Unfair to Waiters?

Abstract

An answer to a recent Final Examination paper contained the remark that bad faith was particularly prevalent amongst waiters. I took this to be a joke, the better for being made under the stressful conditions of an examination. However, in his 'Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter' (Philosophy January i98i) D. Z. Phillips seems to be claiming that Sartre did think that waiters were especially liable to that problem, and that this constituted some kind of attack on waiters. At least he concludes by referring to the 'one ultimate right' which waiters possess, that to refuse to serve a customer, and suggests that they should refuse to serve Sartre and those who think like him (p. 3 '). It looks as if Phillips believes that what is at issue in the passage in Being and Nothingness is a criticism, if not of certain people, then of certain jobs which are 'not a worthy task for human beings' (p. 27), and he explores reasons that could be given for saying this. He does not claim these are Sartre's reasons for his 'attack', though he suspects 'that something akin to these reasons may lie behind his choice of examples' (p. 27). Among his justifications for this suspicion there is a quotation from a book of mine (p. 26). I want to argue that the article misses the point of what Sartre says in this passage, and that, in so far as what I said makes it look as if I should agree with Phillips, then I too was wrong in what I wrote. For I would now like to claim that the choice of a waiter as an example was accidental; Sartre could have used a representative of many other jobs or professions. There are, perhaps, historical reasons why he chose the one he did; we know he wrote many of his works in caf6s, and perhaps glanced up at a waiter when he was looking for an instance. He might have taken a professor to illustrate a particular kind of bad faith; with a few changes, Sartre's passage could be re-written to describe a professor, for we have all encountered professors whose conduct at Senate and in the lecture-room could be described as 'playing at being a professor'. I will not attempt the necessary re-writing, but leave it to readers as an exercise. Such a man could be said to be playing his role in order to realize it. He makes remarks like 'As a professor of this university, I must . . .' He is trying to make himself into a thing, a professor-in-itself, in order that he can look on his decisions and actions as determined by that role. There is nothing personal in the performance. This could be expressed by saying that he is alienating himself in some way, making himself into something he is not. Of course, the alienation may not be all one way; I have often found