Home | Philosophy | General

What is the connection between bad faith and angst in Existentialism?
By: Mitchell

One of the central tenets of all existentialist philosophy is that of freedom and choice. Man, by his very nature, is a free being and he must choose and choose for himself alone. In the existential world, God or No God, one must choose and accept responsibility for that choice. It is this entire and heavy responsibility that is Anguish in existentialist philosophy. In The Fall by French-Algerian existentialist writer Albert Camus the central character Jean-Baptiste Clamence remarks,

“...for anyone who is without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”(1)

Clamence feels the weight of days is dreadful because It is the full realisation of one’s freedom and consequently, entire responsibility. This realisation instils in man a sense of intense anguish. An anguish over the implications of one’s total and unshakeable culpability. The figure head of French existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre defines anguish in his own terms in his work Existentialism and Humanism, saying;

“First, what do i mean by anguish? The existentialist frankly states that man is in anguish. His meaning is as follows - When a man commits himself to anything, fully realising that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time legislating for the whole of mankind - in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility. There are many indeed who show no such anxiety. But we affirm that they are merely disguising their anguish or are in flight from it.”(2)

By choosing anything, under existentialist thinking, I am affirming its value over any other choices. But what separates one choice from another? Nothing. There is no property that states any one choice is better or more valuable or more worthy than another and so in choosing it is only I who decides to value one over another and, as such, it is I too who must accept total responsibility for the consequences of my choice as only I had any part in making the choice. I am “condemned to be free” as Sartre says, again from Existentialism and Humanism. He goes on, in the same text, to give us a clear example of an anguish provoking situation;

“When, for instance a military leader takes upon himself the responsibility for an attack and sends a number of men to their death he chooses to do it and at bottom he alone chooses. No doubt he acts under a higher command but its orders, which are more general, require interpretation by him and upon that interpretation depends the life of ten, fourteen or twenty men. In making the decision , he cannot but feel a certain anguish.”(3)

To face these decisions is one thing, to make them another, but greatest of all is to accept the responsibility. In the example Sartre gives us it is up to the individual as to what is done. Admittedly the orders come from above, but they must be interpreted, thought upon and eventually enacted and it is the realisation that one is responsible, entirely and ultimately, that leads to anguish. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkergaard gives us a biblical example of the same phenomenon in his passage known as Abraham and the Angel. In this bible story a message is sent to Abraham from God commanding him to show his faith in God by sacrificing his only son. A son who was promised to him by God and who did not come to Abraham and his wife Sarah until they were far in to old age. This command devastates Abraham who loves his son Isaac above all things. Here is where the anguish lies. Whilst Abraham has been commanded by God, seemingly, to sacrifice his son, it is up to him to choose between killing and not killing. The sign must be interpreted. There is no evidence that it emphatically came from god and ultimately it is Abraham’s choice. As Mary Warnock states in Existentialism,

“The reasonability therefore, for the sacrifice of Isaac could not have been shuffled off onto God. It was Abraham and he alone who decided to obey the voice.” (4)

Sartre gives us a very similar line in Existentialism and Humanism,

“No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do: no signs are vouchsafed in this world. The catholics will reply, “oh but they are!” Very well; still it is I myself in every case who have to interpret those signs.” (5)

We can see, therefore, that for the Existentialist, facing this freedom and responsibility is a powerful but significant step. Even when many would claim they were following some guideline be it the law, the social mores of their society or some higher power’s command it is still, always, their own decision. Any guideline only shapes our action if we choose to follow it. Any laws or social mores guide us only in so far as we decide to adhere to them. A higher power can never force us to act, we always are the key - we choose. It is because we are always the one and only person to make the choices that we too must accept total responsibility. If one accepts that ultimately they are the choosing entity in the situations then they too must see that all blame or praise for their actions must go entirely to them. Recognising one’s utter culpability in the face of every single decision one makes, having no respite, no fall back, no means of appeal is a daunting prospect. As Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy,

“We should recognise how everything which comes into being must be prepared for a painful demise, we are forced to peer into terrors of individual existence - without turning to stone.” (6)

It is this‘turning to stone’ that represents the Existentialist theory of Bad faith or ‘mauvaise foi” as Sartre puts it. Bad faith is the reaction that many have to the recognition of total responsibility and it is easy to see why, in the face of true anguish, one might wish to run and hide. To shirk responsibility, ignore our total freedom and try and block out the ringing voice of Sartre in our head demanding that we accept the truth. For Sartre, it is to face anguish and be ‘authentic’ that really shows moral character. In a worldview that holds no moral choice as higher than any other by its intrinsic worth, it is only through the operations of faith that one can attain any form of morality. He who does not accept responsibility, he who attempts to make excuses and pass the blame is he who is not acting authentically. For Sartre, this is morally abhorrent.

One of the most clear and thorough examinations of the concept of Bad Faith is Sartre’s play No Exit. In this play three people who have died are confined together and through their discussion we learn of their lives and, most crucially, their own interpretations of their lives and the lives of their roommates. At one point the character Garcin sees his colleagues on Earth view him as a coward. He becomes enraged at how they view, what he felt were perfectly responsible actions. His roommate, Inez, says the following to him,

“That's the question. Was that your real motive? No doubt you argued it out with yourself, you weighed the pros and cons, you found good reasons for what you did. But fear and hatred and all the dirty little instincts one keeps dark - they're motives too. So carry on, Mr. Garcin, and try to be honest with yourself - for once.” (7)

For Sartre and the other Existentialists, that is what really matters, being honest with oneself. Man must not “hide behind the excuse of his passions, or invent some deterministic doctrine,” [Sartre, Being and Nothingness.] For Sartre anyone who does so is a self-deceiver and morally reprehensible. It is the man who looks in to the face of Anguish and grabs it by the horns, unwilling to be overwhelmed. He who makes his decisions and accepts responsibility afterwards, who is not only the morally decent but, as Kierkergaard says in Either/Or, the truly happy one,

“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside himself.”(8)

However, at times it seems bad faith is a necessary element of life. At times, when faced by truly daunting circumstances one may see that retreating in to habit and falsity and bad-faith may be one of the few ways to survive. Camus, in The Plague, recognises the importance of habits and bad faith. In a town overcome by a virulent and lethal plague the narrator remarks,

“You can get through the days there without trouble, once you have formed habits. And since habits are precisely what our town encourages, all for the best.” (9)

In another example given to us by Sartre in Being and Nothingness we see how to be a good waiter we must be totally submerged in the idea of being a waiter.

"His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too quick...his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer...he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things...the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to realise it." (10)

Whilst this may be financially necessary, being a good waiter is likely to be better for his job prospects and monetary situation than being a bad waiter, it is still morally reprehensible. To be something at its fullest we must negate our separate human qualities and this is to shirk our intrinsic human freedom. True, he is a good waiter, and most fully a waiter but ultimately he is denying his own separate existence. He has become what Sartre calls the ‘en-soi’ - something which has existence simply ‘in itself’. He is merely an object, a label, a waiter, whereas man should be nothing but the ‘pour-soi’ - something that exists just for itself. The man is NOT a waiter but a man and the guise of waiter is merely a skin he has adopted in order to shelter himself from truly accepting the limitless freedom and responsibility that comes from being ‘man’. He has objectified himself and in doing so limited himself. The denial of one’s natural human freedom is to be in bad faith. To objectify one’s self and say “I am a student” and that is why i act thus. “I am a Widower” and so I act thus. Each of these is to objectify oneself. To stop being a true authentic being which is free to choose and act in any such way and to become nothing more than a simple list of qualities. In being this list of qualities one’s existence and life becomes laid out like a map before you but a map that shows only a few routes though life and not the myriad that are really available. It is to deny freedom and thus to deny responsibility. “I am a student, of course I get drunk,” is to shirk responsibility for one’s decision to get drunk, a decision that was not controlled by ‘being a student’ but chosen by the individual. To objectify oneself is to be in bad faith, running from the daunting prospect of truly being free to choose. Herman Hesse in Steppenwolf speaks of how a whole life can be summed up and objectified if it does not accept its freedom,

“I imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of sound respectability - early rising, attention to duty, retrained but cheerful family gatherings, Sunday churchgoing, early to bed.” (11)

So what is it to be in good faith? If we are to be condemned to Sartrean hell for being one of the ‘self-deceivers’ as he puts it, how can we accept anguish and avoid this moral condemnation? How can we be both accepting of our immense burden of responsibility and yet be authentic and true and exist merely for ourselves? Kierkergaard, for me, best sums up how one can be an Existentialist ‘saint’ [to paraphrase Camus],

“The man who can really stand alone in the world, only taking counsel from his conscience - that man is a hero.” (12)

He who does not appeal to higher law to blindly follow, he who does not seek counsel in friends for advice to take, he who does not toss the coin to make a decision, he who does not follow popular consigns unthinkingly - he is the ‘hero’ for Kierkergaard. It is to rely on nothing and appeal to nothing but one’s own freedom to choose. It is to never look for anything to guide one’s choosing and realise that in following any guides, advice, beliefs that ultimately you are choosing to follow and that to choose in any way is to take upon you total and complete responsibility. That man is the ‘hero’.

As we can see from the Existentialist writings I have quoted, essentially to be in anguish, is to see that whilst we may seem to have rules, guidelines and ideas of morality it is still, ultimately, the individual who acts. No rule, law of belief can make us act in anyway. It is the individual who acts. Because they act alone and can never be made to act - it is the individual, ultimately, who chooses to do any one thing over another. Consequently, by choosing how to act entirely by ourselves we must accept total responsibility as the choice comes only from ourselves. This immense and grinding responsibility is the anguish of existentialism. It is a powerful, unpleasant and overwhelming emotion and many take flight from it. These are the ‘self-deceivers’ the ones who are in Bad Faith. They construct doctrines and alibis. They say “but I am a coward” of course i acted thus.” Or they say “it was the bible that led me to act so.” But ultimately, whatever their ‘inspiration’ or ‘motive’ for action, it is they who chose. He who is in good faith is he who can face anguish and choose knowing he and only he is responsible. He who can look in to the face of utter responsibility and accept it unshakingly. As Sartre says,

“The actions of men of good faith have, as their ultimate significance, the quest of freedom itself.” (13)

Footnotes

1. The Fall
2. Existentialism and Humanism Pg. 30
3. Existentialism and Humanism Pg. 32
4. Existentialism Pg. 105
5. Existentialism and Humanism Pg. 38
6. The Birth of Tragedy Pg. 91
7. No Exit and three other plays
8. Either/Or
9. The Plague Pg. 3
10. Being and Nothingness
11. Steppenwolf Pg. 37
12. The Journals
13. Existentialism and Humanism Pg. 51

Bibliography

Camus, Albert
The Myth of Sisyphus (Penguin Modern Classics 2000)
The Fall (Penguin Modern Classics 2000)
The Plague (Penguin Books, 1990)

Hesse, Herman
Steppenwolf (Penguin Books, 1990)

Kierkergaard, Soren
The Journals (Princeton University Press 2003)
Either/Or (Penguin Books, 1992)
Fear and Trembling (Penguin Classics 2003)

Nietzsche, Friedrich
The Birth of Tragedy (Oxford World’s Classics 2000)

Sartre, Jean-Paul
No Exit, and three Other Plays (Vintage Books, 1989)
Being and Nothingness (Routledge, 2002)
Existentialism and Humanism(Methuen, 1973)

Warnock, Mary
Existentialism(Oxford University Press, 1979)

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

Please Rate this Article

 

# of Ratings = 4 | Rating = 4.8/5

Click the XML Icon Above to Receive General Articles Via RSS!
Additional Articles From - Home | Philosophy | General
Sign Up as an Author.
Submit Articles
Member Login
Top Authors
Most Popular Articles
Submission Guidelines
Ezine Notifications
Article RSS Feeds
New Stuff
Forum
Link to Us
Contact Us

Powered by Article Dashboard