I had no choice.

The sentence is almost always false, and almost always believed by the person saying it. Not a lie — they are not being cynical, and if you offered them money to say it insincerely they would refuse. They believe it, and at some level they also know better.

That combination is what Sartre called bad faith, and the reason he needed a whole analysis for it is that on the face of it, this should not be possible.

The puzzle the concept exists to solve

Ordinary deception is simple. One person knows something, another does not, and the first arranges the second's ignorance. Two people, one truth, one concealment.

Self-deception has one person filling both roles. To pull it off you would have to know the thing in order to conceal it and not know it in order to be taken in — at the same time, about the same thing. Stated plainly it looks incoherent, which is why a philosophy that treats consciousness as transparent to itself cannot account for it, and has to explain it away as something else: forgetting, or weakness, or an unconscious that does the concealing on your behalf behind a wall.

Sartre will not take that exit. His objection to the unconscious version is that it just relocates the problem — whatever does the censoring has to know what to censor, and so has to know and not tell, which is the original puzzle with a new name.

His answer

Consciousness is not a thing that has properties. It is an activity, and it is never quite identical with itself — there is always a gap between the consciousness doing the attending and whatever it attends to, including itself.

That gap is what makes bad faith available. You do not have to believe and disbelieve simultaneously. You have to use one part of what you are against another part: attend here, in order not to attend there. Bad faith is not a state you are in but a project you are running, and one that has to be maintained, which is why it takes effort and why it can be exhausting to be around.

The waiter

Sartre's example is a café waiter, and the description is doing something precise.

The movements are a little too quick. The bow is a little too deep. The voice carrying the day's dishes is a fraction too eager, and the whole performance has the quality of a man doing an impression of a waiter.

What is wrong is not insincerity. What is wrong is that he is trying to be a waiter the way a stone is a stone — completely, with nothing left over. And he cannot, because a person is never simply the role they occupy. He is a free consciousness who took this job and turns up again tomorrow, and the slight over-performance is the labor of covering that up.

The example is not about waiters, and Sartre is clear that the waiter is not a special case. It applies wherever a person identifies with a function: the manager who is only being realistic, the professional who is just following the process, anyone who has ever said that's not who I am.

The two directions

Bad faith runs two ways, and they look like opposites while doing the same job.

Collapsing into facticity. Treating yourself as only your circumstances — your role, your history, your temperament, your background. This is just how I am. I had no choice. The freedom is denied by being dissolved into the situation.

Fleeing facticity. Treating yourself as pure possibility, unconditioned by any actual circumstance — the endlessly reinventable self with no history, whose commitments are always provisional because something might still change. Here the situation is denied rather than the freedom.

Both refuse the same thing, which is that a person is always both at once: free and situated, and unable to resolve the tension on either side.

What it does and does not license

It is not a charge to level at other people. Used that way it becomes unanswerable — any denial is more evidence — which makes it useless as an accusation and revealing about whoever is making it.

It is not the opposite of authenticity in a simple way either. There is no state in which bad faith has been permanently defeated; there is only the continuing recognition of how the flight works and a continuing refusal to take it, which is why Sartre is so much better on the failure than on the achievement.

The usable part is the diagnostic. When you hear yourself explain that you had no choice, the claim is doing work — and the work it is doing is not description. It is the sound of a decision being made and simultaneously disowned.