insufficient evidence, we are aware of our “supplementing” that insuffi-
ciency with our prereflective “decision” to believe or at least our supine
unwillingness to disbelieve (a point that Sartre could make but does not).
As he explains: “This original project of bad faith is a decision in
bad faith on the nature of faith. Let us understand clearly that there is
no question of a reflective, voluntary decision, but of a spontaneous
determination of our being. One puts oneself in bad faith as one goes
to sleep and one is in bad faith as one dreams” (BN 68 ). All conscious
acts, recall, are implicitly self-conscious. This distinction between
the prereflective and the reflective is the ontological basis for the phe-
nomenon of faith in general. But in the case of bad faith, Sartre sees a
duality within the prereflective consciousness. The explicit (prereflec-
tive, positional) act of believing is implicitly (nonpositionally) aware that
it is “other” than its act of believing; in other words, “the non-thetic
consciousness (of) believing is destructive of belief ” (BN 69 ). The
“othering” character of consciousness has loosened the grip of belief
on its object. Belief is of its very nature “troubled.” Sartre is claiming
that the agent who asks himself “Do I believe?” has, to that extent,
ceased to do so. In fact, this unstable character runs even deeper. Sartre
seems to think,pacePaul Ricoeur, that even “naive” belief is insecure.
Assumed in this discussion is the “rationalist” thesis that the evident
fulfills a certain drive to which inquiry is related as motion to rest,
as means to end. What we shall label Sartre’s “bifocal” epistemology
of praxis and vision comes to the fore when he exchanges consciousness
inBNfor “praxis” in theCritique.^47 But already inBNwe encounter the
instability of every conscious act – perhaps even that of the “apodictic” –
a point that Sartre is unwilling to concede in his later work. Had he set
aside his epistemology of “vision” (intellectual intuition of intelligible
contours) or modified these intuited “essences” as means–ends continua
in the manner of John Dewey’s pragmatism, he might have subsumed
his Husserlian intellectualism into a pragmatic dialectic. But he never
managed to make such a synthesizing move. Hence the ambiguity or
“bifocality” of his later understanding of knowledge.
Bad faith, in Sartre’s view, seems to be our original position. Even
the project to “be” in good faith or to be sincere are themselves forms of
(^47) See below,Chapter 10.
188 The war years, 1939–1944