Radical Freedom and Bad Faith

Anguish is what you feel when you realize there is no map. Bad faith is what you do when you pretend there is.

A classical theater mask in profile, its features frozen in an expression of anguish or sorrow. The mask illustrates Sartre's concept of bad faith: the attempt to fix a role as if it were an immovable essence rather than a chosen performance.

Five sections. The first is open. This is the conceptually densest page in the unit — take your time with bad faith in particular.

Once you accept that you are radically free — that there is no essence, no design, no external standard telling you what to be — three moods become unavoidable. Sartre calls them anguish, abandonment, and despair. He is not recommending them as good mental states. He is pointing to them as honest responses to the actual human situation. They are what freedom feels like when you do not flinch away from it.

Anguish (angoisse)

Anguish is what you feel when you realize that you are the source of your values — that there is no law outside yourself that you are simply obeying when you make moral choices. Not guilt (guilt is about a specific act), not anxiety about some external threat (that is fear), but the vertiginous realization that you are responsible for the very standards by which your actions are to be judged. Sartre’s example: someone who commands soldiers in battle. They order the assault knowing people will die, knowing they may be wrong, knowing that whatever moral framework justifies the order is one they have — in some sense — chosen. Anguish is not weakness; it is honest recognition of the weight of freedom.

Abandonment (délaissement)

Abandonment is what follows from the non-existence of God — not just the lack of a divine creator, but the lack of any objective moral law, any cosmic guarantee that good will be rewarded, any foundation for the claim that this value is objectively more important than that one. You are abandoned in the sense of being thrown into the world without instructions. Sartre is not, he insists, recommending despair about this. He is naming it: if there is no God, then there is no transcendent moral order. That is a fact, not a lament. The only question is what you do with it.

Despair (désespoir)

Despair means acting without counting on what you cannot control. It is not hopelessness. It is the recognition that the outcomes of your choices depend on factors beyond your will — on other people, on luck, on circumstances. Sartre’s counsel is to act fully and commit fully to your choices while not resting the value of those choices on their results. Whether the resistance fighter succeeds does not determine whether the decision to resist was right. Act, and do not place your hope in anything outside yourself.

Anguish, abandonment, and despair are what you feel when you face freedom honestly. Most people, most of the time, do not do this. They flee from it. Sartre calls the attempt to escape from freedom bad faith (mauvaise foi).

Bad faith is not lying to someone else. It is a particular kind of self-deception — but not ordinary self-deception either. In ordinary self-deception, you believe something you ought to know is false. In bad faith, you simultaneously know and deny your freedom. You know you are free — consciousness cannot entirely hide this from itself — but you act and think as though you are not.

Two famous examples from Being and Nothingness illustrate the two main forms:

The Waiter

Sartre describes a waiter in a Paris café who moves with exaggerated precision — his gestures are slightly too crisp, his attentiveness slightly too eager. He is performing “waiter” in a way that suggests he is a waiter in the way a rock is a rock. He is trying to be his role completely, to be nothing but his function. This is bad faith by denial of transcendence: he is pretending to have a fixed, thing-like nature (a waiter-essence) rather than acknowledging that he has chosen this role and could, in principle, choose otherwise.

The waiter is not a bad person. He is doing something we all do: finding comfort in a role, in an identity, in the idea that “this is just who I am.”

The Young Woman on a Date

A young woman is on a first date. Her companion takes her hand. She knows she will eventually need to decide how she feels about him — whether to encourage or discourage. But she does not want to decide yet. So she leaves her hand in his and treats it as if it were a thing — as if it were not attached to her, not requiring a response. She “is not there,” in a sense — she is pretending the situation is not requiring a choice. This is bad faith by denial of facticity: rather than denying her freedom (as the waiter does), she denies the reality of her situation, treating her own hand as an object rather than an extension of herself.

Both examples involve the same fundamental move: a failure to acknowledge the full structure of one’s being — both the facticity (your situation, your history, your role) and the transcendence (your freedom to take a stance on all of that). Bad faith collapses one side onto the other: either “I am nothing but my situation” (waiter) or “I can float above my situation without committing” (young woman).

Logic Concept — Bad Faith  |  Logic Reference →

Bad faith is a self-directed form of deception that operates by selectively attending to evidence. Its structure: (1) the agent knows, at some level, that they are free; (2) they attend only to evidence that supports a deterministic self-description; (3) they treat the incomplete picture as if it were complete. Unlike lying (which requires the liar to know the truth), bad faith involves simultaneous belief and denial — the person both knows and disavows their freedom.

Note: This is related to but distinct from Marx’s false consciousness (Unit 5). False consciousness is structurally imposed by material conditions — you believe what your class interests require you to believe without necessarily choosing to. Bad faith, for Sartre, is something you do to yourself — a choice you are making, even as you pretend you are not making it.

What makes bad faith philosophically puzzling is that it seems impossible. How can you deceive yourself? To deceive someone, you need to know the truth (otherwise you are just mistaken, not deceptive). But if the deceiver and the deceived are the same person, how can the deceiver both know the truth and not know it?

Sartre’s answer draws on the structure of consciousness he established earlier. Because consciousness is a for-itself — never simply identical with itself, always at a distance from itself — there is a genuine gap between the “self that knows” and the “self that is known about.” Bad faith exploits this gap. The non-coincidence of the self with itself is not a bug in Sartre’s theory; it is the condition that makes bad faith possible.

Sartre is not saying that bad faith is unique or unusual — he thinks it is the normal condition of most people most of the time. We are constantly tempted by the comfort of having a fixed identity, a determinate role, an excuse. The concept of bad faith is not a diagnostic tool for identifying unusual pathologies. It is a description of the ordinary way human beings flee from the vertigo of freedom.

If bad faith is the flight from freedom, then authenticity is the honest acknowledgment of it. But Sartre is careful here. He does not say that authenticity is a permanent, stable achievement. You do not “become authentic” and then stay there. Because consciousness is always in motion — always projecting, always choosing — authenticity is a mode of existing, not a state you arrive at.

Authentic existence does not mean you are free from facticity — from your situation, your past, your body, your social role. It means you take up your facticity honestly, owning the choices you are making about it rather than pretending those choices are imposed on you. The waiter can be a waiter authentically: he is free to perform this role, he knows he is performing it, and he has chosen to continue doing so. The difference is not in what he does but in his relationship to his own choosing.

This is why authenticity is not, for Sartre, a matter of doing dramatic things or refusing all social roles. It is a matter of honesty — with yourself, about yourself, about the freedom you are exercising even when you pretend you are not. The most ordinary, conventional life can be lived authentically. The most apparently dramatic life can be lived in bad faith.

The middle section of Existentialism Is a Humanism introduces anguish, abandonment, and despair, and takes up the objections that existentialism is “quietist” (it leads to passivity) and “pessimistic” (it wallows in human wretchedness). As you read:

Track Sartre’s responses to the critics. He takes three objections seriously: that existentialism is a counsel of despair; that it denies the possibility of objective moral judgment; and that it makes serious ethical guidance impossible (“what do you do when you need advice?”). Notice that he does not fully rebut these objections — in some respects he partially accepts them.

The Dostoevsky line. Sartre quotes (roughly) “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” He accepts the first part — God does not exist — but rejects the implication that everything is permitted. Why? What does he think follows from the non-existence of God that is not permissiveness?

The advice-seeking problem. A student comes to Sartre and asks what to do (join the Free French or stay with his mother). Sartre says he told the student: “You are free; choose.” Is that a satisfying answer? Is it an evasion? What is Sartre’s point about the limits of general moral principles?

Bad faith in the text. The lecture does not use the term “bad faith” extensively — that concept is developed more fully in Being and Nothingness. But the idea is present. Notice where Sartre describes people who deny their freedom, and what he thinks is wrong with them.