Bad faith

Bad faith is Jean-Paul Sartre’s name for strategies through which people deceive themselves about who they are and what they can choose. In this account, it is closely connected to imagination: a person can treat a chosen social role or a preferred picture of the world as if it were simply necessary. The same imaginative capacity that can hide freedom, however, also lets people envisage alternatives and alter their circumstances.

Definition and Self-Deception

Bad faith is not merely a mistaken perception of external facts. It involves adopting an imaginary attitude that stipulates what things are rather than trying to discover their nature. Franz Gerlach, for example, uses such an attitude to deceive himself about the world around him and to portray himself to himself as a figure of historical importance. The example shows how an imagined account can serve a desired self-image. Yet the imaginative attitude is not always a calculated scheme: someone in a schizophrenic episode may be unable to leave it for a perceptual attitude, and dreams or drug-induced hallucinations may likewise involve an inability or unwillingness to return to ordinary perception. Such cases do not, by themselves, establish that an image is mistaken for a perception.

The distinction matters because Sartre’s account does not reduce imagination to a malfunction. Bad faith concerns how a person takes up an attitude and what that attitude makes possible or conceals; it is not a general claim that imaginative experience is deliberate. Franz’s self-presentation illustrates deception through the imaginary, while the broader account leaves room for states in which a person cannot readily set that attitude aside.

Social Roles as Performances

Sartre’s café waiter illustrates how a social identity can be staged. The waiter’s movements are excessively precise and rapid; he handles his tray as though balancing on a tightrope. Similar stylized performances appear in the dances of the grocer, tailor, and auctioneer. These gestures provide an analogon through which a person is apprehended not as a complex individual but as the role being performed. A customer can take someone to be no more than a grocer, just as an audience can take an actor to be Hamlet.

The waiter may wish to regard himself as wholly a waiter so that the demands of the job seem necessary to his life rather than the result of choice. By playing at being a waiter, he gives his movements the form through which he can imagine himself as entirely defined by that occupation. The role can thus function as an excuse: if the station in life dictates conduct, other possible actions appear unavailable. Sartre treats this kind of imaginative game as a recurring way people hide aspects of themselves both from themselves and from one another; in his novels, such behavior can be comic or melancholic.

The theatrical comparison also marks a limit. An actor uses the body, feelings, strength, and gestures as analogons for Hamlet, and can be fully mobilized by the character without believing, in the realizing sense, that he is Hamlet. The actor’s real tears may be apprehended as Hamlet’s tears rather than as evidence that the character has become a real person. In this account, the performer is irrealized in the character. The waiter’s performance similarly makes a role imaginatively apprehensible, but the relevant danger is taking that role as an exhaustive identity that removes the appearance of choice.

Freedom, Responsibility, and Imagination

The stakes of bad faith are ethical as well as personal. One common purpose is to hide freedom, because freedom brings responsibility. A person who persuades himself that circumstances made his conduct necessary can try to avoid blame for what he did or failed to do. The waiter might treat his social position as a command that rules out other activities. Sartre’s counterclaim is that people are not coerced by their surroundings in this way: they remain free, and cannot make responsibility disappear simply by imagining that their behavior was dictated.

Imagination is bound up with this freedom because it presents the world as capable of being otherwise. A person can imagine multiple ways of changing a situation, rather than living only among the possibilities that seem immediately given. This capacity can support self-deception, as when a role is treated as destiny, but it also makes action and change possible. In Sartre’s account, the imagined alternative is not an escape from the world’s practical demands; it can help supply the aims through which people attempt to reshape that world.

The surroundings themselves do not carry all their significance independently of a person’s projects. A door handle appears as something to turn in relation to the aim of entering a room; without that aim, it might appear merely as a metal projection from wood, or as matter. Piles of paper appear as mess to someone able to imagine a tidy office. These examples describe a situation formed through both objective surroundings and subjective aims. The patterns of salience that prompt action are partly shaped by imagined possibilities, so circumstances do not dictate conduct in isolation from the person’s projects.

Imaginative Attitude and Its Limits

Sartre’s treatment of schematic drawings clarifies how an imaginative apprehension differs from simply reading marks as perceptual objects. A few lines and points can first be organized as a fork, with a separate sinuous line. A change of intention can make the same marks appear as a face: the lines become forehead, eyebrow, nose, eye, mouth, and chin. The shift also reorganizes the surrounding white paper. Space on one side is taken as volume, while the other side functions as empty ground; the viewer’s eye movements help constitute the figure, including an absent line that must be supplied between separate marks.

In such schematic images, knowledge directs movements of the eyes and proposes hypothetical directions across the lines. If an image takes shape, the figure appears as a man running, but it remains apprehended as an image that the viewer continues to create. By contrast, forms such as those in the Müller-Lyer illusion can impose motor reactions: eye movements meet closed angles or continue along open ones, and the line segments acquire apparent powers of extension. This remains within perception. The distinction supports the broader argument that an altered apprehension need not be a sensory error: the attitude through which a figure is taken matters.

The account of artworks offers a further contrast between the real material support and the imagined object. A painted portrait of Charles VIII is not identical with its canvas, frame, or layers of paint. The aesthetic object appears when consciousness adopts an imaging attitude; the material canvas serves as an analogon through which that irreal object can be apprehended. Likewise, an actor’s real body can serve as an analogon for Hamlet without making Hamlet a realized person. These examples illuminate the operations of imaging, but they do not make every imaginative act an instance of bad faith. The defining issue in bad faith is the use of an imagined identity or necessity to hide the freedom and responsibility that the broader account associates with human action.