Investigating and questioning the possibilities and limits of bad faith lie at the heart of the existential thinking-philosophizing of de Beauvoir.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir acknowledges that human beings, both females and males, are constantly tempted to abandon their responsibility, freedom, authenticity, and even their own selves by turning themselves into mere things.
The existentialism of de Beauvoir argues against this temptation and refuses this willingness or readiness to abandon freedom, responsibility, and our own selves, and yet acknowledges that this abandoning and this willingness allow us to avoid the anguish resulting from our attempts at assuming responsibility.
There are, of course, similarities between how Sartre and de Beauvoir think toward and understand bad faith, but their philosophical accounts still remain different.
According to Sartre, bad faith takes place when we refuse our absolute responsibility and evade our radical freedom. Sartre says that the realization that our existence in the world, in its entirety, is our own responsibility delivers us into anguish, which we endeavor to avoid by pretending that are nothing but mere things. This pretending is easier than confronting the weight of free choosing, genuine deciding, and authentic acting, according to Sartre.
De Beauvoir’s account of bad faith differs from Sartre’s view in two ways. Firstly, de Beauvoir acknowledges that bad faith is often decidedly chosen by the oppressed. Secondly, she argues that oppressed individuals are not in bad faith even if they decidedly choose bad faith.
Cases of Bad Faith: Narcissism, Love, and Mysticism
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir discusses three main ways in which women themselves take part in their own reduction, exclusion, oppression, and othering; that is, three ways in which women are in bad faith because they decidedly choose to be the Other by negating their own freedom and refusing responsibility. These three ways are narcissism, love, and mysticism.
For de Beauvoir, the narcissist woman abandons her own freedom by turning herself into a beautiful object by letting her whole value, significance, and meaning arise solely from this thinghood.
The woman in love abandons her freedom by letting her identity disappear into a privileged male object. The mystic denies her freedom and abandons herself by disappearing into God or the absolute. But are these cases genuine cases of bad faith, according to de Beauvoir?
Are These Genuine Cases of Bad Faith?
According to de Beauvoir, although these ways of existing in the world render women unfree and thus deliver them into bad faith, they are not as simple as they appear. That is, although these ways of existing seem to be simple and direct examples of bad faith, bad faith is and must be much more complex than this.
De Beauvoir’s view is that if the oppressed gender remains oppressed for long, this oppression reaches a limit after which the oppressed cannot see this oppression as what it really is, that is, as oppression, therefore hollowing bad faith of itself and its force as a decision.
In other words, women often cannot see any other free ways of existing in the world after being oppressed, marginalized, and excluded for long. De Beauvoir’s view is that it is often the case that the oppressed cannot see any other possibilities but oppression itself after being oppressed for so long.
Long periods of oppression often conceal any possibility of free choosing and authentic deciding, according to de Beauvoir. This is why de Beauvoir says that when women cannot glimpse different free situations or new authentic possibilities because of their long, systematic, historical, social, economic, and structural oppression, they are not in bad faith, they cannot be in bad faith, for they cannot imagine freedom or even glimpse a world in which authenticity resides as a genuine possibility.
In a word, according to de Beauvoir, the possibility of freedom, responsibility, and authenticity is forever concealed from the person or the group that has been always oppressed, marginalized, and excluded.
De Beauvoir Against Sartre
To what extent does de Beauvoir’s view agree with or refuse and negate Sartre’s existentialism? For Sartre, to be a being for-itself, that is, to be a human being is to able to constantly project different possibilities.
Being a human being means being able to constantly negate facticity. If one cannot project different possibilities and if one is not able to negate one’s facticity, then one is not a human being, according to Sartre. For this negating, this nothingness, itself resides in the being of the for-itself.
De Beauvoir’s view argues for two theses: that women actively take part in their own oppression when they negate their own freedom and give up authentic deciding; and that oppressed women, because of their deep, historical, systematic, and structural oppression, cannot often imagine that there still exists a world in which there is freedom, authenticity, or responsibility. That is, long periods of oppression render othering, exclusion, and marginalization absolutely normal and the absolute norm.
Does de Beauvoir disagree with Sartre’s view? Or is she completing and rendering more livable Sartre’s existentialism, which is essentially lacking? That is, is this an acknowledgement that Sartre’s existential thinking-philosophy is problematic and unworkable?
Perhaps there are no straightforward or simple answers to these questions. According to some commentaries on and discussions of de Beauvoir’s existential thinking-philosophizing, there are, at least, two notions of freedom at work in de Beauvoir’s existentialism: Ontological freedom and practical freedom, which is the freedom to achieve something in the world; that is, the freedom to make possible concrete changes in the world.
According to this categorization, de Beauvoir could be understood to be saying that women are completely free because freedom belongs to and resides in their own being, but they are not completely free when it comes to practically changing the world. This answer still does not solve the problem or answer the question because it only brings these two notions of freedom into each other.
This answer only says that if the oppressed remains systematically, structurally, and historically oppressed for long enough, ontological freedom itself undergoes a certain modification from which it arises reduced, disrupted, and emptied out.
In other words, if someone remains in jail for long enough, they will not be able to imagine a world outside of this jail, a free world that is essentially different from this confinement.
De Beauvoir thinks that this is exactly what happens to women because they have remained oppressed, excluded, and marginalized for so long. This is why, for de Beauvoir, they cannot be in bad faith when they do not defy and refuse sexual inequality.
This account of freedom seems to be refusing Sartre’s existential notions of freedom and bad faith, although de Beauvoir generally agrees with Sartre’s existentialism.
In the literature discussing and commenting on de Beauvoir’s existentialism, there is the argument that this is a clear disagreement with and refusal of Sartre’s notions of radical freedom and total responsibility; a disagreement and refusal that are implied yet not directly stated. That is, it could be argued that de Beauvoir rejects the main notions in which Sartre’s existentialism is grounded.
For more articles on de Beauvoir‘s existentialism, visit this webpage.