“A being which is what it is not and which is not what it is”

“A being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” names the unstable structure Sartre attributes to human reality: people are never simply identical with a fixed description of themselves, but can both assume and distance themselves from what they are. This is not a verbal paradox added to the account of bad faith; it is the condition that makes self-deception possible.

The Structure of Human Reality

The formulation gathers together two movements. A person is what they are not because they can exceed a present or past condition through freedom and the projection of possibilities. They are not what they are because no identity or quality fully coincides with consciousness: it can put that identity in question, refuse it, or relate it to its opposite. Sartre presents these movements as inseparable features of human reality, not as alternating states.

The same structure appears in several ways of evading a fixed self-description. Someone may arrest themselves at one period of life and insist that they remain what they were, disregarding later changes. Conversely, when faced with reproach or resentment, someone may disown the past by appealing to freedom and perpetual self-recreation. The positions seem opposed, but both exploit the ambiguity of human temporality: one claims identity with what has been, while the other denies that identity. Neither captures a self that is simply fixed or simply detached from its past.

Bad Faith and Its Possibility

Bad faith uses this instability to move between being and non-being. It may deny a quality that a person possesses, or positively constitute that person as having a quality they lack. Sartre’s example is the coward who tries to take themselves as courageous. Such an effort requires more than overlooking a fact: the person must also evade the fact that being cowardly does not fix them in the way an object is fixed in a property.

The comparison with an inkwell that is not a table marks the difference. An object’s not being a table does not let it reconsider or escape that condition. Human consciousness, by contrast, can determine itself as cowardly, deny courage to itself, and thereby distance itself from the very cowardice it acknowledges. Bad faith relies on this capacity to relate a quality to its opposite; without it, the person could neither hide from a quality nor claim its contrary.

Sincerity and the Identity Ideal

Sincerity appears to oppose bad faith, but Sartre argues that it is also an ideal rather than a settled state. Its demand is that a person be, for themselves, only what they are. Yet this is the model of an in-itself: a thing fully coincident with itself under the principle of identity. Treating that model as the proper condition of human reality assumes that people could become as fixed as things, even though their mode of being allows them to be otherwise than what they are.

The apparent remedy therefore shares bad faith’s underlying assumption. For sincerity to function as an ideal that could momentarily persuade, human reality cannot be governed by the principle of identity in the same way as an object. The person must be able to take distance from what they are and to be what they are not. Sartre’s conclusion is sharper still: sincerity itself must be in bad faith when it demands complete coincidence with a fixed self.

Significance for the Account of Bad Faith

The expression is the compact statement of a condition, not a license to treat every self-description as equally true. It explains how evasion can operate: consciousness can acknowledge a quality while refusing to coincide with it, or claim a quality while knowing it is not possessed. These are not exceptions to human reality but possibilities grounded in its immediate, pre-reflective structure.

That structure also clarifies why Sartre describes the concepts used in bad faith as disintegrating syntheses. Claims about being and not being can briefly appear persuasive, but cannot settle into a stable identity; they shift as consciousness moves between what it has been, what it is, and what it may become. The expression thus links bad faith to freedom and temporality, while showing why a simple ideal of sincerity cannot erase the instability that makes self-deception possible.