Sartre opens the detailed account of bad faith he gives in Being and Nothingness with the example of a flirtatious but naïve young woman
and the guy who is trying to bed her. He, you get the feeling, is older than her, more experienced, maybe even a bit of a lounge lizard. The flirt takes the guy’s various compliments and seemingly polite attentions at face value ignoring their sexual background. Finally, the guy takes hold of the young woman’s hand, creating a situation that demands from her a decisive response, but she chooses to flirt, neither taking her hand away or acknowledging the implications of holding hands. She treats her hand as though it is not a part of herself, as though it is an object for which she is not responsible, and she treats her act of omission of leaving her hand in the hand of the man as though it is not an action.
The young woman knows her hand is held and what this implies but somehow she evades this knowledge, or rather she is the ongoing project of seeking to evade it and distract herself from it. She distracts herself from the meaning of her situation and the disposition of her limbs by fleeing herself towards the future. Each moment she aims to become a person beyond her situated self, a person who is not defined by her current situation. She aims to become a being that is what it is, an object like a table or a rock, yet one that is still conscious. Such a being would not be subject to the demands of the situation, it would not be responsible. It would not be obliged to choose and to act.
She aspires to abandon her hand, her whole body, to the past, hop- ing to leave it all behind her. Yet, in the very act of trying to abandon her body she recognizes that the situation of her body is like a demand to choose. To take the man’s hand willingly or to withdraw, that is the choice that faces her. But she fails to meet this demand by instead choosing herself as a being that would-be beyond the requirement to choose. It is this negative choice that exercises and distracts her and stands in for the positive choice she knows her situation demands. She avoids making this positive choice by striving to choose herself as a person who has transcended her responsibility for her embodied, situ- ated self. She strives to choose herself as a being that has escaped its facticity, escaped the complications and demands of its situation.
As we have seen, every human being is both an object and a subject, a facticity and a transcendence, or to be more precise, the transcendence
of his or her facticity. There are various related forms of bad faith as revealed by the various concrete examples Sartre provides and all of them manipulate in some way the facticity-transcendence ‘double property of the human being’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 79). In essence, bad faith is the project of seeking to invert and/or separate facticity and transcend- ence. The flirt treats the facticity of her situation, in terms of which her choices of herself should be exercised, as though it has a transcendent power over her body. That is, she treats her facticity as though it is a transcendence. At the same time, she treats her transcendent conscious- ness as though it is its own transcendence; as though it is a transcend- ence-in-itself rather than the transcendence of the facticity of her situation. That is, she treats her transcendence as though it is a facticity.
It is strongly suggested in the example itself how the flirt ought to behave to avoid being in bad faith. If she had the intention of becom- ing a true existentialist, the intention of striving to be authentic, she would choose either to push the man’s hand away and tell him to get lost, or hold his hand and take responsibility for encouraging him. Inter- estingly, to cease being in bad faith her outward behaviour, her bodily movement or lack of movement, need not be any different. Her atti- tude, however, what she confronts mentally and what she evades, makes all the difference between having her hand held and holding hands. To try to ignore that her hand is held and what this implies is weak minded and irresponsible. It is choosing not to choose. It is nega- tive choice, though a choice all the same. To decide to consent to hold hands and to recognize that this will encourage further tentative advances by the man, is strong minded and responsible. It is, so to speak, choosing to choose. It is positive choice.
Being a true existentialist, practising authentic behaviour, can be as simple as this. As simple as the difference between having your hand held and holding hands. The difficulty with being a true existentialist, however, as I’ve already said, is keeping it up. The difficulty is producing responsible responses all the time across the widest possible range of circumstances, some of them far more difficult to handle with guts and without excuses than little moves in the mating game.
Of course, it may have already occurred to you that a flirt who con- sents to hold hands or takes her hand away is by definition not a flirt. However, we can imagine a woman, or a man, who knowingly holds hands, knowingly encourages the Other, but also knows that they have no intention of ever going further with the Other than holding hands. This person seems to be a different kind of flirt, a knowing flirt, a tease. A flirt who leads the Other up a very short garden path with only a wall at the end and definitely no gate into a dark and interesting alley; a flirt who knows her actions are a false sign, as opposed to a flirt like Sartre’s flirt who evades thinking about what her actions imply.
Is the knowing flirt – the tease – less in bad faith than the evasive flirt? Arguably, she is not, because she is deliberately misleading the Other. She is not planning to use him in a sexual sense, but she is nonetheless using him in some game of her own. Perhaps she wants to get her revenge on men in general for the way one or more men have treated her in the past. Perhaps she has reasons to get her revenge on this person in particular. Whatever her motives, or lack of them, to use another per- son without their consent, to treat them as a mere means to one’s own ends, is to fail to respect them as a free being.
It can be argued that just as it is authentic to respect and affirm one’s own freedom, so it is authentic to respect and affirm the freedom of oth- ers. To fail to respect the freedom of others, as we do when we tease and tantalize them, is to fall into a certain kind of bad faith, it is to fail to be authentic. Authenticity, it appears, is not just a personal matter but also about how we relate to other people. So much so, perhaps, that ethical and moral behaviour can be identified as other-related authenticity.