Bad faith

Bad faith names a self-deception that cannot make its truth disappear. In Sartre’s account, consciousness tries to evade the freedom for which it remains responsible by treating itself as a fixed thing, or by fleeing the facts it must assume. Yet the flight itself requires an awareness of what is being avoided. Bad faith is therefore at once a concealment and a disclosure: an unstable, recurrent way of living the division within consciousness rather than a successful escape from it.

Definition and Distinction from Lying

Sartre distinguishes bad faith from a lie told to another person. In an ordinary lie, the liar knows the truth and intends to hide it from someone else; the deceiver and the deceived are distinct, even though the liar may manage what the other person can see. That interpersonal division cannot simply be transferred to self-deception. In bad faith, one consciousness hides a truth from itself, so the roles of deceiver and deceived must coexist within a single project. The person must in some sense know the truth in order to conceal it, but cannot possess that knowledge as a detached, fully acknowledged certainty without undoing the concealment.

This difficulty is not an accidental flaw in the definition but the condition that makes bad faith possible. Consciousness is translucent to itself: it cannot conceal a truth as one person might hide an external object from another. To turn away from an aspect of its own being, it must already indicate that aspect and remain oriented toward what it is attempting not to see. The aim of flight and the flight from that aim belong to the same consciousness. Consequently, bad faith cannot be described as simple ignorance, nor as a cynical and fully deliberate lie to oneself.

Sartre also rejects treating bad faith as a state imposed from outside or as an unconscious psychic mechanism that divides the person into separate agents. It is a project by which consciousness affects itself. It can be conditioned by life with others, but it does not arrive as an infection or a fixed condition. Its characteristic instability is compatible with persistence: a person may have abrupt moments of cynicism or good faith and still maintain bad faith as a durable style of life.

Freedom, Anguish, and Flight

Bad faith is closely tied to anguish, understood as the reflective apprehension of freedom. When a person disengages from the appeals of the world and considers possibilities, the meaning of the world cannot be derived from the world alone; it is disclosed as dependent on freedom. Anguish exposes the person’s responsibility for the meaning and direction of action. Bad faith begins in the effort to flee that exposure without being able to leave behind the consciousness that makes it possible.

One common refuge is psychological determinism. It presents motives and acts as if they were things linked by an unbroken causal chain, giving conduct a reassuring foundation outside the person’s freedom. Causes are treated as permanent facts that produce decisions, rather than as circumstances whose weight and meaning depend on a freely assumed project. Determinism thus offers an excuse: it portrays the person as the consequence of forces instead of as the agent who must take responsibility for what those forces mean. Its appeal does not establish that freedom is absent; it provides a way to take refuge from freedom’s demands.

Bad faith also works by narrowing attention to one chosen possibility while assigning other possibilities to an undifferentiated “Other.” A person tries to see the chosen course as generated by an already constituted self, imagined as though it were another person or a thing with a fixed nature. In that construction, freedom is toned down and responsibility is softened into an account of what the person simply is. The self becomes an apparent source of acts that is supposed to explain them in advance, even though this reassuring object is itself a projection through which freedom tries to disguise itself.

This concealment cannot succeed as literal hiding. A person can turn attention from an external object without changing either that object’s existence or their own. But a person cannot turn away from an aspect of their own being without remaining aware of the aspect in the very act of avoidance. Anguish, the intention of anguish, and flight toward reassuring myths are therefore held together within one consciousness. Bad faith does not expel anguish; the attempt to flee it is itself a way of becoming conscious of it.

Examples and Relations to the Other

Sartre introduces bad faith through a woman on a first outing with a man. She understands his intentions and knows that she will eventually have to decide how to respond, but she avoids recognizing the urgency of the situation. She confines her interpretation to the present and treats his behavior as respectful and discreet rather than as part of a developing approach. When he tells her that he finds her attractive, she restricts the remark to its explicit meaning and detaches it from its sexual implications. She wants neither a desire that would humiliate or horrify her nor respect emptied of personal recognition. The example shows how bad faith tries to make a living, developing situation resemble a set of fixed qualities, while the person’s awareness of the possibilities remains part of the scene.

The example makes visible the movement between facticity and transcendence. A person may treat a present fact or a settled description as if it completely defined them, denying the freedom by which they go beyond it. Conversely, they may invoke freedom to evade the facts they must assume. Bad faith depends on refusing to acknowledge either dimension as it is, rather than holding together the given circumstances and the person’s ongoing capacity to exceed them.

The relation to another person clarifies why self-knowledge cannot simply supply the objectivity received from someone else. A person cannot make themselves an object to themselves by their own power alone: the distance consciousness maintains from itself prevents a self-description from becoming a fully external fact. Sartre treats the Other as the concrete, transcending condition of this objectivity. Qualities such as being evil or jealous may be attributed to a person by another, and the person may accept responsibility for the stranger-like self so described without recognizing it as a self they simply are for themselves. Bad faith is not identical to this experience of being seen, but the contrast shows how attempts to fix the self as an object rely on a perspective that consciousness cannot straightforwardly provide for itself.

Shame, Pride, and Self-Objectification

Shame makes the person’s dependence on the Other’s view especially clear. It is the awareness of being an object for another subject: exposed, fixed, and dependent in a way that cannot be reduced to a particular fault. Sartre connects modesty and fear of being seen unclothed to this original shame, since clothing can serve as an effort to hide one’s object-state and claim the position of a subject who sees without being seen. The account of Adam and Eve knowing their nakedness functions as a symbol of this fall into visibility among others.

Pride does not abolish shame; it grows out of it. In pride, a person acknowledges that the Other confers an object-state and tries to assume responsibility for that state, presenting the self as if it could affect the Other in return. Vanity sharpens the contradiction: the person wants the Other’s admiration or love to confirm an identity received from the Other, yet that confirmation matters only if it comes from the Other as a free subject. To secure the desired judgment, the person tries to seize and objectify the very subject whose freedom makes the judgment valuable. Once the Other is treated as an object, the image of the self held there becomes merely one of that object’s properties, and it no longer yields the stable self the person sought. The attempt to recover the self through the Other thus undermines the recognition on which it depended.

Belief, Persistence, and Ethical Significance

Bad faith is also a problem of belief. It is neither cynical certainty nor the intuitive possession of an object; it is adherence to something that is not fully given. Its concepts may be fashioned to persuade the person, but the project of persuasion is itself implicated in bad faith. The person does not first stand outside the project and then deliberately adopt it with complete clarity. The effort to decide to be in bad faith cannot cleanly name itself as such without turning into cynicism, and cannot sincerely regard itself as innocent without leaving bad faith behind.

This explains the paradoxical structure often rendered as believing in order not to believe. Good faith tries to escape the uncertainty of belief by taking refuge in fixed being. Bad faith flees that fixed being through the very uncertainty that allows it to accept what it believes without fully believing it. The belief is weakened in advance, yet that weakening also makes it possible to sustain the desired self-description. The project’s evanescence does not prevent it from becoming a continuing form of life; it accounts for the recurrent wavering between self-justification, cynicism, and moments of clearer recognition.

The same structure appears in Sartre’s discussion of inferiority. A person may choose an activity in which they experience themselves as inferior, while willing to become superior there; maintaining the gap between the desired achievement and the result can itself belong to the project. Reflective efforts to overcome the perceived weakness may construct false psychic motives, while a more fundamental, non-reflective consciousness remains implicated in the choice of inferiority and its accompanying shame and failure. Sartre does not treat this as an unconscious division into two independent levels. He argues that the levels belong to a deeper unity of consciousness, and that bad faith better describes the effort to hide what the project simultaneously sustains.

Bad faith also informs Sartre’s account of moral self-judgment. A person may say that an action is guilty without being able to make the self coincide with the judgment, because the action as an object of evaluation and the person’s free project are not experienced in the same way. The ideal of judging oneself from the Other’s point of view can therefore remain unattainable, leaving a gap between declarations of guilt and the lived apprehension of one’s situation. This is one source of the anguish of bad conscience, not proof that responsibility can be transferred to a fixed moral identity.

Sartre’s wider critique of seriousness gives the concept a social and ethical reach. Seriousness treats values as independent givens and allows the material properties of objects to appear to dictate what should be desired. Its adherent presents the self as a consequence of the world, without a beginning that could be attributed to freedom. Existential psychoanalysis, by contrast, seeks to disclose the projects and meanings through which people make themselves and their values intelligible. It cannot derive ethical commands from ontology, but it can expose how the serious attitude hides its own freedom and responsibility. In the glossary, bad faith is condensed as a lie to oneself within a single consciousness, a flight from responsible freedom sustained by vacillation between transcendence and facticity. That formulation captures its central paradox: the person’s evasion is never separate from the freedom it tries to evade.