Self Encounter; 4; Bad Faith

[music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [Dr. Hazel Barnes]: Bad faith with the existentialist is a form of original sin. One is not born in it to be sure, but it is so prevalent in the world that it is almost impossible to escape the contagion of bad faith. Bad faith is a lie to oneself. It is a form of self-deception. Sartre has formulated the concept as ?inaudible?

?inaudible? It is his belief that most of us simply cannot bear the anguish of recognizing that we are free, and that because we are free, we are responsible for whatever we have made of our lives. And so he says, we seek by any means possible to escape from the terror of this dreadful freedom by retreating into the serious world. The serious world is a world where everything is absolute. In it, each man is born into his rightful place. He has his own privileges, which are his due. He knows how to behave because all is defined. And values, too, are clear and absolute, just as clearly marked as articles on a bargain table, each one with its own price. But in reality Sartre says, we are not living in a serious world. In reality our position is more like that of a player in

a game. He has consented to acknowledge the stakes is worthwhile. He has agreed to abide by the rules, but he knows very well that nothing from outside the game forces him to be there or to choose these rules. And consequently at any moment, he realizes, he could change the rules of his game, alter the stakes or choose another game entirely. In this sense we find that man is not identical with the rule that he plays. Sartre has exploited this in a drama known as, "Kean." Edmund Kean, the Shakespearean actor, has apparently ruined his career the night before by shouting abuses at the Prince of Wales, who was sitting in the audience. [ambient sound] [ambient sound] [Solomon]: ?Guv'nor? If i tell them you're in you're right mind, they'll put you in prison.

[Kean]: Prison? Because I'm in my right mind. What a world. Very well then. I shall go to prison. [Solomon]: If you go to prison, you'll never act again. [Kean]: What a [Kean]: fate. [Solomon]: Governor, you mustn't let 'em. [Kean]: Waht do you want me to do? [Solomon]: Well, if you'd only, just for a day or two. [Kean]: What? [Solomon]: Pretend. [Kean]: To [Solomon]: Yes [Kean]:Solomon. [Solomon]: Well you were magnificent in Lear. [Kean]: Lear My dear fellow, even if I wanted to it would be impossible. I can never act again. [Solomon]: You can never. Since when? [Kean]: Since last night. I've been thinking to act, one must take onself as someone else. I thought I was Kean, who thought he was Hamlet

who thought he was Fortinbras [Solomon]: But Hamlet [Kean]: Yes, Hamlet does think he's Fortinbras. Shhh. It's a secret. What a series of misunderstandings. Fortinbras doesn't think he is anyone. Fortinbras and Mr. Edmund are alike. They know who they are and they say only what is. You can ask them about the weather, the time of day, the price of bread, but never try to make them act on a stage. What's the weather like? [Solomon]: Can't you see. The sun is shining. [Kean]: Is that your sun? I shall have to grow accustomed to it. Kean's sun was painted on the stage canvas.

Solomon, the London sky is a painted cloth. Every morning you open the curtains. I open my eyes and I saw- I don't know what I saw When the man himself is sham, everything is a sham around him. Under a sham sun, the sham Kean cried the tale of his sham sufferings to his sham heart. Today the sun is real. How flat real light is. Truth should be blinding, dazzling. It's true. It's true. I am a ruined man. I shall wait for the police

here. [Solomon]: That's a Richard the III's chair. [Kean]: In this very chair. When you go, leave the street door wide open. I want the police to have free access. [Solomon]: Like the Gauls invading the Roman Senate? [Kean]: Who told you I was thinking of that? [Solomon]: It was in the new play you gave me to read. [Kean]: Oh my God. You are right. I am making a gesture. Do you know my whole life is composed of nothing but gestures. Their is one for every hour, every season, every period of my entire life. I learned to walk, to breath, to die.

Now at last those gestures are dead. Like so many dead branches, I killed them all last night at one blow. I will root them out and if I cannot, I will cut off my arms. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Do you hear? Do you Do you hear? Oh, Mountebank. you're going to lead a hard life. You must learn to be simple. [sound] Perfectly simple. Out of my life or I will kill you. No. Stay.

You do not incommode me. No. You see, the man in the armchair was not me. It was Richard the III. That one is Shylock. Oh well. It will have to happen by degrees. I will imitate the natural until it becomes second nature. [ambient sound] [Barnes]: As an actor Kean can perhaps see the human situation a little more clearly than the rest of us. For as he watches himself playing his roles, it is as though he looked into a series of mirrors, finding image upon image and then discovering that he cannot decide which is the real

Kean. The answer of course for the existentialist is that there is no real Kean. For one cannot say of a man that he is anything in the way that the tree is a tree or table or is a table. There is as it were a little fill of nothingness between a man and his acts and here, according to Sartre, is where bad faith enters in. It is just as Sartre, as though man shifted back and forth between two meanings of the verb to be. In the past one was what one was. In other words, a man was what his acts made him be. But in the present and the future then situation is different. Facing the past the man in bad faith will attempt to say that he isn't really what his acts would seem to have made him. For example, I have, let's say, cheated on my income tax, pocketed a few extra items in a supermarket

and yet I declare I am not a thief for I do not have the nature of a thief. Now such bad faith is easy to detect but what about sincerity itself. This may be a trap. It may prove to be a form of bad faith. For suppose a person says I am an evil person. I am hostile to society. I am an outcast and since I am a criminal or a thief there's no point in my trying to be anything else, for this is what I am and I can't change it. This becomes, perhaps, a more serious form of bad faith. The seeming sincerity then the insincerity. Uh, one might recall the old story of the man who was made to feel by an old fashioned minister that he was totally evil and depraved. As the limmerick puts it, "At Ipswich when the preacher had quit it, a young man said ah, now I've hit it.

Since nothing is right, I'll go out tonight find the best sin and committ it." But bad faith is not just an attitude toward oneself, it involves also an attitude toward others. In general we may say that bad faith consists in accepting absolutely the customs and the outlook of the society around one, as though it were absolutely true for eternity. And more than this, it consists in identifying a man with some accident of his situation, his social situation, his religion, his race or what he happens to have done in the past. Simone de Beauvoir and her book, The Ethics of Ambiguity," discusses bad faith in connection with a society with oppressed and oppressors. It is common she says for the oppressors to deny the oppressed education and everything which would help lift them above the level of sub-men. And then

the oppressors look around them and say but can I possibly be on an equal basis with such animals as these. In prejudice one can see most easily of all the structure of bad faith. The prejudiced man pins all others in himself to some accident of birth or religion or situation, and then he feels that he has in contrast a position which cannot be assailed. No matter what he does, he does not have to win his place in the sun. He is what he is. He is the impenetrability of a rock. Sartre says that no man is ever simply an anti-semite or an anti-negro, for example, but that anti- semitism or one of the other prejudices is not an opinion. One can't change the prejudice man by showing him a ray of facts, so that he will modify his

opinion. But prejudice is a global attitude and the man who is prejudiced in one respect will be prejudiced in every other respect. For what he fears is the truth about man, that he is what he makes himself and consequently he wants to keep men always attached to some mere accidental property of their being. We can see in an especially amusing example of this in Sartre's play, "Nekrassov." In one scene a thief has been caught in the apartment of a very respectable householder. Sibilot, the man of the house has just called the police. [Georges]: Do I look like a murderer? What a misunderstanding. I admire you and you think I want to cut your throat. I admire you. Let me look at the honest man in his full and splendid majesty.

Suppose I were to tell you that I tried to kill myself just not inorder to escape my pursuers? [Sibilot]: Don't try to get around me. [Georges]: Splendid. And suppose I were to take a vile from my pocket, swallow the contents and drop dead at your feet? Well, what would you say? [Sibilot]: I'd say the rogue had saved the law a job. [Georges]: The quiet certitude of an ir- reproachable conscience. It is easy to see, sir, that you have never entertained the slightest doubt about what is right. [Sibilot]: Of course [Georges]: And that you don't subscribe to those subversive doctrines which hold the criminal to be a product of society. [Sibilot]: A criminal is a criminal. [Georges]: Splendid. A criminal is a criminal. That's well said. Ah, sir, there's no danger that I'd touch your heart like telling you the story of my unfortunate childhood. [Sibilot]: It will do you no good.

I had a tough childhood myself. [Georges]: And little you'd care that I'm a victim of the first World War, the Communist revolution and the capitalist system? [Sibilot]: There are others who are victims of all that. Me for example, and who don't stoop to theiving. [Georges]: You have an answer for everything. Nothing saps your convictions. Ah, sir with that bronze fore- head, those enamel eyes, and that heart heart of stone, you must be an anti- semite. [Sibilot]: I should have know it. Are you a Jew? [Georges]: No, sir. No. And I'll admit to you that I share your anti-semitism. Don't be offended. Share is going too far, let's say I pick up the crumbs. Not having the good fortune to be honest, I don't enjoy your assurance. I have doubt, sir. I have doubts. That is the prerogative of trouble souls. I am,

if you like, an aspiring anti-semite. What about the Arabs? You hate them, don't you? [Sibilot]: That's enough. I have neither the time nor the inclanation to listen to your nonsense. I ask you to go back in this room immediately and to wait there quietly until the police arrive. [Georges]: I'll go, I'll go back in the other room, but just tell me that you hate the Arabs. [Sibilot]: Yes. [Georges]: Say it better than that, just to please me and I'll swear to you it's my last question. [Sibilot];They are to stay where they belong. [Georges]: Wonderful. Sir, I take off my hat to you. You are honest to the point of ferocity. After this brief tour of the horizon, our identity of views is this plain,me. which doesn't surprise me. What honest people we scoundrels would be

if you're police would give us the chance. [ambient sound] [Barnes]: In such obvious examples as this, it may be difficult to see how bad faith can be even self-deception, but more often the patterns of bad faith are more insidious. The most subtle of all perhaps is in a book by Albert Camus called "The Fall." The title is applied ironically to the self-recognition of its hero. Clamence was a brilliant defense attorney and then at the height of his professional and social success he felt that everything was undermined as he had come gradually to see that all of his loudly proclaimed love of humanity, all of his many acts of altruism, were simply manifestations of self-interest, of self-love. So he gave it all up

and went to a bar at the side of the sea, grabbing hold of anyone he could find to listen to him and launching into a long monologue of denunciation. In part, this was an attack against the whole human race and Clamence listed, rather gleefully, all the crimes and atrocities of humankind. And sometimes he became more subtle, pointing out for example our inability to love. Have you noticed, he said, that death alone awakens our feelings. How we love the friends who had just left us. How we admire those of our teachers would cease to speak, their mouths filled with earth. Then the expression of admiration springs fourth naturally. That admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and

more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple: with them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time. Fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time. If they forced us to anything it would be to remembering and we have a very short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends. The painful dead. Our emotion, ourselves after all. That's the way man is my friend. He has two faces. He can't live without self-love. But Clamence's denunciation is not just of mankind in general. As he goes on he goes more and more into the nature of a personal confession, showing how gradually

in his life in Paris he had discovered that every single act was really but one more stone in the monument of self-pride. The crisis he said occurred one night as he stood on the bridge over the Seine. From a distance, he heard muffled cries for help and out of fear of danger and even more dislike of the necessary discomfort involved, he failed to jump in and save the drowning woman. Then the image shattered and he fled from Paris to his bar and his listening victims. [music playing] [music playing] [Clamence]: I have been practicing my useful profession here for some time. It consists to begin with, as you know from experience, in indulging in public

confession often as possible. I accuse myself up and down, covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored with cloy, but with piercing eyes I stand before all humanity. Recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing and saying I was the lowest of the low. When I get to, this is what we are. The tricks been played and I can tell them off. However I like to be sure. We're in the ?suit? together. Whether I have a superiority in that I know it, this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage I'm sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better I provoke

you into judging yourself and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Oh, we are odd, wretched creatures. And if we simply look back over our lives there is no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves. Just try. I shall listen, you may be sure to your own confession with a great feeling of fraternity. [music playing] Are we not all alike, constantly talking and to no one? Forever up against the same questions although we know the answers in advance. Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the keys of the Seine and how you managed never to risk your life. You, yourself. Utter the words that for years have never

seized echoing through my nights that I shall at last say through your mouth, oh young woman. Throw yourself into the water again that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us a second time. What a risky suggestion. Just suppose sir that we should be taken literally; we'd have to go through with it. Brrrr, the water's so cold. Ah, but let's not worry. It's too late now. It shall always be too late fortunately. [Barnes]: The question is whether Clamence at long last really is in good faith or not. Whether his grim self-portrait is as he intended, the proper mirror of all mankind. Some critics have said that it is and that Camus for his part in this book

has pronounced his own condemnation of men and that is confessing the failure of humanism. One writer has gone so far as to say that the only logical step for Camus would have been to retreat into the church and to confess his need for divine grace, that man cannot go it alone. But this is not what Camus did and he has made it very clear that these are not the correct interpretations of "The Fall." There are two things which destroy mankind he said. The first is that conventional self-righteousness, which in the name of the easily establish morality of society, would pass dreadful judgments against men. And the other is cynicism, which holding up before man some non-human standard of perfection, would deny to him any of his weaker aspirations for good. Camus says that his hero, with his guilty conscience,

with a sense of sin represents the attitude in Europe, which has condemned mankind finally, which ends up by killing and by putting men into concentration camps. This would mean that Clamence actually represented both of the attitudes, both the self-complacent virtue and what we might call his days of grace and the cynicism at the time of his fall. Camus say, I detest virtue that is only smugness. I detest the frightful morality of the world and I detest it because it ends just like absolute cynicism. In demoralizing men and in keeping them from running their own lives with their own just measures of meanness and of magnificence, perhaps we may say that good faith consists in accepting men in spite of their evil for the sake of their potential good. If this is

true then bad faith is any device which either pretends that the meanness is not there in man or that we should for any reason whatsoever give up our never ending struggle to obtain the magnificence. [music playing] [music playing] [music playing] [Announcer]: The scene from Nekrassov by Jean-Sartre was translated by Sylvia and George Leeson.The scene from Sartre's "Kean" was translated by Kitty Black. Both works are published by Alfred A. Knopf under the title, "The Devil and the Good Lord and Two Other Plays." [music playing] This is

National Educational Television.