of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate
being,in the intrastructure of the prereflective cogito, must be what it is not and
not be what it is” (BN 67 , emphasis added). This nonself-coincidence
of the for-itself is expressed or better “made concrete” in our situated being.
We are what we are by virtue of consciously “othering” the givens of our
situation, but that does not make them any less “given.”
“The ‘Faith’ of Bad Faith”Sartre’s analysis of the “faith” of bad faith betrays his Husserlian
conception of “evidence” as the thing in its self-givenness to our imme-
diate conscious grasp. Apodictic evidence such as that of theCogito,
though rare, literally “forces” our assent. It faces us with the “indubit-
able” such that its denial would violate a basic logical or metaphysical
principle. We simply “see” that it is the case and that it must be so.^45
Sufficient evidence, on the other hand, one could say “urges” our assent.
To deny it would not be irrational but clearly unreasonable. This is what
Sartre seems to be arguing when he distinguishes the “certain” from the
“probable” in his phenomenological account of imaging consciousness in
The Imaginary.^46 That said, anything relying on less than such evidence
is belief, which he describes as “adherence of being to its object when
the object is not given or is given indistinctly” (BN 67 ). But the faith of
bad faith is our satisfaction with insufficient evidence when sufficient
evidence is available – which is a violation of what is commonly called
the “ethics of belief.”
Though Sartre does not elaborate a theory of evidence in any detail,
his account of the “faith” of bad faith makes implicit appeal to such a
Husserlian-Cartesian theory as employed inThe Imaginary. Because
of the dynamic character of consciousness as nonself-identical, the
“metastable” character of faith of any kind is obvious. We have just
noted that this instability infects the prereflectivecogitoas well. One
could always choose to act or think unreasonably or even irrationally –
resisting even the force of the “apodictic.” As with the implicit aware-
ness of our freedom in sustaining the act of imaginative “irrealization”
noted inChapter 5 , so in the act of believing, especially in the face of
(^45) SeeBN 84. (^46) See above,Chapter 5.
Being and Nothingness 187