TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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bad faith, Sartre, and more... I had some great ideas to write here when I was in the shower, now it's past two in the morning and I've already written a lot and I think it might not happen. - Uh, let's have a bash at this anyway. Ok, I'm reading "Being and Nothingness" by Sartre, and I'm going to assume most of you haven't read it, so I'll give you a bit of a summary of the chapter I'm reading at the moment, which is called "Bad Faith". - Um. Ok, so the deal is that people deceive themselves about things, and Sartre makes the point that the fact this is possible violates our conventional notions about our "unity" as people. He points out that in order to deceive ourselves we have to know what it is that we are deceiving ourselves about, in order to be able to carry out the deception. But then, if we know what we are deceiving ourselves about, it ought to be impossible to be deceived about it. If you think that's a convoluted explanation, you should read the way he expresses the idea. - Ok, so to give an example of bad faith: procrastination. You know you have work to do, but you don't want to know about it, so you find something to distract you from the fact that you have work to do. And you do find something, say the TV, and it does allow you to distract yourself from the thought of the work. And yet, at the same time, you would be aware of the work if you allowed yourself to be. The deception only works because you collaborate in it, because you elect to be deceived. - I'm not sure that example works for you, so I'll give you Sartre's example, although I warn you, it's a bit sexist. Ok, so a man asks a woman out to dinner. Sartre says, basically the man is asking the woman to have sex with him. But if he asked her straight out to have sex with him, she'd be horrified and refuse. Essentially what the woman wants out of the arrangement is to enjoy the man's attention, to feel desired and desirable, but at the same time to retain her own image of herself as a good, proper, decent and therefore non-sexual person. If he were to be merely polite and respectful to her, in other words, then she wouldn't enjoy the dinner at all; what she wants is for him to be polite and respectful, but as a way of concealing sexual desire for her. She wants to be desired but only in an attenuated way, only by subterfuge. Blah, I could go into more detail (Sartre certainly does) but you get the picture. - Ok, so the attitude described in both of these examples is what Sartre describes as "bad faith". So, while I was reading this, two ideas came to me. One is that, the main effect that guilty produces on people is not virtuous behaviour but bad faith. For example, guilt feelings about sex don't eliminate sexual desire, they just mean that one acts out that desire through bad faith. Guilt about laziness doesn't make you work harder, it just makes you act out that laziness through bad faith, and so on. Hence, guilt is useless. Really, utterly useless. - Except of course, it isn't! Because our society is more or less run on a machinery of bad faith. Our civilization depends upon it to function in the way that it does. Which brings me to my second point. - Successful relations with others often rely on mutual complementarity of bad faith. Take Sartre's example of the coquette, the woman who wants to be both desirable and proper. How must the man be psychologically disposed in order to fulfil his part of the bargain? Yes, he too must act in bad faith. He must feel sexually attracted to her, but hide from himself this sexual element to his attraction, and regard his invitation to dinner as nothing more than a friendly gesture. If he acts without any bad faith at all, the coquette will be shocked at his brazenly sexual advances; if his guilt is so powerful that all traces of sexuality in his manner are eradicated, then he will appear to her as merely polite, and so the hidden part of her agenda will go unfulfilled. - Now, the thing is, as a child I think either my intelligence or my hostility toward my mother made me an expert in detecting the bad faith in others. And so, applying this to myself, I had to become an expert in concealing my own bad faith from myself. You see? So, where for example I could see the bad faith in my mother's apologies to my after a violent incident, wherein she would explain to me why the incident was actually my fault and responsibility. This isn't an apology, I'd think, although in its initial form it appears as though it were one. She has come to me with the explicit purpose of saying she's sorry, she's telling herself that she's doing the right thing, but she's also telling herself and me that she never did anything wrong for which she would need to apologise. Actually, this is an excellent example of bad faith, the apology. An apology made in good faith is a rare, rare event; most apologies are either reflex reactions or careful rationalizations, but in either case the hidden purpose is typically to disengage oneself from a slimy, unpleasant other. To disengage from one's own bad feelings. Anyway. Where was I? Right, being good at discovering bad faith in others made me good at discerning my own bad faith, which in turn meant that I had to work very hard at lying to myself, deceiving myself, concealing my own motives from myself. For example, when I had various crushes on girls in school, even up to my late teens, I never admitted to myself that there was any sexual element in these attractions. My love was a pure and platonic thing, but all the stronger for being so pure! Of course at the same time I "knew" that there was a sexual element to these things, which meant that I was constantly trying to prove to myself that there was no such element, which meant ever more carefully constructed defences against the truth, ever more elaborate justifications... - ...and, see, basically the pattern has continued into my adult life. This is the scary thing. I still try to beat the system, still try to be "good", still try to placate the guilt-gods by means of elaborate concealment strategies... I think it makes me very hard to reach. And yet... of course this stuff doesn't apply all the time. And I connect with others whose bad faith is buried at about the same "depth" as mine, if that makes sense. - Bah, now I've gone on so long and I can't remember what made me think this was all going to be so interesting. I hope it's given you some food for thought, anyway. - "There was a fool in a dressing robe Trying to assess his power" - Pete Townshend |
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