Sartre and the Modality of Bad Faith: The Contingency Debate

This article investigates the nature of Sartre's bad faith by analyzing the concept's modal dimensions. It focuses, in particular, on the discussion of how frequent bad faith is in our everyday lives. On one side of the debate is the reading that bad faith is temporary, avoidable, and contingent. Sartre's wellknown examples of the woman and the waiter in the chapter "Bad Faith" in Being and Nothingness support this reading of bad faith as a state that we come in and out of, as something we can refrain from doing or succumb to and fall into. Bad faith is in this way interpreted to be a normative, ethical concept. However, on the other side of the contingency debate is the reading that bad faith is a constant in our lives. I borrow an argument from Schopenhauer to investigate how having bad faith about the ultimate goals of life presents us with the most prevalent variation of bad faith. This article offers a topography of this debate, thereby underscoring one of the main topics about the modality of bad faith, which has not yet been fully articulated in the literature on Sartre, but which is vital to understanding the concept.