the second, ontological condition of its possibility. Perhaps the best
known of these cameos is that of the waiter in the cafe ́:
His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes
toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly;
his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the
customer. Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible
stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness
of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken
equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm
and hand.
(BN 59 )
Sartre remarks that this seems like a game. But what is he playing? He is
playing atbeinga waiter in a cafe ́the way a stone is a stone or the in-itself
is an inert plenum. But to seek such a “conscious identity” is impossible.
This is the most common form of bad faith.
If the prereflective–reflective dualism is the basis for self-deception
“within” consciousness itself, Sartre introduces an analysis of being-in-
situation in terms of facticity and transcendence, the “given” and
the “taken,” one might say, in order to ground the second type of bad
faith in our radical denial of our ontological make-up. Human reality
is in-situation and “situation” is an ambiguous phenomenon – one
cannot determine in advance the proportions of the “factical” and the
“transcendence” in each situation. Since the truth of our ontological
make-up is that we are both transcendence and facticity in an indeter-
minate mixture, the lie about our true condition consists in denying one
or the other of these two essential components: we either collapse our
freedom (our transcendence) into our facticity by saying “that’s just
the way I am” – in other words denying our freedom and responsibility –
again, the most common form of bad faith – or we “volatilize” our
facticity into pure transcendence (possibility) by convincing ourselves
that we can accomplish anything we wish (as if life were a dream with no
grounding in the facts of our situation). Because the waiter plays at being
a waiter as if his other possibilities (his freedom) were not ingredient
in that project, as if he had “no other choice,” he is living in bad faith.
He is denying the anguish that his freedom entails because of the
possibilities it harbors.
Sartre returns to the source of self-deception in the prereflective–
reflective dichotomy when he summarizes the phenomenon: “the condition
186 The war years, 1939–1944