calls in BN“A knowledge that is ignorance and an ignorance that
knows better.” As we shall examine at length when we discussBNlater
in this chapter, the basis of bad faith or self-deception is a certain duality
or better “nonself coincidence” that distinguished consciousness from
the nonconscious or the in-itself, a term also used in the Diaries
that becomes cardinal inBN. Though the matter is disputed, it seems
that, if inauthenticity and bad faith are distinct in Sartre’s more careful
usage, authenticity and good faith do overlap, in the sense that being
“true to oneself ” is an essential feature of the authentic individual,
provided one takes that Sartrean “self ” as a “self presence” and not
a substantial subject.^15 And while this contributes a cognitive dimen-
sion to authenticity, the relevant knowledge is clearly practical in the
sense that it involves an aspect of the “good” in its very nature. Again,
“to thine own self be true” in the distinctively Sartrean manner to be
elaborated below.
Sartre is beginning to regard the Stoic as trading in bad faith,
specifically as enveloped in what he will call “the spirit of seriousness”
inBNand which we’ve already witnessed in the dogmatic Communist,
Brunet inThe Roads to Freedom. As we have just noted, Sartre attributes
a certain smug self-satisfaction to the Stoic who is assured of the order of
the universe and his place in it. Hence the anguish for the free person is
not experienced by the Stoic. Sartre will later dismiss as “stoic freedom”
the concept of freedom as the definition of man, namely, the attitude
that if the cliff is too steep for climbing, one need simply change one’s
project, say, to photography, and this will no longer be a limitation but
perhaps an advantage. In effect, the Stoic as well as the early Sartre up
to and includingBeing and Nothingnessseems totally innocent of what
Max Weber called “objective possibility” – the enabling or limiting
power of the given state of affairs for the exercise of concrete freedom.
Sartre will famously embrace such possibility in his programmatic
lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” in 1946.^16 It will lead him to
reconsider his relation to Marxism.
(^15) On the various readings of the relation between good/bad faith and authenticity/inauthenticity,
see Ronald E. Santoni,Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy
(Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press, 1995 ), and Joseph S. Catalano,Good Faith and
16 Other Essays: Perspectives on Sartrean Ethics(Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield,^1996 ).
I develop this thesis inSME 72 – 84 et passim.
168 The war years, 1939–1944