choices from pre-given selections since it was fully autonomous and
creative – in effectsui generis. “One does not undergo bad faith; one is
not infected with it; it is not a state. But consciousness affects itself
with bad faith. There must be an original intention and a project of bad
faith” (BN 49 ).
The result of this initial “duality” is not only that it enables us to both
“not know” reflectively and “know,” that is, comprehend prereflectively,
at the same time. As Sartre remarks, bad faith is the kind of knowledge
that does not know and ignorance that “knows better.” It follows that the
unblinking eye of Sartrean consciousness, its total translucency, leaves
us fully responsible for this self-deception. This is its moral significance.
But such prereflective “responsibility” is more a function of who we
are, our fundamental “Choice,” rather than a result of our reflective
decisions from a set of options previously given to us. Like the “choice”
of the ethical that Kierkegaard’s Judge William offers the aesthete in
Either/Or, it is more a criterion-constituting“Choice” than a selective
choice according to the resultant criteria. As the Judge says to the young
aesthete, first one must choose good and evil, that is, one must decide
to play the moral game, and only then can one choose between good and
evil.^44 Sartre even employs the Kierkegaardian expression “conversion” to
denote such a fundamental “leap.” Such basic revisions of life orientation,
though rare, are possible and their possibility haunts our existence by the
“anguish” they entail.
Though Sartre’s embrace of the “hydraulic” model of the Freudian
mind, viz., id, ego and superego, as well as the libidinal pressure that
drives it, has been subject to much criticism from psychoanalytic quar-
ters, his basic claim inBNis that the mechanism of Freudian control of
the unconscious forces, namely the famous “censor,” is itself in bad faith:
it both knows and does not know what is permissible in our conscious
life. As he phrases it, psychoanalysis substitutes for the notion of bad
faith, the “idea of a lie without a liar” (BN 51 ). Similarly, other Freudian
phenomena such as “resistance” exemplify the presence of bad faith.
True to his phenomenological convictions, reminiscent of the findings
ofThe Imaginaryand with the novelists’s eye for the dramatic, Sartre
proceeds to offer several “case studies” of bad faith as he searches for
(^44) Kierkegaard,Either/Or, 479.
Being and Nothingness 185