Bad faith and authenticity

Abstract

In Sartre's chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness the coquette woman is familiar to us all, symbolizing our intermittent need to abdicate the role of moral agent, to become passive, to cease to choose. The uneasy woman is meeting with her would-be lover, assessing his approach. She fears the implications of his flattery not because she does not wish to be flattered, but because she is afraid of being the kind of woman who allows herself to be so charmed. To admit reciprocal desire for the man would terrify her. She cannot afford to stand naked before herself; consent must be clothed; she must feel she has no choice. To achieve se If-deception the woman ignores the implications implicit in the man's behaviour, his attempts at seduction, Instead, when he expresses admiration for her she disregards this as the "first approach", and pretends that the man is admiring her personality (her "true self"), divorced from its body. This dualistic fantasy allows the woman to identify with her "soul" and deny ownership of the physical.