CONCEPT
Bad Faith (Mauvaise Foi)
Sartre's name for the flight from freedom into the comfort of imagined necessity — a lie told not to another but to oneself, concealing the freedom that the self-deceiver exercises with every such lie.
Bad faith is the most commonly cited and most commonly misunderstood concept in Sartre's philosophy. It is not ordinary lying, because the liar knows the truth and deliberately conceals it from another person. The person in bad faith conceals the truth from herself. She holds two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — that she is free and that she is determined — and constructs an architecture of self-deception that lets her act on whichever belief is more convenient. Bad faith is not primarily a moral failing but a structural feature of consciousness: the always-available flight from freedom into the relief of imagined necessity. The AI moment has produced, in Sartre's diagnosis, the most sophisticated alibis in the history of human tool use — and therefore the richest field for bad faith analysis since the mid-twentieth century.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Sartre introduced bad faith in Being and Nothingness (1943) through a series of