a transphenomenal being.6 Second, for Sartre "human reality" is seen as "a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is." 7 Consciousness8 and being for-itself9 (i'etre pour-soO, often used by Sartre interchangeably with human reality, are frequently described in an identical manner. In other words, in direct contrast to being initselfa 'etre en-soO, being for-itself, or human reality as for-itself, cannot be said to have identity. Being for...