The BROTHERWISE DISPATCH – VOL.2, ISSUE #4, SEPT-NOV/2010
Human reality manifests a peculiar struggle of contradiction. The human being is linked both to the free and the unfree. The latter we may call the human being’s situation in the world. One definition of situations is that they are the meanings of our confrontation with those aspects of our condition over which we seem to lack some control – for example, our past biography and the freedom of others. Our situation is not, however, completely independent of the choices we make. A situation “is not a pure contingent given. Quite the contrary, it is revealed only to the extent that [consciousness] surpasses it toward itself”. [1]
For example, the situation of slavery is a function of the slave’s choice to assert his equality and the master’s choice to deny it. A child is born on a plantation. He receives love, kindness, and nourishment from his mother. He doesn’t see her for many hours during the day except when it’s time to be fed. One day, when he is old enough to walk and speak, he decides to pursue his mother and discovers a peculiar point in the distance. As he attempts to reach it, he hears the crack of a whip. He attempts to continue anyway, but this time the whip lashes across the back and tears open his flesh. His situation becomes clear: His factical horizon – that is, where his liberty extends – is different from others factical horizon. His horizon stops short of the point in the distance, but others roam there freely. He becomes conscious of the limitations imposed upon him. He becomes conscious of his situation as a slave. “[Human reality] constitutes itself in the flesh as the nihilation of a possibility which another human reality projects as its possibility. For that reason it must arise in the world as a No; it is as a No that the slave first apprehends the master, or that the prisoner who is trying to escape see the guard who is watching him”.[2]
Yet the slave is also simultaneously aware of not only being a slave; he is, after all conscious of the beyond.
The situation of the slave is that of being a slave and simultaneously not being a slave. Slavery places limitations on the options over which the slave chooses, but not over the slave’s ability to choose. It is precisely the sense in which a slave is not a slave that he faces himself, every moment, as a slave who is responsible for the ways in which he deals with the fact that there is an effort to make him, in his entirety, into a slave. The achievement of such a totalization would be the “ideal slave”. All slaves face this “ideal” as what they are not in virtue of their being human beings. All slaves are in confrontation, as all human beings are on the existential level, with anguish.
Bad faith, or the anguish-riddled-flight from anguish, involves an effort to take advantage of the human condition as freedom and the human being as a being who lacks some control over the impact of others’ freedom to affect and to effect certain aspects of its various situations. In bad faith I may assert that what I “really am” transcends my situation in the world; for example, I “am” my freedom but not my gender or biography. Or I may try to take refuge in those aspects of my situation over which I seem to lack control; I can assert that I can’t help being what I am. Further, I can make an effort to be what I was or to disengage myself entirely from my past and my present by claiming only to be what I will become. Each of these cases involves taking refuge in a form of being what I “really am,” as though my “real” being is as static and as complete as a stone. I can try to take refuge away from myself as a conscious being and take advantage of my situation of also being presented to others as a being subject to their interpretation of me. I can claim that other people have knowledge of a self that is “me” but that that self is not really me. Or I may claim that the self that is presented to others is the real me. Or I may claim that the self that is presented to the others is the real me. In either case, it is another effort to take refuge in what I “really am.”
I can try to be sincere. I can claim that there is a version of myself that is the real me and I am simply being myself. But even that effort is flawed; it is an effort at an attitude which manifest bad faith, for it is an effort to be for-myself what I really am. To decide to be who I really am presupposes my being determined ahead of my choices. I therefore regard myself as compelled to be myself, instead of submitting to a chosen conception of myself, as though even such “compulsion” were not submission and hence a form of choice. All of these cases are cases of my choosing to take refuge in a notion of myself as a reified substance. Since I am not identical with any of my objects, I must in fact be choosing whatever objects I claim to be.
Imagine a community activist. One day, he is offered the opportunity to run for a seat in city government but with the condition that he reduces his grass-roots style of political activity. He agrees, reasoning to himself that he will be able to serve his constituency better in a position of power. In city government, he is then offered the opportunity to run for a seat in the state legislature but with the condition that he doesn’t make any political waves on the municipal level. He agrees, reasoning that he will be able to serve his constituency better with the greater degree of power available to him on the state level. Eventually, a similar situation emerges and he finds himself making concessions to become a U.S. senator. Let us say that this period of political ascent takes a decade. He is now a senator. He is confronted one fine day on the steps of Capitol Hill by one of his old grass-roots buddies. He is called a “sell-out.”
He is outraged. He defends himself right away with the claim of being a community activist who is really trying to make a difference in the community from which he has come. His accuser point out, however, that no matter what he sees himself as he is a politician and he has not acted differently from any other politician who has sold out. No matter what he may claim is his real identity and his real motives, he has mad choices which have placed him in positions of power at the price of a decade’s worth of legislation that could have benefitted his community. Our community activist/politician is now placed in a position of having to show that he is sincere. But how can he accomplish this without making claim either to a real version of himself that is not recognized by others or a real version of himself that will be made known to others?
Our politician/activist finds himself in anguish. For he has to make a choice either to vote upon legislation that will reveal a motive to empower his community or continue to play the game of continued-empowerment-toward-some-eventual-community-payoff. Either version of himself represents a choice of himself that he is to make; but either version doesn’t necessarily support his claim to good faith, although both may support his claim to sincerity, for he could be interpreted as a sell-out who is trying not to look like a sell-out, a sell-out who has decided to make a change to appear, to his community and perhaps to himself, like Kierkegaard’s opinionated man, as sincere. From the Sartrean perspective, his immediate claim to sincerity is rotten at the core, for he treats his choice as having already been made in order to evade it. He is in bad faith.
[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, (Washington Square Press, 1956) p.409
[2] Sartre, pp.86-87
excerpted from Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Anti-Black Racism, (Humanities Press, 1995, 1999) pp.16-18.
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