Bad Faith and the Other

One of the characteristic features of Sartre's philosophical writing, especially in Being and Nothingness, is his use of extended narrative vignettes that immediately resound with the reader's own experience yet are intended to illustrate, perhaps also to support, complex and controversial theoretical claims about the structures of conscious experience and the shape of the human condition. Among the best known of these are his description of Parisian café waiters, who somehow contrive to caricature themselves, and his analysis of feeling shame upon being caught spying through a keyhole. There is some disagreement among commentators on Sartre's philosophy, however, over precisely what these two examples are intended to convey and over how they relate to one another. The waiter is usually taken to provide an example of bad faith, on grounds that he is taking himself to have a fixed nature that determines his actions, but this reading has recently been challenged. The description of shame is usually understood as an account of the revelation of the existence of another mind and as at the root of the conflictual basis of interpersonal relationships, though commentators are divided over just how this revelation is supposed to work and why it is supposed to lead to conflict. My aim here is to defend and enrich the interpretation of these vignettes and their associated theories that I offer in my book, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. On this reading, the waiter should indeed be understood as he usually has been, but the significance of this discussion of bad faith is much greater than has generally been recognised. For we should read the discussion of shame and interpersonal relations within the framework sketched in the discussion of the waiter and other characters in bad faith. Other people are hell, Sartre thinks, unless we abandon the project of bad faith. We should read Being and Nothingness not as a series of discussions of discrete issues, but rather as progressively elaborating a single view of the ontology of human existence and the ways in which we think and behave as a result of that ontology. The book is a work not only of phenomenological ontology, but also of existential psychoanalysis. It is intended not only to show what we most fundamentally are, but also to provide a cultural critique aimed at exposing the roots of many personal and social problems. Quite how we should understand this aspect …