ABSTRACT
Although our characters consist in projects that we freely pursue and can revise, according to Sartre, we generally prefer to consider them to be fi xed natures over which we have no control. We would rather not acknowledge our responsibility for the way we are, the way things seem to us, and the way we respond to them. This is the basic aim of bad faith, as we saw in the last chapter, and it is not an honest mistake. Sartre frequently describes it as a project and, as we will see, this project is not merely a cognitive exercise but involves the way we relate to the world around us. The behaviour of the café waiter provides a good example: his gestures are not just those we would expect from someone with fi xed waiterly characteristics, they do not merely manifest a belief that the waiter has about himself, but are exaggerations that together present a caricature of such a person, conscientiously enacted to persuade himself and his customers that he is nothing but a waiter. Since bad faith is the project of hiding our freedom from ourselves, the very idea of it raises the diffi cult and intricate question of how it is even possible for people to hide things from themselves.
