Sartre: Authentic Existence in Living in Bad Faith

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Sartre: authentic existence in contrast to living in bad faith

Jean Paul Sartre's philosophy is one of the most popular systems of thought in the school called existentialism. Sartre valued human freedom and choice, and held it in the highest regard. To be able to live an authentic existence, one must take responsibility for all the actions that he freely chooses. This total freedom that man faces often throws him into a state of existential anguish, wherein he is burdened by the hardship of having to choose all the time. Thus, there ensues the temptation for man to live a life of inauthenticity, by leaning on preset rules or guidelines, and objective norms. This would consist the idea of bad faith.

Bad faith is pretending that we are not free and responsible for what we are and do, when in fact we know that we are. It is also pretending that we are causally determined as inanimate things are, and that therefore we have no freedom and are not responsible for our lives, as victims of circumstances. To have a truly authentic existence, Sartre dictates that we live according to our own beliefs, that we insert meaning into the acts that we do, not finding meaning from what other people say. We should no live in regard to what other people think or say, because this would also push us into bad faith.

We choose, act, and take responsibility for everything, and thus we live, and exist. Life cannot be anything until it is lived, but each individual must make sense of it. The value of life is nothing else but the sense each person fashions into it. To argue that we are the victims of fate, of mysterious forces within us, of some grand passion, or heredity, is to be guilty of bad faith. Sartre says that we can overcome the adversity presented by our facticity, a term he designs to represent the external factors that we have no control over, such as the details of our birth, our race, and so on, by inserting nothingness into it.

By inserting nothingness, he means that we can turn the facticity into "nothing," and then give it a meaning all of our own making in order to make the most out of our situation and optimize our goals.

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