I've been trying to get a better handle on what Sartre means by his introduction of the concept of "bad faith". Sometimes I get insight about what Sartre declares in his book Being And Nothingness by reading what other people write about their own thoughts of Sartre's notion of bad faith. He devotes and entire chapter to bad faith, and I've read it carefully. There were many times (practically on every page of a 800 page book) I went back to the beginning of the chapter and re-read the whole thing up to the point where I got stuck. It took months for me to wade through it in order to prepare myself to understand his point. Reading around, bad faith may in essence BE his only point, but it's a good one, that is, if I catch his drift.
Recently, I've been reading about how he thinks homo sapiens have two consciousness'. When I'm reading along I understand why he writes what he does, but when I leave off from the state I enter to read him, I don't carry the immediacy of my understanding with me. I find it almost impossible to reflect on the meaning (me-and-thee-ing) of what I just read. If you're interested, here's the link to Bad Faith in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_(existentialism)
What I read seems connected to the two kinds of consciousness he says humans have. The "bad faith" happens because of the polarity and concerns of the two consciousness'. It happens because human beings have no choice about freedom. They're free whether they like it or not. That's one side of the argument. One of the two consciousness' acts like this is so.
The other consciousness doesn't wanna take on the responsibility of human freedom. Human beings can't make some Earthly object God to get out of the need to take responsibility for their being the way they are, and declare themselves twice-born and "saved" by the shirking of this innate responsibility of freedom.
Shirking one's responsibility to their own inherent freedom to choose to do anything and everything a slightly different way exhibits bad faith with the other dimension of consciousness because it's not acting from one's own authenticity. s
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
