Arc One · The Unreliable Narrator

I’m Just Not That Kind of Person

“I’m just not a confrontational person.” It sounds like a fact about you. But you said it, just now, at exactly the moment the alternative was hard.

Someone at work is taking credit for what you did. You’ve drafted the sentence on the drive home. You don’t say it, and you explain it to yourself with: I’m just not a confrontational person.

That sentence turns a choice into a thing you are, and the moment it does, there’s nothing left to argue with. Sartre called the move bad faith, and it isn’t hypocrisy. It’s something you do to yourself, with yourself as the only audience.

The history matters here: when Sartre took God out of Kierkegaard’s account of self-deception, there was no true self left to be false to. Which makes the concept far more aggressive and, in its cheap version, cruel. That’s the objection, and it’s a fair one.

Sections

1. The pour
2. The sentence on the drive home
3. Facticity, transcendence, and the waiter
4. What Sartre did to Kierkegaard
5. The objection: some people cannot
6. What changed

Reading

• Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two, “Bad Faith.”
• Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism. The accessible version, with caveats.
• Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Part One.
• Ronald Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy (1995).

Transcript

Available on release.