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Sartre’s Waiter, ‘Bad Faith’, and the Harms of Inauthenticity

With his famous discussion of a waiter, Sartre argues that to limit ourselves to predefined social roles is to live in ‘bad faith’. Living authentically means not reducing ourselves to static identities, but acknowledging that we are free, dynamic beings.

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O n any particular day, we might play a certain social role with our partners, another with our families, another with friends, and yet another with our colleagues.

The question might then arise: what does ‘being yourself’ really mean?

What does it mean to be an authentic human being?

In his 1943 work Being and Nothingness , the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre offers his view of inauthenticity with his famous discussion of a waiter who takes his role too seriously.

French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a Parisian cafe in 1946.

The waiter’s movement, Sartre writes, is “a little too precise, a little too rapid,” and he interacts with customers “a little too eagerly…a little too solicitous.”

Watching him, we feel a certain uncanniness — that something’s not quite right, Sartre says:

We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.

In other words, the waiter is so intent on perfectly acting out the role of waiter that he begins to define himself as a waiter, and suppresses other parts of himself.

As the contemporary philosopher Skye Cleary puts it in a 2020 essay on existentialism:

A waiter can play at it, but to believe that one is a role is bad faith because we are always becoming and growing, and so to view ourselves as some kind of fixed entity is to fool ourselves. It is to be a thing — like a rock — rather than a person with intentions and projects, with a past and a future.

The waiter, we might think, is just doing his job. But Sartre’s point here is that we must be careful not to collapse our boundless existential potential into things like our jobs.

The problem is not serving as a waiter; the problem is reducing one’s entire being down to a fixed, predefined social role. Indeed, the waiter is not guilty because he has a job as a waiter; in Sartre’s example, the waiter is guilty because that’s all he thinks he is .

Though Sartre’s use of a waiter is often criticized (indeed, there Sartre was in Parisian cafes, busily writing his philosophy, and using the people serving him as models of inauthenticity!), what he really wants to convey is that we’re all occasionally guilty of what the waiter in his example is doing.

In fact, we spend far more time living according to (and viewing ourselves in terms of) these kinds of passive, predefined social roles than we might care to admit.

For it is not just waiters or jobs: anything that boxes us into a particular mode of thinking or behaving, be it a particular label, expectation, or role — all are ways in which, rather than live for ourselves, we imitate something static .

And to imitate something static is to deny our own freedom as dynamic beings: by succumbing to social pressure and tacitly conforming to fixed, predefined roles, we deny ourselves the possibility of ever actually using our freedom.

Clothed in garments that are not our own, we live in hiding from ourselves. Playing roles, we are unnatural, inauthentic — or, as Holden Caulfield might put it, phony .

‘Bad faith’

S artre thus thinks we must be careful not to spend our whole lives acting out various social roles or fixing our perception of ourselves to certain descriptors — the sporty one, the career-driven one, the funny one, the parent — for doing so leads to suffering.

This suffering — felt as angst, anxiety, or as a kind of alienation from ourselves — arises from the fact that we foreclose possibilities to authentically grow and continue becoming.

By clinging to identity, we shrink and limit ourselves: by denying our existential potential, we live in what Sartre calls ‘bad faith’.

To live in bad faith is to deceive ourselves about the limits of our own freedom: it is to convince ourselves that we have to be a certain way, or else — when really there are far more possibilities available to us.

Indeed, as Heidegger notes in his discussion of authenticity , though our lives take place in the wider context of society (and everything we must do to forge a life for ourselves and our loved ones), bad faith arises from self-imposed constraints on how we view ourselves or spend our lives: bad faith is the denial of our own freedom.

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Living in bad faith means living like a thing , rather than a being

T o illuminate this further, Sartre distinguishes between a thing ‘in-itself’ ( en-soi ) and a being ‘for-itself’ ( pour-soi ). Inanimate objects like rocks are the former; intentional beings like humans are the latter.

The harm of fixed identities is that they reduce our dynamic subjectivity to a static objectivity: we are diminished from pour-soi to en-soi — rather than beings, we become things .

Interestingly, Sartre thought a certain ‘look’ from another person could have the same effect: in noticing the look, we see ourselves from the perspective of the ‘other’, and self-consciously collapse from pour-soi (a being) to en-soi (a thing). Hence one interpretation of Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.”

Conforming to socially recognized roles is an understandable — even inevitable — form of self-deception, for it can be comforting to think there is something secure about who we are, that we ‘fit’ in society and that nothing can change us. (In her succinct analysis of authentic love, Simone de Beauvoir discusses this further ).

But to be consumed by such roles — to limit our own view of ourselves to such roles — is to live like a thing . It is to deny our true humanity, to deny that we are self-making beings who, rather than statically exist in ourselves ( en-soi ), dynamically live for ourselves ( pour-soi ).

Living authentically

L iving in bad faith means we have become passively detached from life, ignoring all the freedom at our disposal. In our social lives, jobs, and even at leisure, we ‘switch ourselves off’.

If we want to liberate ourselves from bad faith and live authentically, Sartre says, we must resist the temptation of approaching life via predefined, self-limiting roles — of reducing ourselves down to things .

Instead, though it initially may feel uncomfortable or disruptive, we shouldn’t be afraid to acknowledge and take responsibility for — rather than deny or ignore — our dynamic human freedom, and all the possible ways of becoming available to us.

What do you make of Sartre’s analysis?

• Is ‘bad faith’ a concept that resonates with you? Does Sartre’s example of the waiter make sense?
• Do you think living out socially recognized roles is to live in ‘bad faith’?
• Or can one maintain authenticity even when assuming various identities in varying circumstances?

Learn more about Sartre’s existentialism

I f you’re interested in learning more about existentialist philosophy, consider checking out my brief introduction to existentialism as both a movement and philosophy . You might also like my reading list of existentialism’s best books , as well as the following related reads:

• Existence Precedes Essence: What Sartre Really Meant
• Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• Heidegger On Being Authentic in an Inauthentic World
• Kierkegaard On Finding the Meaning of Life
• Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards
• Confucius: Rituals Grind Our Characters Like Pieces of Jade (a counterpoint to Sartre: why living according to predefined social roles is not inauthentic, but an important part of what it means to be human)

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Authenticity

Jean-paul sartre on bad faith, in search of authenticity, individuality, and self-realization..

Updated July 24, 2024 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (d. 1980) called it ’bad faith’ [French, mauvaise foi ], the habit that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice.

By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice' and failing to recognize the multitude of other options that are available to him, a person places himself at the mercy of the circumstances in which he happens to find himself. Thus, the person is more akin to an object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terms, more akin to a ‘being-in-itself' than a ‘being-for-itself'.

People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature as conscious human beings, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, and thereby to acknowledge, even if only implicitly, their freedom as conscious human beings.

Two Examples

One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. For Sartre, the waiter's exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. Sartre points out that, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter must on some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter.

The lesson here is that, whenever we take up a social function, we need to be careful not to confuse this borrowed identity with our own. Our social function is often a convenient hiding place, but, if the boundaries are blurred, it can lead us to act against our own beliefs, principles, and interests—as often happens with politicians when they confuse means and ends, losing sight of the ends or ideals that, early on, drove them into politics .

Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date. The woman's date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest limply and indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, implicitly acknowledging, or betraying, her freedom to make choices.

Implications

For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, professional and social roles, and value systems.

In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles and value systems, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of pretending to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices.

Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.

My Top-7 Sartre quotations

• Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
• My life and my philosophy are one and the same.
• As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.
• Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.
• Life begins on the other side of despair.
• One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life. ​​​​​​
• Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.

Neel Burton is author of The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide .

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

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Not Just Lying to Oneself: An Examination of Bad Faith in Sartre

• Published: 18 February 2021
• Volume 38 , pages 103–121, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Stalin Joseph Correya   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7724-1716 1  

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A Correction to this article was published on 07 May 2021

This article has been updated

Bad faith is commonly conceived as lying to oneself or self-deception. This folk definition is too simplistic as it undermines the rich ontological underpinnings of bad faith. While both simple self-deception and bad faith are opposed to the general phenomenon of lying (to others), for Sartre bad faith is also meant to explain both the working of consciousness and the ubiquity of pre-judicative nothingness. Together, consciousness and nothingness supply the special ontological foundation required for bad faith to operate. To enter into bad faith is to escape from the anguish of the experience of insubstantiality and freedom into deterministic attitudes about the self, such as the deceiver/deceived bipolarity of Freudian psychoanalysis. Sartre rejects the thesis that there can be hidden motivations in consciousness by arguing for the reflexivity and the translucency of consciousness. Further, he would take the ubiquity of nothingness to explain the wide prevalence of bad faith as a state-of-being in the world. Bad faith cannot be equated with simple cases of self-deception as bad faith is sustained by a unique mix of ontological postulates. Sartre argues for this point cogently through his examples of bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In these examples, Sartre shows that sincerity , the purported anti-thesis of self-deception, causes one to fall even deeper into bad faith.

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Self-awareness and self-deception: a Sartrean perspective

Kierkegaardian Deconstruction and the Paradoxes of Faith

Markan faith, change history, 07 may 2021.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00239-5

Translations of and references to Being and Nothingness are from and to Sartre, J.P. (2003). Being and Nothingness . Hazel E. Barnes (tr.) (1957). First publishes in the original French in 1943. (Abington, Oxon: Routledge).

For a detailed treatment of bad faith as self-deception tout court , see Detmer ( 2013 ).

Sartre writes that in fear one is “afraid of dying,” in anguish one is “afraid of being afraid (2003, p. 53).” Anguish is thus the realization that any decision I take lacks sufficient justificatory grounds. It merely has a being that “ought to be sustained (2003, 54).”.

By “metastable,” Sartre implies susceptible to change; evanescent (2003, p. 73) .

For instance, Sartre writes that if being of consciousness is consciousness of being, then the being of freedom must be an unceasing consciousness of freedom.

Sartre reject the idea that consciousness can be reduced to knowledge, such that to know a particular consciousness, another act of knowing must be posited. If consciousness must be known by a knower , then a third term, to relate the known to the knower, would be required, and so on ad-infinitum .

Sartre argues that when a reflective consciousness takes a pre-reflective consciousness as its positional object, it endows the latter with a propositional content. For instance, in reflection, I may pass judgement on my pre-reflective consciousness: I “am ashamed of it, I am proud of it, I will it, I deny it, etc. (2003, p. 9–12)” Pre-reflective consciousness, on the other hand, is world-directed, and lacks any judgmental or propositional content. Thus, a pe-reflective consciousness cannot be known by a subsequent reflective consciousness. To be known, a pre-reflective consciousness must be reflexive. Sartre also contends that one can easily think of pre-reflective consciousnesses that have never been reflected on. The very fact that a pre-reflective consciousness can occur without the need for it to be revealed through subsequent reflection indicates the reflexivity of consciousness.

Certain interpreters of Sartre (Gordon 1985 ; Detmer 2013 ) explain the possibility of bad faith in terms of the denial in reflective consciousness of a truth that a person’s pre-reflective consciousness possesses. Such an epistemic explanation of the possibility of bad faith, however, is problematic in the wake of the thesis of consciousness’ reflexivity. The problem with a theory that explains bad faith in terms of distortion of the truth in reflection is that it fails to account for how consciousness hides the truth from itself.

“… consciousness is radically ontologically original , that is, that there is no higher concept under which it falls (Gardner 2009 , p. 38)”.

“Indeed, where would consciousness ‘come’ from if it did come from something? From the limbo of the unconscious or of the physiological? But if we ask ourselves how this limbo in its turn can exist and where it derives its existence, we find ourselves faced with the concept of passive existence; that is, we can no more absolutely understand how this non-conscious given (unconscious or physiological) which does not derive its existence from itself, can nevertheless perpetuate this existence and find in addition the ability to produce a consciousness (Sartre 2003 , p. 11).”.

Sartre cautions against misinterpreting the statement that causation is self-caused. Consciousness is not “prior to itself,” nor is it “an act (2003, p. 11).” Sartre further reckons that: “It would be unwise to misuse the expression ‘cause of self,’ which allows us to suppose a progression, a relation of self-cause to self-effect. It would be more exact to say simply: The existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself (2003, p. 11)” Besides, Sartre reiterates that consciousness does not emerge from a nothingness, as consciousness is “prior to nothingness. (2003, p. 11)” For Sartre, before consciousness arises, there can only be a “plenum of being” which cannot refer to a “absent consciousness (2003, p. 11).” Therefore, when Sartre contends that consciousness is self-caused, he does not mean that there is an absolute, witness-consciousness that causes specific instances of consciousness to arise. Instead, what he means is that though consciousness requires being to arise, being is not the cause of consciousness. Consciousness is a stand-alone, unique, and autonomous category.

“This different way of being of consciousness implies that any notion of self cannot be a notion of a self as substance in the sense that being-in-itself is the type of being of substances. And not being substantial means two interrelated things for Sartre: first, it means that there is no substratum for this type of being, which is pure appearance. Second, it means that this kind of being is not its own foundation (Onof 2013 , p. 33).”.

“Freedom is the human being putting his past out of play be secreting his own nothingness. Let us understand indeed that this original necessity of being its own nothingness does not belong to consciousness intermittently and on the occasion of particular negations. This does not happen just at a particular moment in psychic life when negative or interrogative attitudes appear; consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its past being. (Sartre 2003 , p. 52).”.

“Man is the being through whom nothingness must come to the world. But this question immediately provokes another: What must man be in his being in order that through him nothingness may come to being? (Sartre 2003 , p. 48).

“Non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment which is conditioned and supported by non-being (Sartre 2003 , p. 11);” “This example is sufficient to show that non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being. (Sartre, p. 35).” Also see Richmond ( 2013 , p. 97).

“There are questions which on the surface do not permit a negative reply – like, for example, the one which we put earlier, ‘What does his attitude reveal to us?’ But actually we see that it is always possible with questions of this type to reply: ‘Nothing’ or ‘Nobody’ or ‘Never.’ Thus at the moment when I ask, ‘Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man to the world?’ I admit on principle the possibility of a negative reply such as, ‘No, such a conduct does not exist.’ This means that we admit to being faced with the transcendent fact of the non-existence of such conduct. (Sartre 2003 , p. 28–9).”.

“But this intra-mundane Nothingness cannot be produced by Being-in-itself; the notion of Being as full positivity does not contain Nothingness as one of its structures.”.

“There is a trans-phenomenality of non-being as of being (Sartre 2003 , 32–33).’’.

“That is actually what the critic is demanding of his victim – that he constitute himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a fief, in order that the friend should return it to him subsequently -like a suzerain to his vassal (Sartre 2003 , p. 88).”.

Sartre writes that if sincerity or candor is the universal value of human existence, then “what is posited is not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being (2003, p. 82).” Sartre argues that the ideal of sincerity is impossible to achieve, as it is incompatible with how consciousness is structured (2003, p. 85). If consciousness (or conscious being – being-for-itself) is “not what it is and what it is not,” then any attempt to be “what one truly is” is absurd and futile (2003, p. 85).

In BN Sartre does not talk about authenticity; he merely declares it to be the anti-thesis of bad faith (2003, p. 94). For a constructive account of authenticity in the commentarial literature on Sartre, see Webber ( 2013 , p. 131–142).

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Correya, S.J. Not Just Lying to Oneself: An Examination of Bad Faith in Sartre. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 38 , 103–121 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00232-y

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Received : 11 August 2019

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Accepted : 23 January 2021

Published : 18 February 2021

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-021-00232-y

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Understanding Jean-Paul Sartre – What is Bad Faith?

March, 2019 By By: L.A. Brandenburg 1 Comment

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), French philosopher, novelist, playwright, political activist

Jean-Paul Sartre, author of Being and Nothingness , may very well be the most widely know philosopher of the 20th century. Understanding his philosophy, however, can prove to be challenging. But when broken down and explained clearly, it not only makes sense, but can be very meaningful for living life.

First some fun facts about Sartre:

• He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1964, but turned it down.
• He spent 9 months as a prisoner of war in 1940 (World War II) while serving in the French army as a meteorologist.
• He shares a grave at Montparnasse Cemetery with life-long partner and fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
• He was arrested in Paris, 1968 for civil disobedience, but was later pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle (de Gaulle stating, ‘You don’t arrest Voltaire’).

Key Concepts

In trying to understand Sartre’s philosophy, it helps to look at some key concepts and break them down bit by bit.

Here are some general definitions of the concepts discussed in this section:

Freedom :  Our freedom (to choose) constitutes us as humans; Freedom is our essential nature. Responsibility :  With absolute freedom comes absolute responsibility; We are each responsible for everything we choose. Anguish (angst) :  The responsibility of life produces an overwhelming sense of anguish (angst). Bad Faith :  A denial of our essential freedom; a form of self-deception.

All of these concepts are intimately connected, but what is essential to Sartre’s philosophy and existentialism, in general, is the idea of Freedom – our freedom to choose .

We are all free to make choices in life. In fact, Sartre defines freedom ‘as the definition of a man’. We choose our career, we choose our clothes, we choose what to eat, where to vacation, who to be friends with, etc.

This freedom is something that we cannot escape; we cannot not choose. Sartre famously says, ‘we are condemned to be free’ . He says, ‘condemned’ because this freedom is not always something we want.

All through our life, we have no choice but to make choices. Even if I do not ‘choose’, I have made a choice.

We are our choices. – Sartre

It follows that freedom brings a lot of Responsibility . We decide what to do in life and who we are by the choices we make. We are responsible for our own life and are exactly what we have chosen to be.

If you are unhappy about your life, you are the only one responsible. You can blame nothing or no one else – the choices have been yours.

According to Sartre,

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Responsibility & Anguish

Once we know we have freedom to choose and are the only one responsible for our life, we are often overcome by feelings of anguish (angst). Being responsible for everything in our life is simply too much to bear.

There are so many choices and we will always know that we could have chosen another path in life. We can rely on no one else and life offers us little help or guidance. This is Anguish (angst) .

This is obviously an uncomfortable and unwanted feeling that we want to escape.

How do we rid ourselves of this responsibility & anguish?

Bad Faith is a form of self-deception. It refers to behaviors we employ and choices we make that try to deny our freedom. It is in bad faith where we try to escape the responsibility of freedom and rid ourselves of the anguish we feel.

In Bad Faith we find ourselves living by labels or titles, and following rules and guidelines set by external entities. Anytime we make a choice that is based on some role we are playing or some label we are trying to live by, we are living in bad faith.

For example: a young man grows up in poverty and wants to attend university. He determines that it is not possible for him to do this given his circumstances. He accepts this label of poverty and denies his freedom to explore options in order to attend university.

Another example: a Catholic wife is unhappy in marriage, but refuses to divorce because of her strict beliefs in the church. She is playing a role and allowing the choice to be made for her.

It is oftentimes much easier and more comfortable to believe that our choices are determined by outside forces.  This way there is no decision to be made on our part (and we rid ourselves of anguish by believing we have no choice).

In Bad faith, we blame outside forces for our situation and the choices we make. We blame our parents for how we act as adults, we blame our children for holding us back from life, we blame everything from human nature to society to emotions to God.

We do anything to escape the responsibility and the reality that our life is exactly as we have decided it. Sartre says, ‘ Man is what he wills himself to be ‘ .

When we live in bad faith, we claim victim and define ourself with labels (wife, student, poor, Christian, uneducated, widow, criminal, etc.).

For Sartre, this is the equivalent to living an inauthentic life. We are denying our freedom and therefore denying ourselves. We must face the reality that we can choose differently at any moment. We are not defined by a label or role.

It may be true that we are a mother or a wife or a widow, etc., but it is our choice to decide what those things mean to us. We can make a different choice at any moment.

Something to note here : Sartre does not suggest that our past does not affect who we are. One may say, ‘But it is true that I am a father and a husband, since I married and fathered a child’. This is undeniable and part of our facticity .

Facticity : Details about our life that cannot be changed. For example, the time and place of your birth, previous life choices, life events (death of your parents, for example), etc.

Our facticity is not something that we can change – not something we have choice over. Here are some examples of facticity: age, height, the death of family members, past choices made, eye color, etc.

These things are basically facts about your life, yet you are still responsible for deciding what those things mean to you – how you interpret them.

What does it mean for you to be a father? What does it mean for you to have lost a parent – that is, how will you let it affect your life? What does it mean that you are now in your 40’s?, etc.

We cannot escape choice. In order to live a life of value and authenticity, we must be true to ourselves and choose for ourselves.

Bad Faith is limiting, but the limits are what we choose.

Take responsibility; make of yourself what you will. You can make any choice; this is what is so inspiring about the existential philosophy. At any moment, you can choose to be something/ someone entirely different.

Think of yourself as an artist with a blank canvas. You can paint whatever you want on that canvas, it is yours to do what you will!

Read more about Sartre here .

November, 2018 at 2:27 am

You choose. This is probably why there is an epidemic of depression sweeping the world. With the advances in technology and people’s ability to move in the world the choices today are infinite. This leads to great angst… if only I can identify and make the right choices will I be safe, happy and contented. And we can all observe that people do not attain these desirable states. Hence the depression in the world.

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Jean Paul Sartre: Bad Faith Concept Case Study

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Everyone Lies

Sartre’s philosophical notion, sartre’s example, the woman is in bad faith, people live in bad faith, works cited.

Many people have acknowledged that they have to tackle with liars. More so, one of the latest trends of the modern society is the notion popularized by the famous Dr. House: everybody lies. It goes without saying that the essence of lying has been considered by many renowned thinkers.

Sartre reveals a very interesting facet of lying introducing his idea of bad faith. He also provides precise examples to explain his theory. Obviously, Sartre’s ideas can be applicable in real life as it is possible to find numerous examples even in one’s everyday life.

According to Sartre lying presupposes complete possession of the truth (48). In other words, the liar knows exactly certain facts and tries to hide them changing them or withholding them. Therefore, deceit is a process which consists of two stages: knowing the truth and withholding it.

Sartre calls this pattern the “ideal” lie (48). However, he also claims that people often deny the truth instead of simply substituting facts. For instance, people may (or may not) know the complete truth, and they do not try to substitute facts to deceive anyone. People’s consciousness often tries to deceive itself.

In simple terms, even though people know the truth they tend to forget about it or pay no attention to it focusing on certain desirable points (Sartre 49). Sartre calls this state of negation of the truth the state of bad faith. Thus, when people are in bad faith, they focus on desirable information (though it can be untrue) denying (or simply ignoring) the truth (Sartre 49).

This does not mean that people are deliberately cynical and hypocritical. Sometimes they do not notice that they are in bad faith. Sartre mentions that people often feel guilty when they acknowledge that they were in bad faith in this or that situation. Interestingly, Sartre also points out that sometimes people try not to acknowledge the truth at all.

The philosopher states that psychoanalysis can unveil the truth, but patients often refuse to acknowledge it and even remove themselves from the psychoanalytical treatment (Sartre 52). Admittedly, people try to remain in their comfort zones. Therefore, there can be no surprise that many people lie to themselves, i.e. they are in bad faith.

The concept of bad faith can be also explained with the help of such notions as facticity and transcendence. More so, it is possible to claim that these three notions are closely connected. Thus, facticity is the number of external factors that influences people, i.e. it is people’s background. Admittedly, people’s backgrounds do affect their perception of the world.

Thus, if it had been a norm for hotel receptionists to be impolite and indifferent, the majority of these people would not have pretended to be that careful to details and that attentive to clients. However, there are norms that limit people’s freedom to certain extent. These limits are the necessary background for the development of bad faith in people.

As for the concept of transcendence, Sartre also utilizes it. The concept of transcendence helps Sartre to explain people’s attitude towards each other. Sartre introduces the notion of for-itself which stands for people’s desire to reach the truth, to acknowledge some responsibilities to interact with others.

Sartre notes that for-itself often tries to understand subjectivity of others. Of course, this peculiarity of human beings contributes to the development of bad faith as people (for many reasons, consciously or subconsciously) may try to fit other people’s world.

Sartre claims that it is possible to find many examples of people in bad faith in everyday life. For instance, he provides an example of a woman who is having her first date with a man (Sartre 55). The woman is in bad faith as she tries to focus on desirable points ignoring the truth. Thus, she tries not to think of the major aim of the date, i.e. the necessity to make her decision whether there will be other dates with the man.

She focuses on having a good time enjoying complements and interesting conversation. The woman tries not to think (she is quite successful in that) that the man is attracted by her body. Instead, the woman tries to think the man is attracted by her personality.

More so, Sartre observes the behavior of the woman and assumes that she is eager to postpone the time of decision making ignoring the man’s overt signals. For instance, when the man puts his hand on the woman’s hand, she distracts her attention (and the man’s attention) from her body speaking of some abstract things. Thus, the woman escapes the necessity to vividly accept or refuse the man’s offer, so to speak.

Admittedly, in the situation described the woman is in bad faith as she denies the truth focusing on something desirable. Of course, the woman understands possible outcomes of the date, i.e. either this will be the first and the last date or there will be more dates. The woman also understands that the man pays much attention to her physical appearance. Finally, she understands that there can be physical contact with the man in future.

However, the woman subconsciously ignores these facts she, undoubtedly, know. She focuses on desirable points. She deceives herself trying to think of the nice conversation they are having, instead of directly responding to the man’s signal (touching the man’s hand or taking her hand away).

When the man pays her compliments she tries to think they are addressed to her personal qualities rather than her appearance. Apparently, the woman is not that cynical, but she does not want to leave her comfort zone. The woman’s actions can be regarded as subconscious as she does not act in that way deliberately. Her consciousness chooses to deceive itself to remain in the comfort zone. This state is what Sartre calls bad faith.

It is important to note that the example is a bright illustration of Sartre’s concept of bad faith which is explained as the extreme freedom of choice. Thus, Sartre claims that people are always free to choose. Of course, there are certain limits.

However, people (or rather people’s consciousness and subconsciousness) still have options. It is up to an individual to decide. Bad faith is one of the manifestations of this freedom. Thus, people know the truth but make their choice and deceit others and themselves. This is the choice people are ‘doomed’ to make. This is the kind of freedom people enjoy.

To sum up, Sartre’s notion of bad faith is manifested in real life settings. People tend to deceive themselves not to leave their comfort zones. Sartre’s theory fits the modern life perfectly. It is also possible to say that it advocates people’s hypocrisy to certain extent. Sartre claims that people often live in bad faith not because they are so cynical, but because this is the very nature of the human being.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. London: Taylor & Francis, 1956. Print.

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• "Existence Precedes Essence" a Term by Sartre
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• Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is a Camusian Absurd Hero, That’s to Say He Has No Hope
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Jean-Paul Sartre

Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”. Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns, like Nausea (1938), The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–49), and plays like No Exit (1947), Flies (1947), and Dirty Hands (1948), to name just a few. He founded and co-edited Les Temps Modernes and mobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, he was a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially in the period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding to some calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then French President Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrest Voltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had less academic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier in France, dating roughly from the rise of “post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuze dedicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wake of Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature (Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’s late work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault 1966 [1994: 541–2]) [ 1 ] . In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and of ongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the most important insights of his most famous philosophical book, Being and Nothingness . In addition, significant parts of his oeuvre remain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Little attention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works, such as Imagination (1936) or its sequel, The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophers have seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), or his various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the works of Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongst the works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of their core ideas and claims.

1. Life and Works

2. transcendence of the ego: the discovery of intentionality, 3. imagination, phenomenology and literature, 4.1. negation and freedom, 4.2 bad faith and the critique of freudian psychoanalysis, 4.3 the look, shame and intersubjectivity, 5. existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project, 6. existentialist marxism: critique of dialectical reason, 7. politics and anti-colonialism, a. primary literature, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness , summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middle of that century in Albert Camus’ The Rebel , notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book in Les Temps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to very publicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, at least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as presented in Word s, Sartre’s childhood was filled with books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered the realities of his own appearance revealed through his mother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was not classically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—the École Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS was oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete). Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre from 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and his great philosophical novel, Nausea . He never entered a classical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology had already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the French angoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see War Diaries ). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, No Exit (1947), Being and Nothingness (1943), and then completing Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding and coediting Les Temps Modernes , commencing from 1943 (Sartre’s major contributions are collected in his series Situations , especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see section 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been, but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in 1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral procession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre had been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics, the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remain somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews were produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortly before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are not publicly available.

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3, when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’s description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]). From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty of Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as a means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world that would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartre became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s early translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and his introductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent the following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’s method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students, Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’s phenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title “Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influence over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptive approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the idealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against the kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartre famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true, as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness of something, and if intentionality accounts for this fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to Sartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis, intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to consciousness as it really is , and not as a mere correlate of an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in tune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical account of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack of necessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method of phenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first significant philosophical contribution, Transcendence of the Ego . With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more critical way with the conception of the “transcendental ego” presented in Husserl’s Ideas and defends his realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic tendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publication of Logical Investigations . Stressing the irreducible transparency of intentional experience—its fundamental orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may be—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of Sartre’s most fundamental claims in Transcendence of the Ego is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiences as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world . It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations about the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to be found “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5th Logical Investigation , in which Husserl had initially followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol. 2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), the sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such an account would entail that the perception of an object would always also involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind of perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thus threatening to disrupt the “transparency” or “translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perception and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that Husserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the existentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, which we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against these charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of a self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego is the transcendent object of one’s reflexive experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that was initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me . The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides , so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “ the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken ”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone ). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience him as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]). Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements about one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective (“ irréfléchies ”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of Sartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflective consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many of the pivotal arguments of Being and Nothingness , as we indicate in the relevant sections below.

For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations. Along with The Emotions: Outline of a Theory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so as to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engaging in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of objects that do not precede but result from the imaging capacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartre claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds, which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs to.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging consciousness is essentially characterised by its negativity. The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of the image” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a consciousness of something that is not , whether its object is absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent to intuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essay investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real . The acts of imagination can consequently be described as “magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are designed to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows consciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute it as a proper world : “the nihilation of the real is always implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity of surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion of “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’s philosophical thought after the publication of the Imaginary . Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]). Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that which motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the creation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps above all, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our “being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereading of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding remarks of the Imaginary extend the scope of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product of artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a theatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to experience—though only imaginatively—the world it gives flesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble of new things , of objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates Sartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays he dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses of recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s of his own summative view, What is literature? (Sartre 1948a [1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his Situations (1947, Sit. I ), Sartre defends a strong version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events and adventures of the characters as if she was living them in first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the particular feel of reality that defines Sartre’s phenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017), which became highly influential over the following decades in French literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination of the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s own freedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical “spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre 1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone of the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac and Freedom”, in Sartre Sit. I ).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of reality as it is . In What is Literature? , Sartre describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as if it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministic chain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists in obliging her reader “to create what [she] discloses ”, and so to share with the writer the responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation (Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted from these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of Sartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic: freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels, particularly in Nausea , a novel which Sartre began as he was studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’s pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological analyses, making Nausea a beautifully illustrated expression of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conception of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a public garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists. Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumatic moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated Sartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the early dense parts of Being and Nothingness . While the experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual understanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise of the existentialist “movement”, along with works from de Beauvoir from this period (e.g., The Ethics of Ambiguity ). We cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “human reality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein), based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself ( pour soi ) and being-in-itself ( en soi ), roughly between that which negates and transcends (consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of metaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” by assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom). However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience (i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant role. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be a deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchant criticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothing noths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German), Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter of which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is contingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to found itself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through being’s attempt “to remove contingency from its being”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the apprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartre describes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café. The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” of Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They are not given as an “objective fact”, as a “component of the real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation throughout Being and Nothingness . He argues that the apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction, Sartre suggests that there is not less after the storm, just something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly see it in terms of that which it is not —the building, say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world, since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basic question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish. In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not, there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of such negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more “concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text, which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action, in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical glosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “being which is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are free to “project” anything at all. The for-itself is always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he puts it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]). Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s suffering its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us, and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are “condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, with resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous, especially after World War 2 and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In Being and Nothingness he provides various examples that are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for the hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—is that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge, competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct recognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action of collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances, however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the chapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability to extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and actions, and is nothing without such action.

Sartre’s account of bad faith ( mauvaise foi ) is of major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a critique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretive account, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itself indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is both simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In short, Freud’s differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a “liar” and a “lied to” duality within a single consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure, and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which today might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather than the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness. Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused of recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism that is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense. Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as “Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That is not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimately wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around the “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models of the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to introduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognise that the “germ of its destruction” lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in Being and Nothingness .

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His most famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise themselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms of their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As Sartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not . (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., Anti-semite and the Jew ).

It is important to recognise that no project of “sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being what one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself. Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited. On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection (there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g., third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the arguments from Transcendence of the Ego examined in section 2 . In Being and Nothingness , the temporal aspects of this non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of identity, because we are also our “projects”, and these are intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of “faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there are what he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says these are “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from two perspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good faith in Being and Nothingness , other than the enigmatic footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are more sustained treatments of authenticity in his Notebooks for an Ethics and in Anti-semite and Jew (see also the entry on authenticity ).

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concrete relations with others”, which is essentially a restatement of the “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle for recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of mind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other (see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the significance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both within phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which are far from trivial. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre suggests that various philosophical positions—realism and idealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on what he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution to the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in which in such an experience we become a “transcendence transcended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imagine that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural associations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a period of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or “non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understanding that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an object in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience of shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising (at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition, notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind) rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic, begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what he calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in a lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of the other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjective and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956: 413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes (masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 429])

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last chapters of Being and Nothingness , Sartre presents his own conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a “human-reality” in the 14 th notebook from his War Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a “psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219), allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of their fundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—a paradox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight the fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis to Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s “empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims to remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’s phenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive with consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however, the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less an inheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was the case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamental critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life remains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhat impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the meaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that respect. The human psyche cannot be fully analysed and explained as a mere result of external constraints acting like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts have no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to one’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of the power invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe one’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s free project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility. Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’s project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingness , claiming that

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the paradoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge” combined with a “true understanding” ( réelle comprehension ) of oneself (1972, Sit. IX : 111). The legitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis of consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre, analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of unification or “totalization” ( totalisation ) that commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of one’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason, this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the subject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the subject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’s existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that he is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing its logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred for nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of himself that commands the whole of the French poète maudit ’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his freedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and he wanted this “nature” which others discovered in him to appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point everything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for a single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for the subject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the subject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless destiny —a destiny in which one’s sense of freedom and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did come to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes of himself is completely identified with what is called his destiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication of Being and Nothingness , Sartre refines this original conception of existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire first, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himself in Words ), warning against the dangers of all kinds of determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical analyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as he substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a central role in the development of Sartre’s thought from the early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness ; and his later attempt to take into consideration the social, historical and political factors that are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s free choice of their own existence. Already in his War Diaries from 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality” arises from Sartre’s attempt to understand rather than explain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) Emperor Wilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to the aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). The application of his method to the specific cases of these French writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedom back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented through Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis. Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography in The Family Idiot can be read as synthesising the hermeneutical methodology theorised in Search for A Method and the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initial choice of themselves that arose from Being and Nothingness . Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of Flaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to account for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a “frustrated and jealous younger brother” and “unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that made him “the author of Madame Bovary ” (Sartre 1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel and masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final objectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is now careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions within which this project only finds its full intelligibility. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal, beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits him to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect as the realm of his genius.

While Search for a Method (1957) had been published earlier, it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first volume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of what is his final systematic work of philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason . The second volume, “The Intelligibility of History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. It would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English, which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent neglect. It is also a book that rivals Being and Nothingness for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror , Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy. Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally fundamental. The way in which this plays out in Critique is through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of the prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vast Critique here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptual innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as “the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation that had only minimally featured in Being and Nothingness . It is the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre 1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive here, as it also was in Being and Nothingness ). For Sartre, then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual. Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls das Man in Being and Time ) to becoming competitors and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic consciousnesses of Being and Nothingness . In the Critique , otherness becomes produced not simply through the look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passive activity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel compelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrous forces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the “group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a group relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group in fusion is not a collective à la the practico-inert, but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114). We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’s own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing, turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something together. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it must fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that Flynn summarises as follows:

• That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not my means;
• That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I integrate him into my totalizing project;
• That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very movement by which I project myself towards mine;
• That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine. (Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004 [2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an “apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and (potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has the reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to meet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the form of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures. Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”). From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to do one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical otherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976: 655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as well as the problems associated with institutionality just described. Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the Critique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both addresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifies the social and political reflections of much of his later work.

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich and varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were important themes in his post Being and Nothingness work and are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettre , as Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995: xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectual scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , L’Express , and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These concerned not only the French Algerian and African “colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had challenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenological existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least, Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some of the categories deployed in Being and Nothingness . There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In racism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle of irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance which is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]), as well as what Sartre calls passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society) may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance. In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even if we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jew , composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural) and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power (see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with Fanon that culminated in his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where also Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literary and artistic productions since section 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? , Sartre argues that in a society that remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century ( à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre , two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• 1975, Magazine littéraire , 103–4: 9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

• 1979, special issue on Sartre, Obliques , 18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published since Sartre’s death in

• Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993, Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992 , (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS and Bowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University.

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 individual works published by sartre.

• 1957, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness , Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
• 2004, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description , Andrew Brown (trans.), London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
• 1936b [2012], L’imagination , Paris: F. Alcan. Translated as The Imagination , Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012. doi:10.4324/9780203723692
• 1938 [1965], La Nausée: Roman , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Nausea , Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• 1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalit”, La Nouvelle Revue française , 304: 129–132. Reprinted in Situations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P. Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 1(2): 4–5, 1970. doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
• 1939b [1948], Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions , Paris: Hermann. Translated as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1940 [2004], L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’imagination , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination , Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.), Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
• 1956, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library.
• 2018, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology , Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
• 1945–49, Les Chemins de la liberté (The roads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novels L’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945), Le sursis (The reprieve, 1945), and La mort dans l’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
• 1946a [2007], L’existentialisme est un humanisme , (Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , John Kulka (ed.), Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• 1946b [1948/1995], Réflexions sur la question juive , Paris: P. Morihien. Translated as Anti-semite and Jew , George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948 (reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
• 1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et Révolution I”, Les Temps Modernes , 9: 37–63 and 10: 1–32. Reprinted in Situations III , Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
• 1947a [1967], Baudelaire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Baudelaire , Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton, 1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
• 1947b [1949], Huis-Clos , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1944. Translated as No Exit , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1947c [1949], Les Mouches , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1943. Translated as The Flies , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, Les Temps modernes . Collected in Situations II . Translated in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• 1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology , Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
• 1948c [1949], Les mains sales: pièce en sept tableaux , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated as Dirty Hands , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1952a [1963], Saint-Genêt, Comédien et martyr , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1963.
• 1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, published in Situations VI . Translated as “The Communists and Peace”, in The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort , Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1968.
• 1957 [1963/1968], Questions de méthode , Paris: Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated as Search for a Method , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
• 1960a [1976], Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques , Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles , Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in 1985.
• 1960b, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The condemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
• 1964a [1964], Les mots , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Words , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller, 1964.
• 1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, New Left Review , I/58: 43–66. Partially published in Situations IX .
• 1971–72 [1981–93], L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 , 3 volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 , 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
• 1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interview with Benny Lévy, Le Nouvel observateur , n° 800, 801, 802. Reprinted as L’espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. followed by the volume, e.g., Sit. V .

• 1947, Situations I: Critiques littéraires , Paris: Gallimard. Partially translated in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
• 1948, Situations II , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1949, Situations III: Lendemains de guerre , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964b, Situations IV: Portraits , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964c, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism , Azzdedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001. doi:10.4324/9780203991848
• 1964d, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1965, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2 , Paris:, Gallimard.
• 1971, Situations VIII: Autour de 68 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1972, Situations IX: Mélanges , Paris: Gallimard. Material from Situations VIII et IX translated as Between Existentialism and Marxism , John Mathews (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1974.
• 1976, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken , Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
• 1981, Œuvres romanesques , Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• 1988, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• 2005, Théâtre complet , Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

• 1983a, Cahiers pour une morale , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Notebook for an Ethics , David Pellauer (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1983b [1984], Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 - mars 1940 , Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with an addendum. Translated as The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War , Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• Tome 1: 1926–1939
• Tome 2: 1940–1963
• 1984, Le Scenario Freud , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Freud Scenario , Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• 1985, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History , Quintin Hoare (trans.), London: Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso. [unfinished].
• 1989, Vérité et existence , Paris: Gallimard [written in 1948]. Translated as Truth and Existence , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1990, Écrits de jeunesse , Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

• Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978, Sartre by Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon , transcription of film, Richard Seaver (trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976], Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
• –––, 1960 [1962], La force de l’âge , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life , Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962.
• –––, 1963 [1965], La force des choses , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force of Circumstance , Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
• –––, 1981 [1986], La cérémonie des adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974 , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre , Patrick O’Brian (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, Erkenntnis , 2(1): 219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), in Logical Positivism , A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970, Les écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life , Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, 2004, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 , David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995], Points de Suspension: Entretiens , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie en effet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 , Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Fanon, Francis, 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs , Paris, Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1961, Les damnés de la terre , Paris: Maspero. Translated as The Wretched of the Earth , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-il mort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy), Arts et Loisirs , no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted in Dits et Écrits , Daniel Defert, François Ewald, & Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2001, Dits et Écrits , volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962], Sein und Zeit , Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
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• Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 8(3): 309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
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• –––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014, Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315729695
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• Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000, Sartre face à la phénoménologie: Autour de “L’Intentionnalité” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• –––, 2005, Sartre, avant la phénoménologie: autour de “La nausée” et de la “Légende de la vérité” (Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
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• Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
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• Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
• –––, 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, Sebastian, 2009, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Reader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
• Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980], Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée et civilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated as Sartre and the Problem of Morality , Robert V. Stone (trans.), (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008, Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre’s Political Theory , (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
• Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
• Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
• Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
• Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger
• Existentialist Ethics: Issues in Existentialist Ethics
• Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
• The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism
• Moati, Raoul, 2019, Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions du Cerf.
• Morris, Katherine J., 2008, Sartre , (Blackwell Great Minds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015, Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelles lectures , Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïté de la troisième personne”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 115(2): 269–287. doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
• Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “Existentialist Methodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology , Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317–336. doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
• Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre , (Library of Living Philosophers 16), La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Schroeder, William Ralph, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors: The Self and the Other , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780429024511
• Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes”, Social Text , 13/14: 195–215.
• –––, 1991, “Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures”, in Sartre Alive , Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 53–82.
• Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Van den Hoven, Adrian and Andrew N. Leak (eds.), 2005, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration , New York: Berghahn Books.
• Webber, Jonathan (ed.), 2011, Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism , London ; New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203844144
• Walzer, Michael, 1995, “Preface” to the 1995 English translation reprint of Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew , New York: Schocken Books.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up this entry topic at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism , by Christian J. Onof at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• U.K. Sartre Society
• North American Sartre Society
• Groupe d'Études Sartriennes
• Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

aesthetics: existentialist | authenticity | Beauvoir, Simone de | Camus, Albert | existentialism | Fanon, Frantz | Foucault, Michel | Heidegger, Martin | Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | Kierkegaard, Søren | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | Négritude | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nothingness | phenomenology | self-consciousness: phenomenological approaches to

Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.

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Comparing Constitutional Bad Faith

• Stephen Gardbaum

Response To:

• Constitutional Bad Faith  by  David E. Pozen
• February 2016
• See full issue

David Pozen’s Constitutional Bad Faith 1 is a rich, insightful, and highly original article identifying, and then exploring the causes and consequences of, two gaps in American constitutional culture. The first is between the scarcity of good faith principles in constitutional doctrine and their near-ubiquity in nonconstitutional doctrine, especially in private and international law. The second is between constitutional doctrine and constitutional discourse outside the courts, where allegations of bad faith are legion. In this brief Response, after raising a question about his emphasis on judicial underenforcement, I mostly supplement Pozen’s analysis by considering each of these gaps in turn from a variety of comparative perspectives.

I. The Constitutional/Nonconstitutional Law Gap

Throughout his discussion of the first, doctrinal deficit, Pozen posits that good faith norms in constitutional law are judicially underenforced. Indeed, in express reference to Lawrence Sager’s seminal work on the phenomenon, he suggests that the norm against constitutional bad faith may be the ultimate underenforced norm in the American legal system. 2 For Sager, judicially underenforced norms are still law and so are legally binding on other public officials. 3 But even putting this potentially complicating issue aside, is good faith a judicially underenforced norm in constitutional law or is there (mostly) no such norm in the first place? Why presume that constitutional law is just like private and international law, except that judges have distinctively strong reasons to ignore or underenforce good faith norms in the former? Can one reason from the few specific norms of this kind — the Oath, Take Care, and Full Faith and Credit Clauses — to the existence of a general one? Can one infer from the absence of x that x is underenforced? After all, Sager was discussing such express and indisputable constitutional norms as the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection and the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against taking property without just compensation.

In fact, there may be affirmative reason to question the presumption that, in norm-existence terms, constitutional law is just like private and international law. Pozen deploys a spotlight to search for explanations of the doctrinal deficit in the internal workings and logic of constitutional law itself, presenting a range of specific institutional and self-interested reasons why judges are, and perhaps should be, reluctant to enforce good faith norms in this area. 4 But might a floodlight also reveal a broader, more basic, or “architectural” explanation rooted in the general natures of, and comparison between, constitutional law on the one hand and private and international law on the other? Although constitutional and international law are both “law for states” rather than “law by states,” 5 private and international law have in common that they mostly (or at least classically) regulate horizontal relationships among formally equal actors: private individuals and sovereign states, respectively. Moreover, in such regulation, significant roles are played by consent, custom, and bilateralism. This common regulatory posture seems particularly apposite for duties of good faith, as part of treating other actors as equals. Even the special types of horizontal relationships that give rise to fiduciary duties in private law — agent and principal, trustee and beneficiary, director and corporation — can be seen as ways of requiring that (the interests of) the other party be treated on at least an equal basis, in situations of asymmetric information and control between two actors.

By contrast, constitutional law significantly (though, of course, not exclusively) regulates vertical relationships, between the state and its citizens or a federal government and constituent units. These are not relationships between formal, or actual, equals and the regulatory roles of consent and bilateralism tend to be weak, if not non-existent. Accordingly, as a general matter this may well be less fertile terrain for notions of good faith, independent of issues about judicial enforcement. Interestingly, in those specific areas in which constitutional law does regulate more horizontal relationships — among the “coequal” branches of a national government, among constituent federal units inter se, or where constitutional rights bind individuals — one might expect a greater role for legal duties of good faith or their equivalents, such as “comity” or “full faith and credit.” To be clear, this point is not that good faith obligations are categorically excluded from vertical relationships or apply only to actors who are on an equal footing, but that overall, one might expect them to be fewer in constitutional law than in private and international law, to be more the exception than the general background rule, and for those that do exist to be quite specific. For example, liberal democracy is widely thought to require that governments treat their citizens with equal dignity and respect, which arguably gives rise to a particular duty of good faith or its near equivalent in the constitutional-rights jurisprudence of such regimes, as explained and illustrated below.

This all said, it is unclear how much in the article really turns on the underenforcement thesis per se, despite the emphasis on it. The two gaps would still exist, indeed would be greater, if duties of good faith were simply rarer, rather than underenforced, in constitutional doctrine. I suspect its major appeal to Pozen is more of a rhetorical one in that, as in Sager’s account, it suggests the slack will/should be taken up elsewhere, outside the courts, which foreshadows the second gap between constitutional doctrine and discourse.

Let me now turn to the comparative question that Pozen identifies in footnote 115 as worthy of careful study but, “tentative hypothesis” aside, beyond the scope of the article. 6 Is this marginal status of bad faith distinctive to American constitutional law, or is it a general feature of constitutional adjudication, perhaps in part for the “architectural” reason just stated? Moreover, to the extent it is distinctive, what might explain this new third gap, between U.S. and non-U.S. constitutional doctrine?

Within rights jurisprudence, one difference seems to be that while for the most part constitutional courts around the world are at least as reluctant to question or review governmental ends, and especially motives, as their U.S. counterpart, they have increasingly subjected governmental means to what is arguably a broader “functional equivalent” of a good faith test through the employment of proportionality analysis. This analysis is part of a structure of constitutional and human rights in which limitations are permissible only if premised on a demonstrable public justification, and failing any of the standard three prongs of the proportionality inquiry — the rationality, necessity, and proportionality in the strict sense of the means used — is tantamount to a finding that the asserted justification was not made in constitutional good faith. That is, an important part of what it means to have a constitutional right is that it can be limited by the government only if acting in good faith for the public interest, and the point of the structured proportionality test is to concretize this requirement, itself stemming from the broader obligation within liberal democracies for governments to treat all citizens with equal dignity and respect. So, for example, in a well-known case, the Israeli Supreme Court held that the rights to property and freedom of movement of Palestinian villagers were disproportionately, and therefore unjustifiably, infringed by the army’s location of a security fence, even though it had first found that the army’s objective was valid, that the fence promoted it (“rationality”), and that there was no alternate, less injurious route with the same security benefits (“necessity”). 7 In other words, by imposing excessive burdens on the villagers’ rights relative to the marginal gains in security, the military decisionmakers failed to treat them with equal dignity and respect, and in this sense failed something akin to a constitutional good faith test.

Now, it could be (indeed, has been) argued that U.S. tiers-of-scrutiny jurisprudence reflects a similar basic structure of constitutional rights, even without either the general label or the final prong of “proportionality,” so that any difference is more one of degree than kind. As one who has made this argument, 8 not surprisingly I think this is largely right, although the extent to which non-U.S. courts (aided by the large amount of recent normative scholarship on proportionality) increasingly recognize and understand their task in terms of this equal dignity/good faith framework as well as the specific added contribution to it of the final prong, as in the above example, mean that this difference of degree is not negligible. On structural issues, as Pozen notes, constitutional courts in several other federal systems, most notably Germany and the European Union, have created and enforce a more explicit constitutional doctrine of good faith both between federal institutions and the states, and among the states inter se: Bundestreue or the duty of federal loyalty. 9

So, to the extent there is such a comparative doctrinal gap, what explains it? Here I think Pozen’s discussion of the Madisonian model of opportunistic behavior by politicians as not deviant but rather “the engine of checks and balances” 10 is highly pertinent, as it forms the basis for a useful contrast with other systems. For within the general constraints of its role in constitutional law suggested above, I believe one important explanatory factor is the distinctively deep and abiding anti-governmentalism of U.S. political culture, which means that “good faith” is not something presumed to exist within political institutions or among public officials and so is not a factor on which governmental duties are based or named, even aspirationally. As with Madison’s “enlightened statesmen,” 11 good faith in government might be nice, but it would be foolish to rely on it. Far more important in the real world is to create a system that looks more like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” in which the public interest is served not through the “benevolence” of political leaders, any more than dinner is through that of the baker and butcher, but rather through the aggregate effects of their pursuit of self-interest. 12 By contrast, in the land of their publication, Smith’s principles that so transformed economics and economic policy were never applied to the structure of government itself. In Great Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, belief in the general benevolence of rulers — hereditary or elected — persisted, so that a political system in which officials and institutions were mostly assumed and expected to act in good faith for the public interest did not seem (to mix philosophical metaphors) self-evident nonsense upon stilts. Within this broad political culture, parliamentary systems without the checks and balances of U.S. presidentialism became the norm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

II. The Constitutional Doctrine/Culture Gap

Pozen characterizes the second gap he identifies, between the rarity of good faith principles in constitutional doctrine and the ubiquity of bad faith talk in constitutional discourse outside the courts, as a “hallmark of American constitutionalism.” 13 It seems to me that one major explanation for this gap and the relatively large amount of constitutional bad faith talk outside the courts is itself doctrinal: namely, U.S. standing rules. Especially (although not only) with respect to structural issues, and separation of powers disputes in particular, it is comparatively more difficult for politicians and public officials in the United States to litigate their bad faith claims or functional equivalents, many of which are made in doctrinal terms (for example, usurping legislative/executive/state powers, “animus,” and so on), than in many other countries due to restrictive standing rules and a host of other jurisdictional policies and principles — case or controversy, certiorari, political question — that often in practice mean there is no judicial outlet for them. By contrast, politicians and political institutions are often privileged claimants elsewhere. So, typically, only political actors, not citizens, may bring abstract judicial review proceedings to challenge newly enacted statutes and, until 2010, no other type of constitutional review of legislation existed in France. 14 This difference in turn reflects alternative conceptions and justifications of judicial review: as part of the ordinary judicial function of deciding whether the plaintiff or defendant wins a litigated case 15 or as an extraordinary, quasi-political, and public function entrusted to a special — and specialist — judicial body. 16 To this extent, the sharp distinction between American constitutional doctrine and discourse is an artificial creation of the former, rather than reflecting any inherently extrajudicial nature of bad faith claims or preference by politicians for airing them outside the courts.

Another important explanation is, as Pozen indicates, the comparatively rare but inflammatory U.S. combination of the sparseness, relative difficulty of formal amendment, and sacralization of the constitutional text. 17 I would add to this list the “majestic” 18 style of significant parts of the original Constitution as well as the Fourteenth Amendment. Even without tough formal amendment rules, a majestic, sparsely worded, relatively enigmatic constitution requires interpretation more than a mundane, prolix one and is also more likely to be sacralized, as it reads like a religious text, oracular rather than profane in style. Sacralization itself makes amendment of the text practically more difficult and adds to the centrality of interpretation — the texts of the Torah, New Testament, and Koran are “unamendable,” though often reinterpreted. Japan’s at least semisacralized constitution has never been amended despite quite liberal formal amendment rules, which is the immediate context for the current widespread allegations of constitutional bad faith against Prime Minister Abe’s “reinterpretation” of Article 9, broadening the concept of self-defense to permit deployment of Japanese troops abroad to aid an ally under attack. 19 As in this example, when interpretation becomes the central focus of constitutional discourse and the near-exclusive mode of constitutional change, claims of interpretive bad faith are likely to follow.

Two additional comparative factors that I believe play at least some role here are form of government and judicial appointment/style. American-style separation between legislative and executive branches largely creates the issue of “usurpation” that fuels much constitutional bad faith talk in a way that is rarer in more “blended” parliamentary systems, at least on specific issues. This is maximized when different political parties control the two branches, often leading to the sort of paralysis and frustration that results in the blame game and its raised-stakes version of bad faith talk. A second “inflammatory” combination in the United States is that of (1) life tenure and (2) political appointment for federal judges with (3) the difficulty of amending the Constitution. For, especially at the Supreme Court level, this double no-exit scenario raises the stakes of each relatively rare vacancy and the interpretive philosophies of the various candidates. The U.S. system is therefore more likely to create a breeding ground for suspicion and claims of betrayal resulting in allegations of bad faith than either the fixed term/rolling changeovers of many constitutional courts operating under more easily amended constitutions or the more independent, nonpolitical appointment process of several others. Similarly, the attributable, individual opinions of U.S. (and other common law) judges, compared to the traditional anonymous and collective opinion of the court elsewhere, provide the public exhibits for bad faith talk directed at the judiciary.

Turning to a different comparison, Pozen suggests that this second gap is distinctive to constitutional bad faith and does not apply to private and international law. 20 That is, there is either no extrajudicial bad faith discourse in these fields or far less of it; almost “all the action” as it were takes place doctrinally, in the courts. While this is probably accurate for private law, as even the most sacralized of civil codes such as the French and German ones do not regularly provide much fodder for extrajudicial bad faith jousting by public officials, it is more questionable for international law. Bad faith talk appears to be very common outside courts in international law/relations, even if not the most tactful or effective of diplomatic modes. Especially given the typically limited jurisdictions and enforcement powers of international tribunals relative to domestic constitutional ones, the gap between charges of bad faith pursued inside and outside the courtroom would seem to be large. So, just as Prime Minister Abe is being widely accused of bad faith inside Japan for his “reinterpretation” of Article 9, the external political allegations of bad faith — in terms of international use-of-force norms and masking his real intentions — coming from Japan’s neighbors, alarmed at what a more liberated Japanese military means for them, are at least as great. Accordingly, in some cases the doctrine/discourse gap may reflect the interplay of legal norms and their judicial enforceability to a greater extent than is true of the constitutional law/nonconstitutional law gap.

Let me conclude this Response with a potential implication of Constitutional Bad Faith for the general debate about judicial review. Pozen shrewdly argues that there may be certain benefits of a bad faith talk surplus to set against its more obvious costs. 21 One of the slightly more subtle, and perhaps ironic, of these costs to emerge from the article is that a consequence of constitutionalization per se, of legal constitutionalism, may be the futility of containment. Once courts are in the business of judicial review, talk of constitutional bad faith is all but certain to spread from them to the political institutions, even if the size of the second gap may vary based on some of the factors discussed above. Accordingly, not least among the article’s many contributions is that the seeming inevitability of such discourse — with its associated costs and benefits — should be taken into account by both normative theorists and the remaining handful of holdouts from the global trend toward judicial review if and when they ever reconsider their positions.

* MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights, UCLA School of Law.

^ David E. Pozen, Constitutional Bad Faith , 129 Harv. L. Rev. 885 (2016).

^ Id . at 897 (citing Lawrence Gene Sager, Fair Measure: The Legal Status of Underenforced Constitutional Norms , 91 Harv. L. Rev. 1212, 1221, 1235 (1978)).

^ See Sager, supra note 2.

^ Pozen, supra note 1, at 909–18.

^ See generally Jack Goldsmith & Daryl Levinson, Law for States: International Law, Constitutional Law, Public Law , 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1791 (2009).

^ Pozen, supra note 1, at 909 n.115.

^ HCJ 2056/04 Beit Sourik Vill. Council v. Gov’t of Isr. 58(5) PD 807 (2004) (Isr.).

^ See Stephen Gardbaum, The Myth and the Reality of American Constitutional Exceptionalism , 107 Mich. L. Rev. 391, 416–31 (2008).

^ See Pozen, supra note 1, at 906 n.101 (citing Daniel Halberstam, Of Power and Responsibility: The Political Morality of Federal Systems , 90 Va. L. Rev. 731, 732–34 (2004)).

^ Id . at 914.

^ The Federalist No. 10 , at 75 (James Madison) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 2003) (“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”).

^ See generally Adam Smith , An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Interestingly, The Wealth of Nations , published in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, is not cited or referenced in either The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 or The Federalist Papers .

^ Pozen, supra note 1, at 919.

^ See Organic Law 2009-1523 of December 10, 2009 on the Application of Article 61-1 of the Constitution, Official Gazette of France , Dec. 11, 2009, p. 21379.

^ See Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137 (1803).

^ Hans Kelsen, La garantie juridictionnelle de la Constitution [ The Jurisdictional Protection of the Constitution ], 45 Revue du Droit Public 197 (1928) (Fr.).

^ Pozen, supra note 1, at 944–45.

^ See W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 639 (1943) (referring to “the majestic generalities of the Bill of Rights”); see also Tsvi Kahana, Majestic Constitutionalism? The Notwithstanding Mechanism in Israel , in Israeli Constitutional Law in the Making 73 (Gideon Sapir, Daphne Barak-Erez & Aharon Barak eds., 2013).

^ See Bruce Ackerman & Tokujin Matsudaira, Dishonest Abe , Foreign Pol’y (June 24, 2014), http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/24/dishonest-abe [ https://perma.cc/5UPD-CPEQ ].

^ “Relative to their role in other areas of law, charges of bad faith are both less important (within the courts) and more important (outside the courts) in the constitutional domain.” Pozen, supra note 1, at 887.

^ Id . at 951–54.

• Constitutional Interpretation
• Constitutional Law

February 10, 2016

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Meaning of bad faith in English

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• a pack of lies idiom
• black is white idiom
• falsification
• feed someone a line idiom
• mythologize
• someone can talk! idiom
• stretch the truth idiom
• weasel words
• game-fixing
• have an eye to/for the main chance idiom
• pull a fast one idiom

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• Virginia’s New Bad Faith Law: What to Know

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Virginia’s New Bad Faith Law: What Insurers Need to Know

On July 1, 2024, new Virginia Code § 8.01-66.1 became effective and created a new bad faith cause of action that can be significant for underinsured or uninsured (UIM) carriers.

The prior Va. Code § 8.01-66.1 did not create a duty for UIM carriers to settle a case prior to trial. Instead, it only created a remedy when UIM carriers refused in bad faith to pay once the insured had obtained judgment. Manu v. GEICO Cas. Co. , 293 Va. 371, 391 (2017).

But pursuant to the new Virginia Code § 8.01-66.1, the UIM carrier’s duty is no longer triggered by a judgment; instead, it is triggered “when liability to the [] insured has become reasonably foreseeable without necessity of a judgment by its insured . . .”

Once this duty is triggered, a UIM carrier can now be liable if it, in bad faith:

• denies, refuses, fails to pay, or fails to make a timely and reasonable settlement offer or
• after all applicable liability policy limits and underlying UIM benefits have been tendered or paid, rejects a reasonable settlement demand within the UIM policy’s coverage limits or fails to respond within a reasonable time after being presented with such demand.

If a court determines that a UIM carrier’s conduct was not in good faith, then it shall award not only the amount due and owing by the UIM carrier to its insured, but also an amount up to double the judgment obtained against the tortfeasor, not to exceed $500,000, along with attorney fees for bringing the bad faith claim, and all costs and expenses incurred by the insured to secure a judgment against the tortfeasor, and interest.

The new Virginia Code § 8.01-66.1 marks a significant shift in the legal landscape for UIM carriers in Virginia. As a result of this new bad faith law, UIM carriers need to be diligent and cautious in handling the early resolution of UIM claims to mitigate risk. And given the tight timelines in the statute for investigating liability and damages and responding to demands, UIM carriers should consider early engagement with legal counsel to ensure a timely and appropriate response.

Republished with permission from DeCoster, an attorney with Sands Anderson.

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Written By Katie DeCoster, Sands Anderson

DeCoster is an attorney with Sands Anderson, a law firm serving insurance, government, healthcare and other business organizations and individuals in Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and the District of Columbia. As a member of the firm’s Government Group, she helps local cities, towns and counties with a host of legal issues including local government law, employment law, and municipal litigation. She also acts as an investigator and advisor in private colleges and universities’ Title IX process and provides guidance to small and midsize businesses facing legal disputes.

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How women of color with Christian and progressive values are keeping the faith — outside churches

Ellen Lo Hoffman, the co-founder of Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women, poses for a portrait near her home Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Bothell, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Ellen Lo Hoffman, the co-founder of Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women, poses for a portrait at her home Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Bothell, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Ellen Lo Hoffman, the co-founder of Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women, works at her home Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Bothell, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Ellen Lo Hoffman, the co-founder of Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women, walks down the stairs at her home Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Bothell, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

Ellen Lo Hoffman, the co-founder of Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women, makes tea at her home Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024, in Bothell, Wash. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

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Brandi Brown has yet to find a Black church near her Southern California home that feels right for her. So when she wants to talk about God, she relies on someone over a thousand miles (1,600 kilometers) away.

Like her, Ellen Lo Hoffman, who lives just outside Seattle and is Chinese American, is a progressive Christian. They have known each other through a Christian fellowship for six years. But for the past three years, Hoffman has supported Brown, a former minister, through monthly virtual chats.

“How Black women and how women of color experience God is different than how other people experience God,” said Brown, who is Black. “If I imagine myself, like, sitting on a bench trying to talk to God, Ellen is there too — to sit on the bench with me and point out observations and allow me to interpret things that I’m experiencing.”

For some Christian progressives, the lack of acknowledgement by their churches or ministries of the 2020 racial reckoning was the final push to go elsewhere. Some women of color have been disappointed and upset by evangelical Christian churches — both predominantly white and multiracial — whose leaders failed to openly decry racism or homophobia. Traditional pastors and other leaders often see congregants’ concerns through a patriarchal lens, leaving many feeling dismissed or overlooked. Still, others said they felt alienated by evangelical supporters of former President Donald Trump, with whom they disagree on politics.

Many are now finding solace and reaffirming their faith on their own terms through what they call “spiritual directors,” who are not necessarily priests, pastors, counselors or therapists, but can help others explore thoughts about God or broader concepts around a higher power.

With nearly 24 years of ministry leadership experience, Hoffman has been a self-employed spiritual director for the past seven years. The 2014 death of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer was a pivotal moment for her. She gathered staff members of color, as the associate regional director of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, in a discussion.

Hoffman came away vowing to be a better ally.

So when the murder of George Floyd and anti-Asian hate crimes soon dominated national conversation, Hoffman wanted to do more than march in protests and facilitate bystander training. She said she noticed that a lot of people of color needed “care in the midst of racial trauma.” So with her husband, she created Soul Reparations, a nonprofit providing free spiritual support to women.

“With the people that I was already meeting with, the impact of the racial trauma in 2020 was constantly coming up,” Hoffman said. “And then the people who were reaching out looking for a spiritual director was all women of color looking for spaces to process.”

The sessions are intimate one-on-one chats in person or over Zoom. It’s the client who drives the conversation. Often, there’s no Bible talk or preaching from Hoffman. The discussions can be more philosophical.

“Simply allowing them to tell their story, giving them space to share their pain — is really healing for them and it restores a sense of identity,” Hoffman said. Churches, religious leaders and officials don’t get to “have the last word” on how women choose to express their Christianity.

She has since recruited seven other women of color to serve as directors. In total, they have helped roughly 70 women, including queer women, over the past three years. The demand hasn’t waned. Recently, Hoffman had to close a 60-person waitlist.

That number doesn’t surprise Jessica Chen, of Los Angeles, who virtually meets with Hoffman monthly.

“I do see this kind of movement of women of color who’ve left kind of the traditional church environment to create these spaces for other women of color,” Chen said. “So, sort of reimagining what community can look like for women of color, I think that’s very much needed.”

Only in the last few years did Chen consider she might be limiting herself by only hearing male pastors who have a specific perspective that’s been “universalized,” she said. While her last church was diverse and multigenerational, she felt like she wasn’t growing as a person.

“I want to hear from Black women, Asian women, Indigenous folks ... queer folks. What has your faith experience been and how can I learn from your experiences as well?” Chen said. “And I think that makes our understanding and relationship with God or spirituality a lot richer.”

In 2020, Rebekah James Lovett, of Chicago, tried to broach the subject of social justice with her evangelical pastor. She stayed up till 4 a.m. crafting a written plea to him. The pastor met with her but she came away feeling like he was simply placating her.

Raised in Christianity by Indian immigrant parents, she said she came to a realization, “I can’t ever go back” to white, male-dominated churches that don’t consider other viewpoints.

She felt liberated — but also a bit rudderless. Then she heard Hoffman speak on a podcast, “Reclaiming My Theology.”

“The idea of going to a woman who also is pastorally trained was interesting to me,” Lovett said. “Christianity as we’ve been sold it is built on this sense of certainty that somebody has the answer and you just have to look to the Bible and it’s all right there. Whereas for Ellen, there’s this invitation to wonder. That was never there before.”

After adding her name to the waitlist, Lovett became a regular client of Hoffman’s in fall 2021.

Hoffman’s rates for spiritual direction range from $85-$100 per session — or, in some cases, are free. Her paying clients, or “directees,” don’t seem to mind. They liken it to a regular check-up or therapy session.

“I do feel like it is a wellness practice as well as a spiritual practice. It’s something that keeps me centered,” Brown said. “I’m not trying to reach a goal. My only desire is to, deepen my personal relationship with God.”

Many have left churches across the U.S. over the past few decades. Around 30% of Americans identify as “the nones” or people with no organized religion affiliation, according to a 2023 AP-NORC poll. They include atheists, agnostics and people who are “nothing in particular.”

The Rev. Karen Georgia Thompson, who last year became the first woman and woman of color elected general minister and president of the socially liberal United Church of Christ, agrees churches are often patriarchal. They “continue to be exclusive and bring narratives of hatred, diminishing the human spirit and decrying people’s humanity,” she said. While UCC congregations have become more racially and ethnically diverse, Thompson wants to see that diversity reflected at the top as well.

“We continue to include the voices of all in the leadership — as best we can — paying attention to those whose presence and voices have been historically underrepresented in the life of the UCC,” Thompson said in an email.

Spiritual direction has actually reinvigorated Brown to not give up on looking for a church.

“I’m excited about joining a church that talks about justice, that cares about LGBTQ+ people,” Brown said. “I want to be a part of a community.”

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‘Shoot Me Up With a Big One’: The Pain of Matthew Perry’s Last Days

Court papers show that Mr. Perry, the “Friends” star who had long struggled with addiction, was increasingly taking ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, in the days before he died.

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By Julia Jacobs and Matt Stevens

On the day Matthew Perry died , his live-in personal assistant gave him his first ketamine shot of the morning at around 8:30 a.m. About four hours later, while Mr. Perry watched a movie at his home in Los Angeles, the assistant gave him another injection.

It was only about 40 minutes later that Mr. Perry wanted another shot, the assistant, Kenneth Iwamasa, recalled in a plea agreement that he signed.

“Shoot me up with a big one,” Mr. Perry told Mr. Iwamasa, according to the agreement, and asked him to prepare his hot tub.

So Mr. Iwamasa filled a syringe with ketamine, gave his boss a third shot and left the house to run some errands, according to court papers. When he returned, he found Mr. Perry face down in the water, dead.

Mr. Iwamasa was one of five people who the authorities in California said this week had been charged with a conspiracy to distribute ketamine , a powerful anesthetic, to Mr. Perry. The defendants also included two doctors, a woman accused of being a dealer and an acquaintance who pleaded guilty to acting as a middleman.

Mr. Perry, a beloved figure who rose to fame playing Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” had long struggled with addiction. Court papers filed in the case shed light on the desperate weeks leading up to Mr. Perry’s death on Oct. 28 at the age of 54.

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2025 Religion & the Arts: Performing Religions, Faith, and Spirituality

Anna Hennessey, Graduate Theological Union,  [email protected] Tamisha Tyler, Fuller Theological Seminary,  [email protected]

In line with AAR/WR’s 2025 Conference Theme,  Performing Religion, Faith, and Spirituality , the Religion and the Arts unit this year explores performance and the arts, as well as religion and artistic expression more broadly. In light of the devastating situation this year in the Middle East, and in particular with the staggering loss of life that continues to increase in Palestine, as well as the issues of violent conflict, mass killing, and genocide in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, we are especially interested in how art interacts with religion and genocide, religion and war, and religion and trauma, both in the present time and also historically across cultures, religions and peoples. Performance art related to representation of these events or to cultural healing and survival are encouraged.

We are also always open to coverage of topics on art and religion that are unrelated to this year’s unit CFP or to the general conference theme. We encourage the submission of papers that utilize interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and nontraditional approaches to research, as well as a traditional format for paper delivery.

Submit your Proposal Form ( Word  or  PDF ) to Anna Hennessey and Tamisha Tyler by September 30, 2024.

See this page for proposal form submission instructions:  https://www.aarwr.com/call-for-papers.html

Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact

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• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-warnings-from-democrats-about-project-2025-and-donald-trump

Fact-checking warnings from Democrats about Project 2025 and Donald Trump

This fact check originally appeared on PolitiFact .

Project 2025 has a starring role in this week’s Democratic National Convention.

And it was front and center on Night 1.

WATCH: Hauling large copy of Project 2025, Michigan state Sen. McMorrow speaks at 2024 DNC

“This is Project 2025,” Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, said as she laid a hardbound copy of the 900-page document on the lectern. “Over the next four nights, you are going to hear a lot about what is in this 900-page document. Why? Because this is the Republican blueprint for a second Trump term.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has warned Americans about “Trump’s Project 2025” agenda — even though former President Donald Trump doesn’t claim the conservative presidential transition document.

“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” Harris said July 23 in Milwaukee. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. Like, we know we got to take this seriously, and can you believe they put that thing in writing?”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, has joined in on the talking point.

“Don’t believe (Trump) when he’s playing dumb about this Project 2025. He knows exactly what it’ll do,” Walz said Aug. 9 in Glendale, Arizona.

Trump’s campaign has worked to build distance from the project, which the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, led with contributions from dozens of conservative groups.

Much of the plan calls for extensive executive-branch overhauls and draws on both long-standing conservative principles, such as tax cuts, and more recent culture war issues. It lays out recommendations for disbanding the Commerce and Education departments, eliminating certain climate protections and consolidating more power to the president.

Project 2025 offers a sweeping vision for a Republican-led executive branch, and some of its policies mirror Trump’s 2024 agenda, But Harris and her presidential campaign have at times gone too far in describing what the project calls for and how closely the plans overlap with Trump’s campaign.

PolitiFact researched Harris’ warnings about how the plan would affect reproductive rights, federal entitlement programs and education, just as we did for President Joe Biden’s Project 2025 rhetoric. Here’s what the project does and doesn’t call for, and how it squares with Trump’s positions.

Are Trump and Project 2025 connected?

To distance himself from Project 2025 amid the Democratic attacks, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he “knows nothing” about it and has “no idea” who is in charge of it. (CNN identified at least 140 former advisers from the Trump administration who have been involved.)

The Heritage Foundation sought contributions from more than 100 conservative organizations for its policy vision for the next Republican presidency, which was published in 2023.

Project 2025 is now winding down some of its policy operations, and director Paul Dans, a former Trump administration official, is stepping down, The Washington Post reported July 30. Trump campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita denounced the document.

WATCH: A look at the Project 2025 plan to reshape government and Trump’s links to its authors

However, Project 2025 contributors include a number of high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration, including former White House adviser Peter Navarro and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

A recently released recording of Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, showed Vought saying Trump’s “very supportive of what we do.” He said Trump was only distancing himself because Democrats were making a bogeyman out of the document.

Project 2025 wouldn’t ban abortion outright, but would curtail access

The Harris campaign shared a graphic on X that claimed “Trump’s Project 2025 plan for workers” would “go after birth control and ban abortion nationwide.”

The plan doesn’t call to ban abortion nationwide, though its recommendations could curtail some contraceptives and limit abortion access.

What’s known about Trump’s abortion agenda neither lines up with Harris’ description nor Project 2025’s wish list.

Project 2025 says the Department of Health and Human Services Department should “return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”

It recommends that the Food and Drug Administration reverse its 2000 approval of mifepristone, the first pill taken in a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion. Medication is the most common form of abortion in the U.S. — accounting for around 63 percent in 2023.

If mifepristone were to remain approved, Project 2025 recommends new rules, such as cutting its use from 10 weeks into pregnancy to seven. It would have to be provided to patients in person — part of the group’s efforts to limit access to the drug by mail. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to mifepristone’s FDA approval over procedural grounds.

WATCH: Trump’s plans for health care and reproductive rights if he returns to White House The manual also calls for the Justice Department to enforce the 1873 Comstock Act on mifepristone, which bans the mailing of “obscene” materials. Abortion access supporters fear that a strict interpretation of the law could go further to ban mailing the materials used in procedural abortions, such as surgical instruments and equipment.

The plan proposes withholding federal money from states that don’t report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention how many abortions take place within their borders. The plan also would prohibit abortion providers, such as Planned Parenthood, from receiving Medicaid funds. It also calls for the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the training of medical professionals, including doctors and nurses, omits abortion training.

The document says some forms of emergency contraception — particularly Ella, a pill that can be taken within five days of unprotected sex to prevent pregnancy — should be excluded from no-cost coverage. The Affordable Care Act requires most private health insurers to cover recommended preventive services, which involves a range of birth control methods, including emergency contraception.

Trump has recently said states should decide abortion regulations and that he wouldn’t block access to contraceptives. Trump said during his June 27 debate with Biden that he wouldn’t ban mifepristone after the Supreme Court “approved” it. But the court rejected the lawsuit based on standing, not the case’s merits. He has not weighed in on the Comstock Act or said whether he supports it being used to block abortion medication, or other kinds of abortions.

Project 2025 doesn’t call for cutting Social Security, but proposes some changes to Medicare

“When you read (Project 2025),” Harris told a crowd July 23 in Wisconsin, “you will see, Donald Trump intends to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

The Project 2025 document does not call for Social Security cuts. None of its 10 references to Social Security addresses plans for cutting the program.

Harris also misleads about Trump’s Social Security views.

In his earlier campaigns and before he was a politician, Trump said about a half-dozen times that he’s open to major overhauls of Social Security, including cuts and privatization. More recently, in a March 2024 CNBC interview, Trump said of entitlement programs such as Social Security, “There’s a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” However, he quickly walked that statement back, and his CNBC comment stands at odds with essentially everything else Trump has said during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Trump’s campaign website says that not “a single penny” should be cut from Social Security. We rated Harris’ claim that Trump intends to cut Social Security Mostly False.

Project 2025 does propose changes to Medicare, including making Medicare Advantage, the private insurance offering in Medicare, the “default” enrollment option. Unlike Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans have provider networks and can also require prior authorization, meaning that the plan can approve or deny certain services. Original Medicare plans don’t have prior authorization requirements.

The manual also calls for repealing health policies enacted under Biden, such as the Inflation Reduction Act. The law enabled Medicare to negotiate with drugmakers for the first time in history, and recently resulted in an agreement with drug companies to lower the prices of 10 expensive prescriptions for Medicare enrollees.

Trump, however, has said repeatedly during the 2024 presidential campaign that he will not cut Medicare.

Project 2025 would eliminate the Education Department, which Trump supports

The Harris campaign said Project 2025 would “eliminate the U.S. Department of Education” — and that’s accurate. Project 2025 says federal education policy “should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.” The plan scales back the federal government’s role in education policy and devolves the functions that remain to other agencies.

Aside from eliminating the department, the project also proposes scrapping the Biden administration’s Title IX revision, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It also would let states opt out of federal education programs and calls for passing a federal parents’ bill of rights similar to ones passed in some Republican-led state legislatures.

Republicans, including Trump, have pledged to close the department, which gained its status in 1979 within Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s presidential Cabinet.

In one of his Agenda 47 policy videos, Trump promised to close the department and “to send all education work and needs back to the states.” Eliminating the department would have to go through Congress.

What Project 2025, Trump would do on overtime pay

In the graphic, the Harris campaign says Project 2025 allows “employers to stop paying workers for overtime work.”

The plan doesn’t call for banning overtime wages. It recommends changes to some Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, regulations and to overtime rules. Some changes, if enacted, could result in some people losing overtime protections, experts told us.

The document proposes that the Labor Department maintain an overtime threshold “that does not punish businesses in lower-cost regions (e.g., the southeast United States).” This threshold is the amount of money executive, administrative or professional employees need to make for an employer to exempt them from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

In 2019, the Trump’s administration finalized a rule that expanded overtime pay eligibility to most salaried workers earning less than about $35,568, which it said made about 1.3 million more workers eligible for overtime pay. The Trump-era threshold is high enough to cover most line workers in lower-cost regions, Project 2025 said.

The Biden administration raised that threshold to $43,888 beginning July 1, and that will rise to $58,656 on Jan. 1, 2025. That would grant overtime eligibility to about 4 million workers, the Labor Department said.

It’s unclear how many workers Project 2025’s proposal to return to the Trump-era overtime threshold in some parts of the country would affect, but experts said some would presumably lose the right to overtime wages.

Other overtime proposals in Project 2025’s plan include allowing some workers to choose to accumulate paid time off instead of overtime pay, or to work more hours in one week and fewer in the next, rather than receive overtime.

Trump’s past with overtime pay is complicated. In 2016, the Obama administration said it would raise the overtime to salaried workers earning less than $47,476 a year, about double the exemption level set in 2004 of $23,660 a year.

But when a judge blocked the Obama rule, the Trump administration didn’t challenge the court ruling. Instead it set its own overtime threshold, which raised the amount, but by less than Obama.

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A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem

Dean, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, RMIT University

Disclosure statement

Karin Verspoor receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Elsevier BV. She is affiliated with BioGrid Australia and is a co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.

RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.

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Scientific discovery is one of the most sophisticated human activities. First, scientists must understand the existing knowledge and identify a significant gap. Next, they must formulate a research question and design and conduct an experiment in pursuit of an answer. Then, they must analyse and interpret the results of the experiment, which may raise yet another research question.

Can a process this complex be automated? Last week, Sakana AI Labs announced the creation of an “AI scientist” – an artificial intelligence system they claim can make scientific discoveries in the area of machine learning in a fully automated way.

Using generative large language models (LLMs) like those behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the system can brainstorm, select a promising idea, code new algorithms, plot results, and write a paper summarising the experiment and its findings, complete with references. Sakana claims the AI tool can undertake the complete lifecycle of a scientific experiment at a cost of just US$15 per paper – less than the cost of a scientist’s lunch.

These are some big claims. Do they stack up? And even if they do, would an army of AI scientists churning out research papers with inhuman speed really be good news for science?

How a computer can ‘do science’

A lot of science is done in the open, and almost all scientific knowledge has been written down somewhere (or we wouldn’t have a way to “know” it). Millions of scientific papers are freely available online in repositories such as arXiv and PubMed .

LLMs trained with this data capture the language of science and its patterns. It is therefore perhaps not at all surprising that a generative LLM can produce something that looks like a good scientific paper – it has ingested many examples that it can copy.

What is less clear is whether an AI system can produce an interesting scientific paper. Crucially, good science requires novelty.

But is it interesting?

Scientists don’t want to be told about things that are already known. Rather, they want to learn new things, especially new things that are significantly different from what is already known. This requires judgement about the scope and value of a contribution.

The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it “scores” new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything too similar is discarded.

Second, Sakana’s system introduces a “peer review” step – using another LLM to judge the quality and novelty of the generated paper. Here again, there are plenty of examples of peer review online on sites such as openreview.net that can guide how to critique a paper. LLMs have ingested these, too.

AI may be a poor judge of AI output

Feedback is mixed on Sakana AI’s output. Some have described it as producing “ endless scientific slop ”.

Even the system’s own review of its outputs judges the papers weak at best. This is likely to improve as the technology evolves, but the question of whether automated scientific papers are valuable remains.

The ability of LLMs to judge the quality of research is also an open question. My own work (soon to be published in Research Synthesis Methods ) shows LLMs are not great at judging the risk of bias in medical research studies, though this too may improve over time.

Sakana’s system automates discoveries in computational research, which is much easier than in other types of science that require physical experiments. Sakana’s experiments are done with code, which is also structured text that LLMs can be trained to generate.

AI tools to support scientists, not replace them

AI researchers have been developing systems to support science for decades. Given the huge volumes of published research, even finding publications relevant to a specific scientific question can be challenging.

Specialised search tools make use of AI to help scientists find and synthesise existing work. These include the above-mentioned Semantic Scholar, but also newer systems such as Elicit , Research Rabbit , scite and Consensus .

Text mining tools such as PubTator dig deeper into papers to identify key points of focus, such as specific genetic mutations and diseases, and their established relationships. This is especially useful for curating and organising scientific information.

Machine learning has also been used to support the synthesis and analysis of medical evidence, in tools such as Robot Reviewer . Summaries that compare and contrast claims in papers from Scholarcy help to perform literature reviews.

All these tools aim to help scientists do their jobs more effectively, not to replace them.

AI research may exacerbate existing problems

While Sakana AI states it doesn’t see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company’s vision of “a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem” would have major implications for science.

One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse . This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.

However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.

There are already bad actors in science, including “paper mills” churning out fake papers . This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.

The need to check for errors in a mountain of automatically generated research could rapidly overwhelm the capacity of actual scientists. The peer review system is arguably already broken , and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won’t fix it.

Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasise the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world’s machines) is valid and improving.

A scientific ecosystem where AI systems are key players raises fundamental questions about the meaning and value of this process, and what level of trust we should have in AI scientists. Is this the kind of scientific ecosystem we want?

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Computer science
• Research integrity
• Paper mills

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