Sartre's Existentialism Is a Humanism › Bad Faith and Authenticity

If we are radically free, why do so many people live as if they were not? Sartre's answer is _mauvaise foi_, bad faith. ::: {.callout-warning title="Bad Faith"} The attempt to flee from freedom by pretending that our choices are determined by external forces (nature, society, psychology, circumstances) rather than by our own free decisions. Bad faith is self-deception about our fundamental condition. ::: Bad faith takes many forms. The waiter who performs his role so perfectly that he seems to have no existence beyond it, as if being a waiter were his fixed nature rather than a role he has chosen. The woman on a date who pretends not to notice her companion's advances, treating her hand as an inert object when he takes it, as if she had no responsibility for what happens next. The person who says "I can't help my temper" or "That's just who I am," treating their character as a given fact rather than an ongoing creation. Bad faith goes beyond lying to others. It is lying to oneself. Sartre suggests this is the default mode of human existence. We flee from the anguish of freedom into the comfort of imagined necessity. We pretend that we had to do what we did, that we had no choice, that circumstances forced our hand. The alternative is authenticity: the clear-eyed acceptance of our freedom and the responsibility that comes with it. Authentic existence does not require rejecting rules or social roles. It means inhabiting those rules and roles with full awareness that we have chosen them and could choose otherwise. The authentic waiter serves with commitment and skill while remembering that the role does not exhaust who he is. He is a free being who has chosen this work and could choose to leave it.