In Bad Faith: Ignoring Your Own Transcendence

During last class we discussed an alternate example to the waiter in the cafe as acting in bad faith. I argued that someone who works as a stripper provides a better example of someone who "flees their freedom" and transcendence, and pretends to only be a facticity. They are not merely unchanging objects, but they have the freedom to change and transcend. The bad faith comes in from the fact that when playing the role of a stripper, whose only purpose is to bring pleasure to others, they degrade themselves by allowing others to treat them as an object and who does not have freedom and transcendence. Obviously this is their personal choice to act this way, and the argument against this being in bad faith is that they are responsible for their choice, and if they see nothing wrong with it and take responsibility for their choice then it is not in bad faith. I would argue that it is in bad faith even if they do take full responsibility and do not deny their transcendence, because they are still denying one key aspect of transcendence: that in our own actions we are not just responsible to ourselves, but are also responsible to others.

In Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism," he refutes the criticism used against him saying that existentialism is basically a selfish philosophy lacking in morality. He says that when we make a choice, we are not only fully responsible for that action, but we are also responsible to others. We should make choices that we would want others to make, so that you would want all men to be "measured" by you. Even if the stripper treats their profession as a transcendent choice, and not as something that have to do and are not responsible for, it is still in bad faith because their choice is denying their responsibility to fellow human beings. Their choice to be a stripper has the effect of influencing how men treat women, and how women allow themselves to be treated. Men often treat everyday women who are not strippers as objects that can be disposed of, and women allow this because it has almost become a normal expectation. I am in no way saying that strippers are wholly responsible for this phenomenon, because Sartre would say that everyone is responsible for allowing this type of treatment to occur. However, I do think that being in that line of work denies that allowing men to see you as an on object contributes to the large problem of mistreatment of women that occurs all the time.