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Being and Nothingness
makerowner
Assistant Professor

Usergroup: Members
Joined: Apr 15, 2008

Total Topics: 11
Total Posts: 326
Posted 08/27/09 - 11:42 AM:
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#11
btracz wrote:
A better understanding is gained by knowing how "facticity," that is, the simply reality of things-in-themselves, relates to bad faith. Sartre's metaphysics has dualist underpinnings in the sense that the subject (the will) is absolutely and unconditionally free in a way that contrasts from objects (things-in-themselves).


A terminological point: Sartre's en-soi (in-itself) is not the same as Kant's 'thing-in-itself'. Sartre's term comes from Hegel, though he uses it differently; it refers to the "abstract being" that's left over when all of the determining negations produced by consciousness are removed. 'Facticity' is not limited to the en-soi (I'm not even sure that Sartre applies it to the en-soi at all); it's connected with Heidegger's "throwness" (Geworfenheit) in Being and Time, that is, the human experience of not having chosen one's existence and having to somehow account for it. Another troublesome point is that Sartre doesn't (as far as I remember) ever use the term 'will' in relation to 'freedom'. This might seem like nitpicking, but I think it's important because Sartre's concept of 'freedom' is radically different from the traditional concept of 'free will': it has no essential connection to political liberty (I'm just as free in prison as in "free" life; more so even, because my comfortable 'bad faith' is disturbed); it has no basis in reasons for choosing one action over another, since whether I accept or disregard any reasons is just as much a matter of freedom as whether to act on them.

Bad faith for Sartre is acting against your own set values (this actually compares to Kant's moral philosophy in the sense that both marvel at the subject's ability to make laws by itself, for itself). Thus, the whole murder scenario, Sartre would say, would depend on your own convictions. Killing somebody (see Camus' The Stranger) might be bad or might not be bad depending on the mental attitude of the subject towards the object (recall also that in Being in Nothingness that "the other" is distinctly an object as described in the section entitled "Concrete Relations with Others"). Thus, killing might be moral for you at a given time, but not moral for me at another time.


Bad faith isn't directly related to set values; it has its basis in the reflective-reflecting character of consciousness. For me to be a busboy I have to "play" a busboy, I have to continually re-enact my identity. By getting angry in a traffic jam, I'm enacting a role as "someone who gets angry". Bad faith is simply the realization of this structure: a busboy, or an angry person, is not something I am the way that a pen is a pen, but something I have to continually choose to be, while at the same time pretending to myself not to be choosing it. Moral choices are related to bad faith, but so is everything else.

I don't recall a lot of the details, but the other is not just an object in Sartre; it's the presence of the other that makes him bring in a whole new category of being, être-pour-autrui, which is revealed to me through my experience of shame, of being watched by the other.

For philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life. Even if a man has good parts, still, if he carries philosophy into later life, he is necessarily ignorant of all those things which a gentleman and a person of honour ought to know.
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