Bad Faith is Necessarily Social

Abstract

It is a great honor that Ronald Santoni has offered such a carefully argued, and well supported response to my essay, latter two qual ities (careful and well supported) are not ones that can always be ascribed to my original essay. It should be said, then, at outset, of our disagreements likely result from fact that I some times fail to state matters in a sufficiently clear and or succinct man ner. The crux of our apparent disagreement rides on whether Other is a necessary condition for all instances of bad Appar ent, for I never intended to make this universal claim. Below I show that my thesis is more modest. However, while my intention was to show only that many varieties of bad faith (but not all) require social elements, below I raise considerations as to why we might rea sonably suppose that all instances of bad at least all those that we can actually experience, including what Santoni calls ontological bad faith, are made possible by and explicable only with reference to social features of human reality. Santoni's argument that my thesis is too extreme rides on his reading of my thesis, which he understandably distills down to claim that the Other, or social, is a necessary component of all bad faith consciousness and instances of bad faith. Against this, Santoni makes a good case that Sartre strongly suggests at least some instances of bad faith do not require social elements. While my language may sometimes suggest universal thesis, my intentions were to defend a weaker claim, namely the chapter 'Bad Faith' can not be adequately understood without a close examination of second half of Being and Nothingness''' a thesis Santoni accepts on condition that we substitute complete for adequate. My basic argument is that many varieties of bad faith require a reflec tive act of pseudo self-objectification.1 Thus, my original discussion pertains only to self-objectifying instances of bad (Incidentally, qualification many varieties arises in light of broadness of