Exam 3 Response in PHL3090 Existentialism, taught by Dr. Donovan Miyasaki
Exam 3 Response in PHL3090 Existentialism, taught by Dr. Donovan Miyasaki
4/29/2019
Bad faith is “a constant and particular style of life”1 where someone is “lie[ing] to oneself” (369). The person in bad faith is either believing they are an entity that can’t determine its own destiny, essentially turning “negation…toward itself” (369) and negating possibilities, or living disillusioned with what you are capable of doing and “postpon[ing] the moment” (381) of making choices with real-world constraints. Transcendence and facticity are “two aspects of human reality” (382) everyone experiences, but that bad faith “does not wish to coordinate…or…synthes[ize]” (382). In other words, people in bad faith are in “self-negation” (369) and focus too heavily on one or the other.
Facticity refers to my limitations (both past and present) and transcendence refers to my possibilities (both present and future). If I deny my limitations, or deny my “facticity,” I lie to myself and “escape all that I am” (383). For example, I use to think that I could get a perfect score on my MCAT exam and have a good life at the same time. I worked very hard at it, getting relatively high scores on practice tests but never getting a perfect score. In this situation, I was denying my facticity because I was refusing to acknowledge real restraints on my time to study, my ability to destress, and my mental faculties. If I dropped all my classes and studied practice books for an entire year then I might get a perfect score, but I needed to take full-time classes in order to maintain my scholarship (so I just couldn’t drop out). This meant pushing practice exams to days I had off from school, which gave me severe problems with sleeping at night. I was not acknowledging one of the “two aspects of human reality” (382), specifically my limitations as a flesh-and-bone human with only so much time in his life.
The second type of bad faith and self-negation involves denying one’s other aspect, one’s transcendence. Here, Sartre uses an example of a waiter in a Parisian café. The waiter moved “a little too precise[ly]” in a “kind of game” (386), pretending that he was only a thing—a waiter—instead of being both a waiter and a conscious person capable of being something else. Sartre says that the waiter does this not only because “a grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer” (386) but also because it (the concept of a waiter) chooses for him what he should become. In his state, he can just be the waiter and make all the decisions that a waiter would make instead of having to “carry” the “burden” of freedom (404). Similarly, in the example from my life, I fell into this middle zone of not knowing really what I should commit to—studying for the MCAT or having a good life. I ended up procrastinating with this decision and ended up “trying to do it all” in a state of “faux-choosing” to utter failure. To be more authentic with my facticity, I should have chosen a “good enough” score (instead of striving for the highest) and would have chosen boundaries for study time and how much relaxation I built into my life. I was waffling around in a faux-commitment that tried to do too much and ignoring Sartre’s statement, “You’re free, choose, that is, invent” (352). So, by ignoring decisions that defined who we were, both the waiter and I were in bad faith, but I was refusing to choose a path at all and the waiter had chosen a path too strongly.
A critic might say that the situation where someone denies his facticity is rare, so Sartre’s categorization and example with the woman on a date is irrelevant. However, I would say that, even though the example of the woman on a date is a seemingly unordinary situation, denying one’s facticity through procrastination is a very common human experience. It is a perfect example of lying to oneself to lessen the burden of tough choices. If a construction manager postpones working on a project until later, he is denying the facticity and limitations of an approaching deadline in the contract they signed two months ago. This makes the manager and his workers feel better in the moment and justifies taking a break, but the reality of the situation comes back to bite them when they have to hire many more workers than they would have needed before in order to rush and get the construction project done on time.
2B. Beauvoir talks about an example of a drug addict to explain just how ambiguous moral decisions can be. She says that it is normal to “blame a man who helps a drug addict intoxicate himself”2 but that this can lead to the “worst disasters” (419), like the drug addict taking his own life because he didn’t have the drugs (or dying due to withdrawal, something that hospitals have to be very cognizant of). Thus, there is this ambiguity with what is the right thing to do, as even what may seem like an obvious choice—abstaining from giving an obvious drug-addict money—can be a cruel decision once its consequences have played out. This is why Beauvoir talks about how “no behavior is ever authorized to begin with” (423) and that one needs to see the consequences of the decision in order to determine its morality. This seemingly simple statement has major implications—one can never have confidence in the morality of a decision. Instead, “one bets on the chances and risks” (428) of any action as best as they see fit.
Beauvoir talks about ethical ambiguity as a way of confronting the problem of committing political violence in the hopes of a greater good in the long term. She synthesizes the two traditional camps in ethical philosophy by saying that one must “treat the other as a freedom so that his end may be freedom” (423), which basically means acting in a way that promotes the most freedom in order to promote the most freedom in the end (but not necessarily eliminating the option of transiently hindering an individual’s freedom). Beauvoir agrees with Kantian deontology whose view is to not treat any person as a means to an end, as the above quote mentions “end” in “his end may be freedom,” but she disagrees with the idea that the view is absolutely right. She agrees with utilitarianism’s desire for the greatest good for the greatest number as she mentions “group of individuals” when she says, “the good of an individual or a group of individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action” (423), but she disagrees with how utilitarianism can screw over the individual person by separating herself from “politician[s]” who only care about “collective destinies” (418). Though she adapts the idea of the collective from utilitarianism, freedom is the basis for her ethic’s greatest good while a utilitarian’s ethics considers happiness the basis. It is a fusion of deontology and utilitarianism, just without either’s certainty.
An opponent might say that this would prevent you from acting in the first place, since why would one even bother to act if they could not have confidence they were making the right choice? This assumes any action at all requires being very passionately invested, which is not reflective of reality. Someone not willing to die for a cause might have more foresight and knowledge if the situation happens to change. Much more damage has been done by people not willing to pull out of plans midway through than has been done by people not fully committed. Beauvoir specifically addresses this and says, “the more seriously I accept my responsibilities, the more justified it is. That is why love authorizes severities which are not granted to indifference” (419). This means that when someone does something with conviction, severe actions can get justified to often unlikely ends, hence Beauvoir’s assertion that “morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning” (416). More certainty about an ethical position, which utilitarianism provides, may be comforting in the moment, but the best courses of action involve being able to adapt and change as the situation changes. If the world around us changes frequently, which almost everyone would agree with, then the best ethics would be one that can adapt and change itself depending on the situation—Beauvoir’s ethics. This is why “the goal” should not be “fixed once and for all” but “defined all along the road which leads to it” (431). A critic may also say that there is not much to base one’s decision on in an ethics of ambiguity, since everything is questionable morally. However, Beauvoir’s ethics actually incorporates both Kantian and utilitarian ethics to actually provide the most comprehensive way of evaluating situations. The more angles one looks at the better informed the decision, so the more comprehensive ethics, Beauvoir’s, is preferable and does not lead to indecision but rather more informed decisions. She is not a pacifist, as she says that “violence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the freedom I am trying to save” (419). Thus, it does not fall prey to pacifism’s major criticism of complacence when terrible deeds that demand action are occurring.
3A. Camus thinks the proper way to view life is as a simultaneous grasp of “two certainties…that I cannot reconcile”3. One is that humans try to impose value on the world and have an “appetite for the absolute and for unity” (477) while the other is of “the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational…principle” (477)—that the world is inherently value-free and meaningless since there is no God (at least he thinks). Camus describes “the absurd” as being the “confrontation of this irrational and…wild longing for clarity” (455) despite the world having no clarity or clear organization (like we humans like to put on things). Not accepting the certainty of one of these realities would be “elud[ing] the problem” (479).
For Camus, however, the absurd hero is “keeping the absurd alive” (479) by revolting in the sense that he has "a certainty of a crushing fate” (479)—that is of the world being devoid of meaning—“without the resignation to accompany it” (479). In other words, the absurd hero revolts by living with the knowledge of those two certainties and still doing the “futile and hopeless labor” we humans do (489). As an analogy, the absurd hero acknowledges the game of tennis is a pointless hitting of a ball back and forth, but he still enjoys it (with no resignation over its silliness). In this way, “happiness and the absurd…are inseparable” (491) as the absurd hero is totally available to enjoy the present with “the divine availability of the condemned man” (483). For Camus, this revolt “gives life its value” (480) because the “discipline…the mind imposes on itself” in this struggle has “something exceptional about” it (480). Free from unnecessary future obligations, Sisyphus can be “happy” (492).
Camus argues then we shouldn’t take things too seriously, like Sartre suggests in “pursuing transcendent goals [so] that [man] is able to exist” (366). Camus would call this version of “freedom” constricting, as he says that “the absurd man…was bound to that postulate of freedom…to which he imagined a purpose to his life” (482). An example might be where a boy that dreams of becoming a professional basketball player someday may make all his decisions based on that future goal. So, even an authentic person according to Sartre could still be a “slave of his liberty” (482) according to Camus.
A critic might argue this would mean you should never make any goals and is a nonfunctional view, but this is not the case. Sisyphus, “the absurd hero” (490), still rolled the ball up the hill because “the struggle itself toward the heights [was] enough to fill a man’s heart” (492), so he still had a goal. He just didn’t take them seriously and thus had more “availability” (481) to take in life more. I agree that too much commitment to goals can be freedom-limiting as I have devoted way too much time to basketball in high school and felt restricted by my own goal. However, I disagree with his assertion that there “is no finer sight” (480) than an absurd hero because there is no standard of “fine” that Camus can take for that claim. If the assertion is true that there is no “rational principle” (477) to the world, then I would just be agreeing with his opinion. Also, if the world has a “lack of meaning” (470), then why not be deceived? It might be possible to be more available with no future goals, but it might be possible to live in a world with meaning and use these principles, too. The “divine availability of the condemned man” seems possible in a theistic worldview with goals you don’t take too seriously, like Sisyphus. Camus thinks that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (492), but I would say that this would only happen with some people. Knowing one has no purpose and deciding to keep living sounds equally likely to produce a sad existence than a freeing, available one. One may just be more likely to get dejected than be freer to enjoy life.
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, in Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Modern Library), p. 373.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, in Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Modern Library), p. 418.
3. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, in Basic Writings of Existentialism, ed. Gordon Marino (New York: Modern Library), p. 477.