Bad Faith
As with many of us, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) had his most profound philosophical realisations drinking apricot cocktails in a trendy left-bank café. Here at the Philosophy Carpark we make ours with equal parts gin, apricot brandy and orange juice — dash of grenadine if you’re feeling fancy — but feel free to experiment. The important point is that they helped Sartre realise how even the most mundane objects could provide grist for the philosophical mill (especially cocktails), and how even the most trivial of actions could reveal the underlying truth of human existence. And what they revealed to Sartre was that man was fundamentally free — not in the old-fashioned political sense of low taxes and minimal state intervention, but in the far more exciting philosophical sense of constantly reinterpreting ourselves and the meaning of life. And for a philosophy born in Occupied Paris when freedom was running in somewhat short supply, this was all very exciting indeed.
It is important to bear in mind though that when Sartre talked about freedom, he was not concerned with the traditional philosophical problem of making choices in a physically deterministic world. That’s the sort of dull metaphysical nonsense best left to the analytic philosophers. What interested Sartre was rather our experience of the world, of what it is like to make choices interact with other people — irrespective of what the underlying physics has to say about the matter. And according to Sartre, this experience is one of unlimited open possibilities. After all, we certainly do not feel as if our actions are merely the result of impersonal causal processes, or that our futures are already mapped out by the relentless laws of thermodynamics.
And that’s because when you get right down to it, not even our past actions can constrain our present circumstances. We might feel guilty or ashamed about something we have done in the past — especially that thing, you know what I’m talking about — but that again also involves a choice on our part as to how we are to interpret our past behaviour. We were acting under duress at the time. It was all an honest mistake, officer. Some bigger boys made me do it. I am the victim of society. And anyway, I just don’t think of myself as the “same person” anymore. There’s lots of options here, and feeling some sense of responsibility for what we’ve done is one of many possibilities.
And that works in the other direction too. I make a firm commitment to myself not to drink anymore; and the next day I clarify that I meant no more drinking alone, or no more drinking at work, or no drinking on an empty stomach … and cheerfully order another apricot cocktail. Nothing about my previous commitment physically constrains my actions, and perhaps more importantly, nothing about my past behaviour determines how I think about myself as a person. As Sartre puts it, our existence precedes our essence — we are an unfinished project, forever resisting concrete definition in terms of anything other than our ability to continuously redefine ourselves.
One obvious problem with all this of course is that it seems straightforwardly false. We might agree with Sartre at an abstract, intellectual level — especially after that second apricot cocktail — but the fact is that most of us experience the world as an endless succession of obstacles rather than a rollercoaster of unbridled existential freedom. But for Sartre, this only proves his point. Freedom is a terrifying prospect, and more responsibility than most of us can bear. It is the fear we feel standing on the edge of a cliff — not that we might slip and fall, but that we might choose to throw ourselves into the abyss. And so we find ever more elaborate ways of ignoring the truth. We hide behind our moral codes, complain about our upbringing, and blame the systemic injustices of the blah blah blah … anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives. Ironically then, it is the very fact that we constantly choose to experience our lives as fundamentally constrained that proves the reality of our underlying freedom. And this is obviously absurd: no-one can choose not to be free. This is what Sartre calls “bad faith”, and argues that the only way to live a truly authentic existence is therefore to act in such a way that acknowledges our fundamental freedom.
All of which is undoubtedly an inspiring message — especially after that third apricot cocktail — although it does sadly remain a little light on the details. And while Sartre spent decades developing his existentialist philosophy through literature, plays, articles, essays, interviews, and several substantial academic monographs, none of them ever came close to developing what we might call an existentialist ethics. Indeed, Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, concludes over 600 pages of densely argued prose with a brief paragraph suggesting that such questions will have to be considered in “a future work”.
And that’s because Sartre has no answer for what happens when one person’s authentic existence conflicts with someone else’s authentic existence. After all, there are no higher principles that can adjudicate such disputes (and in any case, how would we choose to interpret them?). At the end of the day, it will just come down to whoever can be said to have the greater insight, the more profound grasp of the phenomenology of human existence — which invariably turns out to be well-educated bourgeois intellectuals just like Sartre. Like many radical political proposals before it then, living an authentic existence largely means doing whatever your social superiors tell you is in your best interest. Plus ça change, and all that …
Of course, none of this mattered at the time. The reality of the French Occupation had elevated the concept of freedom to an end-in-itself with a powerful ecumenical appeal. Between 1940 and 1945, when Sartre was developing his existentialist framework, the overriding moral imperative of the time was resistance to the Nazis, and therefore “freedom” was a goal that everyone —regardless of political persuasion — could rally behind, quietly leaving to one side the radically conflicting views of what might be done with that freedom. An ethics of freedom becomes convincing in this context precisely because it is so abstract.
But in the post-war period, this consensus quickly broke down. Indeed, one of the defining questions of modern political philosophy is to clarify exactly what we mean by “freedom”. But rather than engaging in such thorny issues, Sartre spent the 1950s and 1960s attempting to reconcile his existentialist philosophy with his own political commitment to Marxism. This proved to be quite the intellectual challenge, not least because the phenomenological emphasis upon the individual and their concrete personal experience does not naturally endear itself to the Marxist insistence that everything be explained in terms of underlying economic processes and an abstract notion of class-consciousness. It also found Sartre offering increasingly torturous apologies for the murderous activities of various communist regimes — the millions of peasants massacred in Soviet Russia and China all apparently living their own kind of authentic existence — and only feeling the need to speak out in 1956 when the violent repression of the Velvet Revolution in Hungary saw intellectuals like himself on the wrong end of the jackboot.
Which just goes to show, sometimes we do go to great lengths to avoid taking responsibility for our actions. So maybe Sartre was right after all.