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What makes bad faith bad?
If we perceive someone as a waiter, we know what to expect from him. We know they
are going to perform certain actions. Their behaviour will be to a certain extent
predictable in that we know the role that a waiter has. We therefore know how to
engage with the waiter. The identity the waiter has and the role he plays helps us to
make sense of that reality. “There is nothing there to surprise us” (Sartre, 1958, p. 82).
I enter a café and wish to order a cup of coffee. I recognise the waiter instantly because
he is carrying a small order book and wearing an apron. Immediately I know how to
behave in this situation. I take a seat at the table and wait for the waiter to come to the
table to take my order. Objectifying that person as a waiter has helped me make sense
of my reality in the café environment. So what makes bad faith bad?
Employing mechanisms to manage our subjective selves within our external reality is
not bad per se. We do it all the time as part of our individual engagement with our
objective and social worlds. Perceiving the waiter has helped me to make sense of my
reality in the café rather than seeing him instead as John from Bay View with a cat and
a sick elderly mother. But this mode of objectification is not bad. Indeed, it is a helpful
tool which I employ to make sense of different situations.
When I am working as a nurse I objectify myself in the same way that Sartre’s waiter
objectifies himself. I employ this as a coping mechanism particularly in high stress
situations intentionally to disengage my emotions so that I can deal practically and
effectively with the circumstances at hand. For example, say a patient is exsanguinating
from a bleeding vein in his oesophagus, I adopt my objective role as a nurse equipped
with the skills to effectively manage the situation for the best patient outcome. If I had
not objectified my role in that scenario and engaged purely on a subjective level, the
full horror of the situation would be debilitating to the extent that it would have
negatively influenced my ability to function, less still to achieve a positive outcome.
(Even now, in describing a situation which I regularly confronted in practice many
years ago, I find myself using language which objectifies my behaviour in that context.)
In each of these situations, employing a mechanism of objectification does not appear
to be problematic. However, central to Sartre’s bad faith is that we use processes of
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