Jean-Paul Sartre‘s examples in Being and Nothingness: the café waiter whose movements are “a little too precise, a little too quick”, playing at being a waiter as an inkwell is an inkwell; the woman who lets her hand rest in a suitor’s while pretending not to notice. Both deny either their freedom (transcendence) or their situation (facticity).
Compare Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who lived “correctly” — exactly as one should — and finds at death that it was all a lie.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalMauvaise foi
Origin. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943). — Jean-Paul Sartre
For self-deception, hiding behind roles.
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related by shared connectionsExistence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre’s 1945 public lecture — the most popular statement of existentialism — existence precedes essence, man is condemned to be free.
Sartre vs. Camus
The most famous intellectual break of the twentieth century — two friends of the Resistance fall out in 1952 over revolution, violence, and The Rebel.
Simone de Beauvoir
French existentialist philosopher and novelist whose The Second Sex (1949) — “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” — founded modern feminist philosophy, and whose ethics of ambiguity argued that my freedom requires the freedom of others.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s novella of a respectable judge who, dying of a trivial injury, realizes that his correct, comfortable life was a lie — and finds, at the last moment, the light.
Phenomenology
Husserl’s method of describing experience exactly as it appears — “to the things themselves!” — which Heidegger and Sartre turned toward existence.