self-deception. He calls bad faith “an immediate, permanent threat to
every project of the human being...because consciousness conceals in
its being a permanent risk of bad faith.” The origin of this risk is the fact
that “the nature of consciousness simultaneously is to be what it is not
and not to be what it is” (BN 70 ). Now this looks like an ontological, not an
empirical claim. Its import seems to be that this is an “essential” property
of consciousness (or at least of human reality) on a par with intentionality
itself.^48 But lodged in a footnote that concludes the chapter on bad faith
and partiof the volume, we find the following promissory note:
If it is indifferent whether one is in good or bad faith, because bad faith reapprehends
good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith, that does not
mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of
being which was previously corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity
the description of which has no place here.
(BN 79 ,n. 9 )
“Part II: Being-for-Itself ”In light of the foregoing, Sartre undertakes an ontological study of
consciousness in the “instantaneous nucleus” of its being as “to be what it
is not and not to be what it is.” He parses this insight under three
headings: “Immediate structures of the for-itself,” “Temporality,” and
“Transcendence.” Though these features must be considered in order
and will be spread over this chapter and the next, they denote and articulate
that “duality-in-unity” that is the “spontaneous nucleus” of consciousness
as being-for-itself, which is the “ontological foundation of consciousness.^49
“Presence to Self ”InTranscendence of the EgoSartre discussed the ego and the me as
subject and object respectively of our reflective consciousness. But the
“self ” of self-consciousness was left indeterminate. Now he addresses
(^48) In his 1961 eulogy in honor of his deceased friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sartre con-
trasted his own “eidetic of bad faith” in 1942 with Merleau’s optimism regarding the
49 victorious outcome of the war (Sitiv:^196 n.).
BN 77. “Duality-in-unity” is Gardner’s felicitous phrase (Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,
97 ). Sartre speaks of “a duality whichisunity” in this context (BN 76 ).
Being and Nothingness 189