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 recognized. 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 of his work more than half a century later and from within a different linguistic community is a matter for careful consideration, since the question of the acuity of Sartre’s cultural critique at the time is matched with the question of the significance of the cultural distance between Sartre and ourselves (see Leak, this volume). Although we will not address this question here, we will see that readers of Being and Nothingness are apt to misunderstand the book if they overlook this cultural dimension of it. Defending this view of the relation between bad faith and interpersonal

relations, however, does require us to consider a different methodological concern rooted in the cultural aspect of Sartre’s work. Critics have argued that some of the central stories that Sartre presents are distorted by prejudice. Sartre has been accused of being unfair to waiters, for example, and indeed of showing through this vignette a condescending and demeaning attitude towards working people in general (Phillips 1981). Critics have denounced a similar vignette of his, in which a woman on a date wants simultaneously to enjoy her companion’s advances while overlooking his intentions, as patriarchal fantasy (Moi 1994: 127-33; Doeuff 1991: 72-3). Reviewing a recent production of Sartre’s play Kean, an influential theatre critic declared that ‘there is nothing remotely original in Sartre’s ideas’, on grounds that the play merely propounds ‘the discredited myth of the actor as an echoingly empty vessel’ (Billington 2007).1 These criticisms are clearly misplaced: Sartre argues that people in general, not just particular groups of them, are guilty of the bad faith that these characters represent in their different ways. But these criticisms do raise a deeper question: just why does Sartre think he can surmise someone’s motivations on the basis of brief observations of their behaviour across the café floor? According to his own phenomenology, the world as they experience and respond to it is not immediately accessible to anyone but themselves. According to his own theory of existential psychoanalysis, these motivations are accessible to others only through careful analysis of the whole range of their behaviour. We will see that Sartre’s use of these examples is compatible with his

overall philosophical theory after all. He does not consider the overt behaviour of these characters to show that they are in bad faith, but rather considers it to be equally compatible with the recognition and affirmation of our lack of any fixed nature. Appreciating this point will help us to see where recent commentators have gone wrong in denying that the waiter is intended as an illustration of bad faith, but also to see what is right about their reasoning. Moreover, it will help us to see that Sartre’s famously gloomy discussion of interpersonal relations cannot be arguing for the pessimistic view that human interaction is necessarily conflictual, but is rather intended to show that such frustrating and alienating relationships are all

that is available within the project of bad faith, a theory that Sartre sketches in his account of the waiter and other characters in bad faith but only fully elaborates in the discussion of shame and the subsequent discussion of sexuality much later in the book. One challenge to this reading of Being and Nothingness is presented by

Matthew Eshleman’s recent claim that the discussion of various characters in bad faith – the most detailed of which is the depiction of the waiter – would be much better placed towards the end of the book. To understand that chapter correctly, he argues, we need to read it in the light of the discussion of shame and interpersonal relations, since the theory of bad faith is dependent upon the outcome of that later discussion. Sartre would therefore have followed his method of progressive exposition more closely, on this reading, if he had established the theory of the look before introducing bad faith and the example of the waiter (see Eshleman 2008a, 2008b). In terms of our two vignettes, Eshleman’s claim is that the earlier presupposes the later. This seems to challenge my view that the later should be understood within the framework sketched by the earlier, unless we are to accept both points and reject Sartre’s existentialism as fundamentally circular. Once we clarify the sense in which each vignette is dependent on the

other, however, we will see that there is no circularity here at all. For we will see that the aspect of shame that is born of bad faith is distinct from the aspects of shame on which that bad faith relies. Sartre would have made his position clearer, of course, had he discussed the two aspects of shame separately, but his running them together is no mere accident of exposition. It results from the overall structure of Being and Nothingness. Eshleman is right to draw attention to the way in which Sartre’s phenomenological ontology progresses from the highly abstract to the fully concrete, and to point out that we are apt to misunderstand it unless we allow for the development of the central phenomenological and ontological concepts through this progression (2008a: 18, 2008b: 44-5; see also this volume, p. 43). But we should also be aware of the further complication that this is accompanied throughout by a critical account of the ways in which this ontology is manifested in modern life. Borrowing terminology from Martin Heidegger, we can say that Sartre’s discussion weaves a concern with the ontic facts of our current existence into his investigation of the ontological structures of our kind of existence (see Heidegger 1962: §§3-4). To put it another way, Being and Nothingness is as much in dialogue with

Sigmund Freud as it is with Edmund Husserl. The discussion of various characters in bad faith provides an excellent illustration of this. Sartre introduces these vignettes by saying that they will help to ‘fix more exactly the conditions for the possibility of bad faith’ (B&N: 78). This has led some commentators to argue that these vignettes are solely, or at least

primarily, aimed at uncovering the ontological structures of the kind of existence we have. Rather than trying to present a complete picture and analysis of a pervasive psychological phenomenon, on this reading, Sartre is pursuing the much more limited aim of showing that certain actual behaviour patterns reveal something peculiar and fundamental about our existence, namely that we are what we are not and are not what we are (e.g. Eshleman 2008a: 16-18). Other commentators, however, point out that Sartre’s concern with the detail of bad faith pervades his philosophical and other writings throughout his career, which implies that detailing it is not a secondary or subsidiary issue in these vignettes but is part of a wider concern with bad faith itself (e.g. Santoni 2008: 36). This latter point seems right and should be made more broadly: Sartre’s concern with existential psychoanalysis is closely bound up with his phenomenological ontology, but is not merely a means to it; his concern with ontology, after all, seems at least partly aimed at getting psychoanalysis right. It is no accident, therefore, that the two concerns are often woven together in a single discussion. Bearing this in mind, we will see that Sartre describes two aspects of

shame. One is the revelation of the existence of what Sartre calls ‘the Other’. This is part of his phenomenological ontology: the claim that the structure of the experience essentially involves the Other is both phenomenological, since it is about the structure of experience, and ontological, since this experience reveals part of the structure of our existence. The second aspect is the ascription to another person of a particular kind of attitude towards me, one of seeing me as having some fixed characteristics that explain my current behaviour, even though I cannot know exactly which characteristics that person sees me as having. This aspect presupposes the first, since without the revelation of the Other there could be no question of ascribing anything to any other person. But this second aspect is neither an essential structure of feeling shame nor constitutive of my existence. It is merely the way in which our experience of the Other is played out within the project of bad faith. Understanding the behaviour of the waiter in the light of this distinction

is rather complicated. The issue is best approached through consideration of the recent claims that the waiter is not intended as an illustration of bad faith at all. For these readings emphasize the role of the waiter’s clientele in the story. Customers demand that the waiter behaves in a certain way, writes Sartre, ‘as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition’ (B&N: 83). Two commentators have recently argued that the waiter Sartre describes in the chapter on bad faith does not take himself to have a fixed waiterly nature that determines his actions, but is rather acceding to the demands of the clientele in a superficial and ironic way in order to deny that he has such a nature. ‘The waiter succeeds in rejecting the attempt to reduce him

to nothing more than being a waiter’, according to Robert Bernasconi, ‘not by refusing the role, but by highlighting the fact that he is playing it to the point that he escapes it’ (2006: 38). There are two ways in which the waiter could be behaving as Bernasconi

describes. He could be rejecting the attempt to identify him with being a waiter because he wants to identify himself with some other fixed nature, such as that of a writer or a musician, and emphasize that he is only working as a waiter to make ends meet. In this case, he would still be an example of bad faith, since he would still be taking himself to have some fixed nature. Alternatively, he could be rejecting the very idea of a fixed nature underlying his actions. Gary Cox interprets the passage in this second way: the waiter is intended to illustrate the correct attitude of authentic recognition and affirmation of one’s true condition, he argues, since the exaggerated display is at once a rejection of the idea that he has a fixed nature and an emphatic identification with the social position that he does in fact occupy (Cox 2006: 101-4, 137).2