Sartre argues that Bad Faith occurs when the for-itself attempts, delusionally, to be an in-itself: when we disregard our absolute freedom by acting as if we ae what we are in the same way a rock is a rock.
Therefore, doesn’t it seem like an act of Bad Faith to argue our positions as if we are going to find some system that will make everything click along like some fine tuned machine? Wouldn’t this be the failure of all grand narratives?
Certainly dogmas; I don’t agree with Sartre’s idea of “absolute freedom” though. We all have narratives (grand and otherwise) that feed our ideas of who we are. We need them for context and decision-making.
Absolute freedom? …is that anarchy?
Yes, they do tend to support a kind of order when the indecision of doing otherwise might lead to disorder and despair.
But at the same time, no matter how long you choose to embrace a given narrative, you are still excercising the absolute freedom of sustaining it. You could, at any moment, due to a change in circumstance, choose to act in a way that departs from the spirit of the narrative. You’re never stuck to it in the way a rock is stuck to being a rock. Nor is anyone else. And this is the problem with it at a social level (which what I’m primarily talking about). The only way you could keep the freedom of others from messing it up is through force. And history has demonstrated that this is not likely to work either. Yet we continue to debate our positions as if some system will make it all run like some fine tuned machine. Hence: my point about Bad Faith.
To put it another way: since any narrative we choose to sustain is continually a result our choosing to sustain it, of excercising our freedom to do so, it follows that we are always equally free to choose to diverge from it.
Now as far as your issue with the idea of absolute freedom, I have issues as well. Even Sartre backed away from it (especially as he began to embrace Marxism) and admitted that a lot of it was the result of being a POW under the Nazi occupation. At the time, it seemed imperative to emphasize free-will in an environment in which one could find oneself being tortured for information that could catastrophically harm one’s peers.
My problem with it lies in the notion’s natural tendency to fortify a kind of Libertarian Social Darwinism and ends up being an alibi for FreeMarketFundamentalism and other forms of exploitation and abuses of power.
Granted, we make choices all the time. Every time I blink, I make a choice in that I could choose to hold my eyelids open with my fingers. But then I’m not saying no to blinking. I’m saying no to the possibility of blinking.
To use another analogy: say you’re walking through a canyon and come upon a wall built across it. There is no way over it as there is no way to ascend the canyon walls. Now the tenant of free will, self determination, and absolute freedom tells us that we could choose to bang our head against the wall until it topples and plummets to the bloody mulch below; but it’s kind of hard to deny the influence (or what Sartre would call facticity) of the wall.
And that’s just it: influence: how we influence our circumstances and how our circumstances influence us. For instance, this is why the freely chosen narrative can be so important in the face of absolute freedom: it’s the individual influencing their environment so that it may in turn influence their choices.
But at the same time, you have to kind recognize the ultimate futility of it. The Bad Faith involved.
it lies
in the underlying nothingness
of consciousness
absolute freedom is the nothingness between you and yourself a split second down the line.
the knowledge that at any place in any time a partical could move the wrong way.
There are some narratives that are psychologically unsustainable - we are restricted within a range by our nature as medium-sized earthbound social mammals. It’s not bad faith to acknowledge that, as unappealing as it may be to certain philosophers that we are not forces of Pure Intellect.
I don’t think this is a bad thing, either. It is the fact that chess has rules and conventions that allows people to exhibit genius at chess, that concentrates them and gives them a background against which they can stand in contrast.
All healthy narratives change with time, as situations change with time. Part of the social-narrative nature is that you have internal tensions between conservatism and progressivity. This is how we speak, this is what we wear, this is what we consider acceptable. But you make the important point that it is how we speak, not how one must speak.
You could choose to - but you don’t. So you’re not making a choice. Choice is used to denote responsibility, liability, credit or blame. While you’re not doing anything out of the ordinary or negligent, where there is no weighing-up, you don’t need to make a choice. Where we’re confronted by a brick wall, we have to make choices. When it comes to how much choice we want to have, we make choices (in our voting preferences, our relationships with others).
But we have to avoid the infinite regress - we can choose our narrative, but on the basis of what? The narrative of the free agent? How do we choose that? Rather, we are led by situation and circumstance to make/set ourselves/face a choice, and the choice we make is informed by who we are, what we do, what we want to be.
Dogmatism (which I think is the seat of your Bad Faith) and submissiveness/passivity are easy choices, and probably don’t represent our best interests on deeper enquiry - but if they do, is it a bad thing to opt for them?
We are all trying to work towards incarceration. I was born before three breached walls and several seas and oceans. Now I live behind the Antonine and Hadrian’ s walls. They were breached presumably by the forces of freedom. So we now have to try to use bad faith in the shape of rules and narratives to make lunatics behave like like humans or else the free will make the rules.
Well… Yeah, that’s exactly it. But I would qualify that by saying that it’s not just about dogmatism, but also our tendency to act as if through shear will of intellect, we’ll be able to establish some kind of dogma. I suppose this comes from other message boards that, because of a lack of moderation, end up becoming little more than pissing contests and gathering places for trollers. It was always like having a really cool party crashed by Neo Nazi Skinheads. They’re always telling you they’re there just to have a good time and for interesting conversation while looking at you with crosshairs in their eyes. But you always know it’s just a matter of time before the crap starts. The only difference is that in the case of the boards, the thugs are a little more educated.
Furthermore, it’s not just political –as easy as it may be to infer that from my approach. You see it as well in purely intellectual matters, in what Pinker refers to as greedy reductionism in which an individual attempts to argue as if everything can be explained by one paradigm in their particular field of expertise. You tend to see this with Hard Determinists who can be every bit as smug as FreeMarketFundalmentalists –even though no political advantage stands to be gained.
And it’s really a shame since it fails to recognize the true complexity of reality that allows us all to extract our own meaning from it and is counter-productive in that this should be like a big jam in which we play off of one another and develop in our individual ways. I mean it’s kind of nice to believe that here I can point out a flaw in my own reasoning and not have some thug with a guru complex jump on it and start saying: see! I told you so.
Another approach to this would be the recognization that, ultimately, intellectual constructions do nothing; people do. Ideologies don’t pull triggers or lead 6 million plus people into ovens, or just kill them, or light fires under heretics. Neither Fascism, Communism, or Christianity did any of this. Hitler, Stalin, the church, and their henchmen did.
As much as we may love the intellectual life, and as much importance as we may attribute to it, there is plenty of evidence to support the notion that ideology tends to follow basic human praxis.
Now this, in the face of discoveries by cognitive science and Chomsky and Pinker who railed (for good reason) against the blank slate, presents a problem for me.
But wouldn’t it be reasonable to argue that consciousness emerges through the physiological structures they’re describing and can therefore still retain its underlying nothingness?