Sartre Religion

Assuming an understanding of Sartre’s division of the Being in-itself from the Being for-itself and the characterization of the being for-itself with its relation to nothingness, we may advance a description of Sartre’s concept of bad faith as a lie to ourselves in which we attempt to construct our Being into a “little God” (Sartre, 1984, pp. 81) by asserting our essence in the Being in-itself while maintaining our transcendence. This comes as a desire to assuage the anguish brought upon by the nothingness characterizing the inalienable freedom deriving from the transcendent nature of the Being for-itself. Sartre likens bad faith to deceiving oneself in order to escape from the anguish present in the face of one’s freedom. Sartre offers many examples himself of how we practice bad faith—the woman in the café, the waiter, the homosexual—but in seeing how bad faith is practiced in a myriad of …show more content…
In any case, he apprehends the acclaim as being directed towards him. In the instance of such acclaim, the Other is recognizing him as the source of inspiration insofar as their acclaim is a result of being moved by the achievements of the modest man. They will say ‘your art moves me’, or they will tell the modest man ‘you have outdone yourself’, or ‘you ought to consider yourself a hero’. But nevertheless, the modest man tells the person offering their praise that ‘it was nothing’, it ‘could have been any other person’, that he was ‘in the right place at the right time’, or he was ‘just doing what he was supposed to do’; what is the modest man doing in this reply? In what ways is he attempting to escape from the anguish of his inalienable freedom? In what ways is this demonstrative of bad faith? These questions will guide my following