Talk:Bad faith (existentialism)

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Contents 1 Bias? 2 Bad Faith 3 Criticisms 4 Citations 5 Sartre's Position? 6 Prune it! 7 Examples from literature?

[edit] Bias?

This article, while appearing to be written with a fairly competent grasp of the philosophical and psychological concepts, looks as if it needs a major NPOV clean-up and is performing quite a lot of original research - it's phrased in a way that draws conclusions and also appears to read very biased against Sartre's "bad faith" in particular and possibly Sartre's viewpoint in general.

I don't see any neutrality issues until the end of the "Freudian Framework" section. After that, there is the criticism section, where criticisms lie. Maybe move the Freud criticism towards the "Criticism" section.

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A response: Agreed. The Freudian critique of Sartre's bad faith is interesting and perhaps even valid (although I don't think so), but it has no place on this page in the sense that it's used.

For instance: "It is with the Superego that Sartre lodges his chief complaint". This is clearly an argument to invalidate Sartre and is thus a subjective matter rather than a statement of fact or theory.

Please sign your contributions to talk pages by adding -~~~~ at the end.

For the record, I didn't write this part, but it is with the superego that Sartre lodges his chief complaint. This doesn't invalidate Sartre. Its just the way things are. This can be verified by briefly glancing at pages 153-156 of Essays in Existentialism:

In the psychoanalytic interpretation, for example, they use the hypothesis of a censor [read:superego], conceived as a line of demarcation with customs, passport division, cur rency control, etc., to reestablish the duality of the deceiver and the deceived...The subject has the same relation to these phenomena as the deceived to the behavior of the deceiver. (p. 152 - here he begins his argument against Freud's division of the psyche)

Thus psychoanalysis substitutes for the notion of bad faith, the idea of a lie without a liar; it allows me to understand how it is possible for me to be lied to without lying to myself since it places me in the same relation to myself that the Other is in respect to me... (p. 154 - here he begins to pull together his arguments against the Freudian division)

These various operations in their turn imply that the censor is conscious (of) itself. But what type of self-consciousness can the censor have? It must be the consciousness (of) being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not be conscious of it. What does this mean if not that the censor is in bad faith? (p. 156-157 - and here he starts his full on criticism of Freud)

In other words, this isn't criticism of Sartre from a Freudian perspective, but Sartre's criticism of Freud.

However, the sentence at the end can go, and the whole article needs citations, so it isn't as if there's no work to be done here. -Seth Mahoney 04:02, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bad Faith

This section is two paragraphs long and still does not explain what bad faith is. It doesn't even mention the term in the body. This needs fixing. -dbsanfte 04:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Bad faith is explained in the introduction:

He coined the phrase bad faith in order to describe the state wherein one denies his or her total freedom and sees oneself as an inert object.

Is there something more that you would like to see added? -Smahoney 04:44, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

I think there is a logical fallacy here. With the mugger example, the writer gives a number of possible choices. But one has the choice "to die?" That seems to me to be not a free act, or in any case the free act is that of the mugger. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.64.72.104 (talk) 14:42, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Criticisms

I moved the following text here:

Bad faith occurs when we try to reverse Sartre's utterance into 'human reality is what it is and is not what it is not' (or in Popeye's case, 'I am what I am'). In the reversal, I try to kid myself into believing that I am "a philosopher" or "a chef", and I try to disguise my freedom from myself. I pretend that I have no other choice in the matter, even though I know fully well that I do. By pretending, Popeye and I end up as 'cowards', because we are frightened off by our freedom and seek to dismember it.

Sartre tells us that we should avoid bad faith, and live an authentic life. We should not try to posit ourselves as things in the world, and we should not adopt social roles and norms that undermine our freedom. At this point, the critic asks of Sartre: "What is the authentic life?" Sartre makes a push for authenticity, yet it appears that authenticity cannot be captured. Once we try to define what authenticity is, we end up positing a concept of what an authentic individual is in the world, and we become inauthentic in the interim by postulating the individual as a thing. Suppose Sartre told us, "to be authentic is to X". If we did X, we supposedly be authentic, but by pursuing X we try to make ourselves "a person who does X", and we therefore posit ourselves as a thing. We end up in bad faith. If to be authentic is to avoid bad faith, and we try to make ourselves "a person who avoids bad faith", we end up inauthentic because we try to be something.

Further, Sartre's proposed solution to "self deception" does not really appear to be accurately describing a person who is self deceived. In Sartre's view, the waiter only tries to wish away his freedom. At no point does the waiter actually say "I have no freedom", he simply finds it a burden and seeks to dispose of it. There is no deception that is occurring. Sartre's description more closely resembles "role playing" rather than "self deceiving". In a role playing situation, the individual acts out a stretch of time as if he were something else, but he knows (with a capital 'K') that he is not that thing. Sartre's examples (in particular the waiter and the woman) also appear to follow this thread. The waiter and the woman do not seem to be deceiving themselves with regards to their freedom to make choices. They choose to ignore it. This leads to the debate whether or not self deception is really even plausible.

Let us consider a raging alcoholic named Bill. Bill exhibits the signs of alcoholism, sees the signs of alcoholism in himself, is aware that the signs he sees in himself are enough to qualify him as an alcoholic, yet he does not believe he is an alcoholic (to get smarmy, Sartre would probably agree with Bill, because Bill is refusing to posit himself as a thing). Bill appears to be deceiving himself about his alcoholism. Is he? It seems equally likely that Bill is just having an intellectual failure about the link between his alcoholic tendencies and the fact that he is an alcoholic. In Bill's mind, he may have both a concept of his alcoholic tendencies and a concept of what alcoholism is, but he may not conceptualize a link between the two.

Because (even if it isn't) it reads like original research. If these criticisms can be attributed to a philosopher's work, great - it needs to be done and I'd be glad to see it returned to the article with citations. If not, it is original research and doesn't belong in the article. -Seth Mahoney 04:22, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Citations

This article needs citations. I added {{Fact}} tags to places where citations would be handy for further research (like the waiter and the date examples), and I can add some citations myself. But they need to be there. Went ahead and added four sources I had handy. -Seth Mahoney 04:24, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sartre's Position?

I know that Sartre, for a time, held the position given in the first few lines of the introduction. Yet, after his experience in World War II, he changed some of that, noting that "life had taught him the 'Power of Things'", as he put it. Should the opening sentence be changed to

Jean-Paul Sartre at a time held the position that human beings always have the capability to make rational, conscious decisions.

or is there no sufficient indication that this changed fundamentally later on? --84.186.189.156 17:24, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Prune it!

This rambling article needs to be pruned to concision.

[edit] Examples from literature?

Perhaps someone should add a few examples of bad faith from literature? Say, The Metamorphosis or The Stranger?