Sartre on Bad Faith

Quote

"Man is the being who is what he is not and is not what he is." — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)

Author

Jean-Paul Sartre was the most public philosopher of twentieth-century France—a novelist, playwright, essayist, and political activist who turned existentialism into a household word. Born in Paris in 1905, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure alongside Simone de Beauvoir, forming an intellectual and romantic partnership that would last a lifetime. His major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness (1943), built an ontology of radical freedom on the foundations of Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's analysis of Dasein.

Sartre's influence extended far beyond academic philosophy. Through plays like No Exit and novels like Nausea, he translated the abstractions of existentialism into scenes of ordinary life—jealousy, shame, cowardice, desire. He refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, arguing that no writer should allow himself to be turned into an institution. His concept of bad faith remains one of the most enduring tools for understanding how people deceive themselves about their own freedom.

The passage on bad faith draws on Sartre's years of observing café life in Paris, where social roles were performed with theatrical precision. His genius was to see in the overly attentive waiter or the coquettish woman on a first date not mere social mannerisms but ontological dramas—struggles between freedom and facticity played out on the smallest possible stage.

Context

The sentence appears in Part One, Chapter Two of Being and Nothingness, in the section titled "Bad Faith." Sartre has just completed his ontological argument that consciousness is not a thing but a nothingness—a nihilation at the heart of being. Consciousness has no content of its own; it is pure openness toward the world, pure awareness. This means consciousness can never simply be something, because to be a thing would be to lose the openness that defines consciousness in the first place.

Sartre illustrates this with his famous café waiter. The waiter moves with exaggerated precision—his movements are too fluid, too mechanical, too perfect. He is playing at being a waiter. He treats himself as though he were a thing defined by a function, like an inkwell is defined by holding ink. But this is impossible, because consciousness is always more than any role it occupies. The waiter is conscious of being a waiter, which means he stands at a distance from that identity. He is a waiter (in the sense that he occupies that role) and yet he is not a waiter (in the sense that his consciousness exceeds and precedes the role). This is what Sartre means by the paradox: man is what he is not (a waiter, a coward, a lover—all roles that consciousness takes up but cannot be reduced to) and is not what he is (pure consciousness, which can never be captured as a fixed object).

This structure is what makes bad faith possible. If consciousness were simply a thing, there would be no gap between what we are and what we claim to be. But because consciousness is nothingness—because it can always step back from any identity and negate it—there is always room for self-deception. The person in bad faith exploits this gap, using the fact that they are not their role (I am more than a waiter) to deny their freedom, while simultaneously using the fact that they are their role (I am nothing but a waiter) to escape responsibility for their choices.

The historical setting deepens the argument's force. In occupied Paris, questions of authenticity and self-deception were not academic. People collaborated, resisted, or simply endured, and the lines between genuine constraint and self-serving excuse were often blurred. Sartre's analysis of bad faith offered a vocabulary for the moral evasions of everyday life, from the petty self-deceptions of café culture to the larger evasions of a society living under occupation.

Meaning

The paradox that "man is the being who is what he is not and is not what he is" is the engine of Sartre's entire moral philosophy. To understand it, one must grasp Sartre's distinction between two modes of being: being-in-itself (en-soi), which is the mode of things, and being-for-itself (pour-soi), which is the mode of consciousness. A stone is what it is—fully, completely, with no remainder. But consciousness is never simply what it is at any given moment, because it always has the capacity to negate, to imagine otherwise, to distance itself from its current state. This capacity for negation is what Sartre calls nothingness, and it is the source of human freedom.

Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the attempt to collapse this structure—to pretend that consciousness is a thing, that one simply is a waiter, a coward, a jealous lover, with no distance and no choice. The person in bad faith is not lying in the ordinary sense, because ordinary lying requires the liar to know the truth. Bad faith is more insidious: it is a lie to oneself, a project of not knowing what one knows. The waiter who plays at being a waiter with theatrical excess is not simply being a good employee. He is trying to convince himself and others that he is his role, that there is no gap between his consciousness and his function. He flees from the vertigo of recognizing that at every moment he chooses to be a waiter, and could choose otherwise.

Sartre identifies two complementary forms of bad faith. The first denies transcendence by reducing oneself to facticity: I am nothing but my past, my circumstances, my social role. The second denies facticity by reducing oneself to pure transcendence: I am pure freedom, untouchable by any fact about myself. Both are self-deceptions because both refuse the full truth that human reality is always a synthesis of facticity and transcendence. We are thrown into circumstances we did not choose, and yet we are free to choose how we respond to those circumstances. The waiter is not making a mistake about his job. He is performing an ontological sleight of hand, using one side of the truth to hide the other.

The philosophical significance of this paradox extends beyond the analysis of self-deception. It establishes that authenticity is not a state but a struggle—a constant negotiation between the factical situation one finds oneself in and the freedom that transcends it. There is no formula for being authentic, because any formula could itself become a role to hide behind. What Sartre demands instead is lucidity: the willingness to face the full structure of one's being, acknowledging both the weight of facticity and the breadth of freedom, without using either to escape responsibility for the other. In this sense, the paradox is not merely a description of how consciousness works. It is an ethical demand: stop pretending you are a thing. You are a freedom, and the roles you play are chosen, not given.

Further Reading

For a deeper exploration of the themes in this quote, see Sartre's Being and Nothingness for the full argument, and our entry on authenticity for how Sartre's analysis of bad faith connects to the broader existentialist tradition. Sartre's related claim that man is condemned to be free extends the same logic into the domain of radical responsibility, while his dramatic exploration of hell as other people shows how the gaze of others complicates the project of living authentically.