Bad Faith and the Look of the Other: Sartre's "Being and Nothingness"

If Existentialism Is a Humanism is Sartre’s accessible lecture, Being and Nothingness is his enormous, demanding philosophical masterwork, the full system behind the slogans. It is a difficult book, but its central concepts have entered our understanding of ourselves so deeply that they are worth the effort. Sartre analyses human consciousness and freedom with extraordinary subtlety, and along the way he gives us two ideas I think about constantly: “bad faith,” the self-deception by which we flee our own freedom, and “the Look,” his unforgettable account of what happens to us when we are seen by another person. These are not abstractions; they describe experiences we all have every day.

Here is what Being and Nothingness taught me about bad faith, about the Look of the Other, and about the paradoxes of human freedom.

Key takeaways

• Consciousness is “no-thing,” a nothingness that is radically free.
• Bad faith is the self-deception of denying our own freedom.
• “The Look”: being seen by others turns us into an object.
• Conflict is built into relationships, as we struggle over who is subject and who is object.
• We are “condemned to be free,” responsible even for fleeing responsibility.

Bad faith

Sartre’s most useful concept, for everyday life, is bad faith (mauvaise foi), the various ways we lie to ourselves to escape the anxiety of our own freedom. His famous example is the café waiter who plays at being a waiter a little too perfectly, his movements exaggerated, mechanical, as if he were nothing but his role. He is in bad faith because he is pretending to be a fixed thing, “a waiter,” when in truth he is a free consciousness who has merely chosen, and continues to choose, to act this part. We all do this. We tell ourselves “I’m just shy,” “that’s not who I am,” “I had no choice,” treating ourselves as fixed objects with fixed natures, when really we are free beings evading the burden of that freedom. Bad faith is comfortable; it lets us off the hook. Sartre’s challenge is to recognise and refuse it, to own the freedom we keep trying to disown.

The Look

Sartre’s analysis of “the Look” (le regard) is one of the most brilliant things in the book. As long as I am alone, I am pure subject, freely experiencing the world. But the moment another person looks at me, something shifts: I become aware that I am an object in their world, seen, judged, fixed by their gaze. His example is being caught looking through a keyhole: absorbed in spying, you are pure consciousness, until you hear footsteps and feel another’s eyes on you, and suddenly you are a “peeping Tom,” an object with a shameful identity conferred from outside. The Other’s gaze has the power to objectify me, to turn me from a free subject into a thing with a fixed character. This captures something profound and uncomfortable about self-consciousness, the way being seen by others can make us feel exposed, defined, and strangely captured.

The conflict of relationships

From the Look, Sartre draws a famously bleak conclusion about human relationships. Since each of us is a free subject who can be objectified by the other’s gaze, every relationship involves a kind of struggle over who is subject and who is object. We try to possess the other’s freedom, or to escape being possessed by theirs; love, desire, even hatred become variations on this impossible attempt to be both free and secured in another’s eyes. This is the background to his famous line from another work, that “hell is other people,” not that other people are evil, but that the gaze of others perpetually threatens to fix and define us against our will. I find Sartre too bleak here; he underrates the possibility of genuine mutual recognition. But the underlying insight, that being seen by others is fraught with the danger of being reduced to an object, rings painfully true.

What I’m taking with me

Being and Nothingness is heavy going, but its central ideas have permanently sharpened my self-awareness. What I am taking from Sartre is the concept of bad faith, which catches me out every time I pretend I “had no choice” or that I am simply a fixed type; his unforgettable analysis of the Look, which names the strange vulnerability of being seen and judged by others; and his relentless insistence on freedom and responsibility, even when, especially when, we try to escape them. I do not share all his pessimism about other people, but he has given me tools to catch my own self-deceptions, and that is no small gift.

Frequently asked questions

What is Being and Nothingness about?

It is Sartre’s major work of existentialist philosophy, analyzing consciousness, freedom, self-deception (“bad faith”), and our relations with others (“the Look”), arguing that we are radically free and responsible.

What is “bad faith” in Sartre?

The self-deception by which we deny our own freedom, pretending we are fixed things with no choice, like the waiter who plays at being nothing but a waiter, in order to escape the anxiety of responsibility.

What is “the Look”?

Sartre’s analysis of how being seen by another person turns us from a free subject into an object in their world, judged and defined from outside, which he sees as a source of conflict in human relationships.

References & further reading

1. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. (1943; translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Philosophical Library, 1956.)
2. Warnock, Mary. The Philosophy of Sartre. Hutchinson, 1965.
3. Catalano, Joseph S. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Harper & Row, 1974.