Alienation and Vulnerability in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre

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Alienation and Vulnerability in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre

122 Given the tension among these passages, we can see in some of the existing scholarship on bad faith at least three attempts to resolve the tension. First, consider a typical approach represented here by Thomas Busch. This approach claims that the attempt to “obtain the impossible,”68 is precisely the defining feature of the project of bad faith. While I cannot actually make myself an object, I am still free to try. This interpretation seems uncontroversial. Sartre’s famous example of the waiter in the café, to take one example, seems to manifest an “objectifying” behavior that he brought on himself. Sartre says that the waiter “attempt[s] to realize…a being-in-itself of the café waiter,” despite the fact that he “can not be in the mode of being in-itself.”69 So it seems clear, one can try the impossible, and this is how Sartre characterizes bad faith. While some scholars have debated whether the waiter is actually in bad faith, we only mean to show how bad faith is often understood as a form of “self-objectification,” and thus, “self-alienation.”70 We can also see in the attitudes considered in the previous section, love for example, failed as an attitude because it tried to “obtain the unobtainable.” The problem is that if this is a possibility that can be projected, why is it not a free choice? Of course, bad faith is a free choice, otherwise we would not be responsible for it. But if it is a free choice to attempt to be a thing, does this indicate the ability to 68 Busch, “Sartre and the Senses of Alienation,” 152. 69 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 60 (my emphasis). 70 See the debate in the journal Philosophy in the 1980s, for discussion of this issue, R. F. Khan, “D. Z. Phillips on Waiters and Bad Faith,” Philosophy 59, no. 229 (1984): 389–391; James Mark, “The Waiter and the Philosopher,” Philosophy 58, no. 225 (1983): 386–388; D. Z. Phillips, “Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,” Philosophy 56, no. 215 (1981): 23–31; Leslie Stevenson, “Sartre on Bad Faith,” Philosophy 58, no. 224 (1983): 253–258. For instance Mark claims that the waiter has been “forced…into…surrendering that capacity for taking his own decision which is the expression of his own freedom.” (Mark 1983, 387) Webber also believes that “it is mistaken to claim that the waiter himself is not in bad faith.” Jonathan Webber, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Routledge, 2009), 78. .

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