“The being of consciousness is consciousness of being”

“The being of consciousness is consciousness of being” is the principle that makes bad faith a paradoxical, unstable project: consciousness may conceal an unwelcome truth from itself, but it cannot do so without some awareness of the concealment. The expression names the transparency that bad faith both requires and seems unable to withstand.

The Principle and Its Difficulty

The phrase appears in an argument about how bad faith can operate within a single consciousness. Unlike an ordinary lie, in which a deceiver hides the truth from someone else, bad faith has no separate deceiver and deceived: the person concealing the truth is also the person from whom it is concealed. Yet concealment requires the person, in the role of deceiver, to know the truth accurately enough to hide it. The expression sharpens this difficulty: if consciousness is consciousness of being, then the consciousness affecting itself with bad faith must in some sense be conscious of that very project.

That awareness threatens to undo the self-deception. A deliberate, cynical attempt to lie to oneself collapses under the look of the consciousness that knows it is lying. The attempt is exposed from within, because awareness of the lie is not an external discovery added afterward; it belongs to the project’s own condition. The phrase therefore does not simply assert self-knowledge. It identifies why self-concealment cannot be a clean separation between an ignorant self and a knowing self.

Bad Faith as an Evanescent Structure

The argument does not conclude that bad faith is impossible. Its existence is described as evanescent: it continually vacillates between good faith and cynicism, and its structure is precarious. At the same time, it can persist as an autonomous and durable style of life, even becoming the normal aspect of life for many people. A person may have abrupt awakenings to cynicism or good faith while continuing to live in bad faith overall.

The expression holds these claims together. Consciousness’s translucency makes bad faith unstable, but does not prevent it from taking shape as a sustained way of living. Rather than a settled state imposed from outside, bad faith is a project through which consciousness affects itself. The phrase marks the tension at its center: consciousness cannot become wholly opaque to itself, yet it can keep negotiating the truth it apprehends.

The Unconscious as an Attempted Solution

The passage introduces psychoanalysis as a response to the difficulty. Its hypothesis of a censor, likened to a demarcation line with customs, passport division, and currency control, attempts to restore the duality of deceiver and deceived that bad faith seems to lack. Instincts, original drives, and complexes formed through individual history constitute a reality that is neither true nor false in itself; conscious symbols of instinct, by contrast, are treated as real psychic facts. Fear, forgetting, and dreams are presented as concrete facts of consciousness.

Against that proposed division, the expression keeps attention on consciousness as a unified structure that apprehends its own being. Its role is not to supply a simple diagnosis or resolve the account of the unconscious, but to make clear why bad faith cannot be explained as an ordinary lie occurring between two independent parties. The difficulty persists precisely because the consciousness that conceals is also, in some measure, aware of what it is doing.