that Sartre was “the author of wonderful philosophical novels such
asBeing and Nothingnessand theCritique of Dialectical Reason.”^41
“Bad Faith”Doubtless the most famous section of this work and arguably what
one might call Sartre’s “signature concept” is the notion of bad faith.
It has been widely discussed and, one might venture, even more widely
exhibited. Heidegger is correct to point out its function as a “moral”
disvalue. It is a form of self-deception and thus a (kind of) lie. But
the kind of lie and the form of deception is peculiarly Sartrean, for
it presumes that the “dualism” or better “self-distance” required to
effect bad faith appears within the unity of a single consciousness.
In other words, one need not appeal to a conscious/unconscious subject
to account for this all-too-common phenomenon. Our “inner distance”
will suffice, at least for its basic forms. The self–other relationship will
sustain the other form of bad faith, but that stage of our exposition has
yet to be reached.
There are two sources of the duality required for bad faith. The first
is “within” consciousness itself. The “within” is taken in an accommo-
dated sense since we know that consciousness has no “inside”; its nature
as intentional directs it entirely “into” the world and its objects. This is
the “duality,” also in an accommodated sense, of the prereflective and
the reflective^42 that enables us to understand (prereflectively) more than
we know (reflectively), as we saw in the case of Sartre’s Flaubert. But
Sartre’s prereflective consciousness is dynamic and directional. It is the
expression of a fundamental and prereflective “Choice,” as we shall see.
Analogous to what psychologists call “selective” perception and what
one ethicist designates “decisions of principle” that are themselves
unprincipled,^43 the prereflective is the locus of life-determining
“Choice” and radical “conversion.” Though Sartre was rather ambigu-
ous on the nature of such “Choice” except to imply that it is unlike the
(^41) Louis Althusser,The Future Lasts a Long Time, ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier
42 Boutang, trans. Richard Veasey (London: Chatto & Windus,^1993 ),^176.
One might liken these two “dimensions” to aspects of a “nonsubstantial absolute,” as Sartre
43 occasionally characterizes consciousness.
See R. M. Hare,The Language of Morals(Oxford University Press, 1964 ), “Decisions of
Principle.”
184 The war years, 1939–1944