In Being and Nothingness (1943), chapter two, section II, “Patterns of Bad Faith,” Sartre discusses an example of a woman on a date. The man she is with makes several romantic overtures. She, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge their flirtatious conversation for what it is. When he takes her hand in his, she neither welcomes nor rejects his advances, preferring to ignore her own hand as if it were an object unconnected to her. Here we discuss how Sartre intended this example to illustrate bad faith.
The Example
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre gives an example of bad faith involving a woman on a date. Many people have been confused about exactly what this example is supposed to show.
In his attempt to make the characters and actions more believable and more like those found in real life, Sartre introduces too many elements into the story. Moreover, gender roles and social expectations have changed greatly since the 1940s, and modern audiences are likely to read more into the scenario than he intended to include.
A woman (Sartre does not give her a name, but for clarity, we can call her Adeline or A for short) is on a date with a man. We can call him Bruno or B. They are both aware that they are on a date, and they know this date could end with them going to bed together.
However, A refuses to consider whether she wants this to happen. B makes it clear that his goal is to end up in the bedroom. She ignores all of B’s romantic advances. A crucial moment occurs when he takes her hand in his. To avoid having to react and accept reality, she pretends that her hand is an inanimate object that has nothing to do with her.
Before we go further, we need to know a bit more about A.
There Is More to the Woman Than First Appears
For Sartre’s example to demonstrate someone being in bad faith, he needs A to have a psychological condition that leaves her afraid of her own body and of having sex. This is a reflection of the times. Indeed, Sartre makes use of the idea of “female frigidity,” a now-outdated and offensive idea, but one many people subscribed to in his day.
Of the two people on the date, B has made his intentions clear. This means if A wants to go to bed with B, all she has to do is let him know. And there are many ways, appropriate to the established courting rituals of the time, that she can signal this.
She can also signal that she does not want to go to bed with B. The choice is hers. And in this scenario, it will always be hers. It is her having to make a choice and experiencing the need to do so that is key to understanding where bad faith comes in.
It Is Not What the Woman Chooses but That She Chooses
The bad faith Sartre is attempting to illustrate has nothing to do with whether A wants or does not want to go to bed with B, and nothing to do with how she communicates her feelings on the matter. She is in bad faith because she attempts to believe there is no decision for her to make in this scenario.
The point is not that A has yet to make up her mind. It is that she does not want to choose and has convinced herself she does not have to.
The problem for A is that if she refuses to make a choice, she effectively makes the choice not to sleep with B. The reason Sartre says she is in bad faith is that she pretends the situation can resolve itself without her choosing. In doing so, she denies the reality of life.
The reality she denies is not only that she must make a choice, but that she, and she alone, is responsible for that choice. She is free to rebuff her date’s advances or encourage them. Sartre is not talking about all dates and all people. He is talking only about A and her very particular situation.
Imagining a Different Bad Faith Scenario: The Game
We can make this clearer with a simpler example. Imagine you are asked to referee a game. The rules are simple: two players compete for a prize, only one can win, and you decide who wins. There is one other rule: should you fail to pick a winner, Player One always wins the prize.
After agreeing to take part, you discover the prize is a million dollars. Player Two is a friend of yours. Player One is a moral saint who plans to give all the prize money to worthy causes. Perhaps loyalty to your friend matters more. Perhaps the opposite. Either way, the choice is yours alone.
The point is that you cannot abstain. Refusing to choose is simply giving the money to Player One.
If you said, “This is a terrible decision and I refuse to make it,” and walked away, you made the decision to give the prize to Player One.
A Bad-Faith Attempt to Avoid Taking Responsibility for One’s Choices
One day, a man named Chris, whom we can call C for short, was asked to help with a short experiment. C has some minutes to spare and agrees. The experimenters tell him about the game we discussed in the previous section and explain the rules. He happily agrees to be the person who decides who wins the game.
However, C’s attitude changes after discovering the prize is a million dollars and that the players are a well-known moral saint and his friend, Diana (whom we will call D). He had no idea the stakes would be so high.
In horror, as the reality of the situation becomes clear, C looks at the hope-filled faces of the moral saint and D, and then over to the experimenters awaiting his decision.
He recognizes his friend, of course, but he also recognizes the moral saint who is famous for their charity work and good deeds. In fact, the moral saint is a hero of C (who likes to think of himself as a pretty charitable person). Should he give the money to D (who, as a friend, will likely share some with him) or effectively give it all to charity?
What seemed at first to be harmless fun has turned into a defining moral dilemma for C. It is a real test of his values. His decision on who to give the prize to will show everyone, including himself, what kind of man he is.
It all becomes too much for C. Angrily, he turns on the experimenters, saying he never signed up for this and that they ought to have revealed the true nature of the game. He refuses to take part and storms out. As per the rules, the moral saint is given the prize.
Bad Faith Avoidance of Reality
Imagine that after storming out of the experiment, C is pursued by his friend D, who wants to know why he did not give her the prize. Did she not tell him, the last time they met, that she and her partner were having problems with their mortgage payments? She could have used the prize money to get her family out of debt, she says, adding that she would have shared the prize with C. Because, she says, unlike him, she is a good friend.
C replies that he did not choose to give the money to anyone. He vehemently denies that he chose not to give her the money. He insists that he refused to play the game, that he was drawn into the whole thing under false pretenses, and that he merely withdrew his consent to play and left. It is not his fault; he tries to assure D that she did not get the money.
The reality is, however, that after C found out what was happening, he knew that by refusing to choose between D and the moral saint, he was, for all intents and purposes, choosing the latter.
As mentioned in the previous section, C knew that his choice would be a defining moral moment for him. It would show everyone the kind of man he really is. Afraid of reality, he pretended he had no choice.
Let us compare C to A, the woman on the date.
The Woman on the Date Is Afraid of Her Freedom to Make Her Own Choices in Life and So Denies This Reality
C was in bad faith because he denied facts of life in order to protect himself from seeing the reality of who he is. What he denied, in particular, was his radical freedom to choose that all humans possess.
A too denies reality. Like C, she pretends that she does not have to make a choice when it is the inescapable reality of her situation. Also like C, she does so in order to avoid making a choice that: (i) reveals the type of person she is, and (ii) exposes the reality that she is free to choose exactly what kind of person she is.
Both A and C are in bad faith when they pretend that, for whatever reason, they do not have the freedom to be whoever they choose to be. Why are they afraid?
According to Sartre, they do not want to accept responsibility for their choices. Both would rather believe that, in their own circumstances, they had no choice to make or the freedom to act. They do this by ignoring or explaining away the crucial moment when this freedom is made most apparent. For A, it is when her date takes hold of her hand, and for C, it is when he must choose between his friend and the moral saint.
Instead of making a decision and acting in good faith, they pretend there was no choice at all.
Bad faith, for Sartre, is the pretense that human beings do not have the radical freedom to choose their own destiny. When people act in bad faith, they seek to evade moments when they are called to act on their freedom.
