Bad Faith and the Unconscious

Abstract

The ethical task of becoming a better person requires identifying and assessing fairly one's motivations. Any ethical theory needs to be consistent with the structure of human motivation. Ethics therefore requires an understanding of how self‐deception about motivation is possible. The two main theories of self‐deception about motivation are Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and Jean‐Paul Sartre's theory of bad faith. Freud distinguishes between rationally structured and purely mechanistic aspects of the mind, arguing that repression is a process of preventing oneself from becoming conscious of some mechanistic item. Sartre argues that this explanation fails, since the activity of repression would need to be concealed but cannot be mechanistic. Sartre's alternative rests on his theory of projects as the ground of motivations. Since projects structure our conscious experience, they structure our reflective awareness of our own projects, which allows features of our projects to become hidden from our view. Sartre's theory is internally coherent and consistent with the view of motivation that currently emerges from social psychology. But it is inconsistent with his own theory of radical freedom. It requires instead Simone de Beauvoir's theory of project sedimentation, which in turn entails a nonpurposive form of self‐deception.