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is nothingness as evidence of bad faith. Have I deceived myself so effectively that I am
no longer aware of what Sartre perceives is the reality of existence? But if I am so
deceived about my need to objectify myself, so utterly immersed in my state of bad
faith that I am not even conscious of my intent, then how can I be in bad faith? And is
this complete immersion in a state of bad faith, which according to Sartre is clearly
undesirable, even possible?
To achieve any state of bad faith there must logically be a conscious intention.
Ultimately, bad faith is the adoption of mechanisms which deny the free, subjective
self. If I deny my subjective self and try to objectify myself and everything within my
reality then I am intentionally deceiving myself. I do not just find myself acting in bad
faith. I do so for a reason. I consciously intend to use mechanisms to manage the reality
of my subjective self within an objective reality. And if I intend to act in a certain way
to avoid my reality, I must be conscious of the reality I am trying to avoid. Logically
then, it appears that there must be a limit on the extent of self-deception for us to be in
bad faith. Otherwise the entire foundation on which the notion of bad faith rests is
undermined.
However, while the logic of Sartre’s argument appears flawed, in reality we do seem to
be able to deceive ourselves that objectification and denial of the subjective self is
possible. For example, a complete state of bad faith logically ends with total self-
objectification. What would this state look like? The person would be a machine who
had completely denied his subjectivity, an automaton devoid of any emotion, any life
experience or sociological influence. In short, they would be a robot. Sartre’s waiter
attempts to achieve this status by mechanising his actions: “His gesture and even his
voice seem to be mechanisms” (p. 82). But as I have argued throughout this thesis, it is
not possible to attain this state. We cannot simply switch our emotions on and off.
Indeed, what Sartre’s waiter is trying to achieve is quite recognisable. “He is playing,
he is amusing himself… We need not watch long before we can explain it… the waiter
in the café plays with his condition before he can realise it.” We cannot remove our
values from our selves or the decisions we make in our everyday lives. But the
longevity of rational and empirical philosophies and the on-going reliance on a fact-
centred model of medical decision making and legal positivist approaches are testament
to the reality that we can, and do, deceive ourselves that this is possible.
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