Friday, July 30, 2010

Facticity, Inspiration, and Bad Faith

It starts with understanding how we see ourselves.

Sartre says that who we are is a mix of facticity and inspiration. We describe ourselves by our facicity. These are the facts about ourselves. Our age, our height, our weight, our past. When we look at ourselves in terms of only facticity, we see ourselves in more of a biographical self. It isn’t something we can deny, these are rarely things we can change, they are essentially facts.

We can also see ourselves as inspiration. Inspiration is not who we are in terms of facts, but what we aspire to be. If I want to be a lawyer, I may start to describe myself as someone who is studious or career orientated. I may shift my attitudes so that are congruent with how I see my future self. For example, maybe if I go into criminal law, I will aspire to be a person who cares about justice and fairness.

Rarely are we all facticity or inspiration. If we see ourselves only as facts, we give no perspective to who we are. When we read a biography of a great leader, rarely do we have the insight of what that person was thinking about during their great acts. Maybe a historian can conclude what Julius Ceaser thought about himself as a husband, based on his life acts..but do we really know?

We rarely think of ourselves only as inspiration. Let’s take a very bizarre example. There is a sense, that we lose all groundedness as a human being if I think of myself as an angel or a dragon. Inspiration allows for growth and seeing ourselves outside of our current self…sort of giving a perspective to a future self.

Maybe the mixture of facticity and inspiration varies by person. Someone more realistic and conventional might see themselves more in terms of facts. Someone more artistic or unconventional, one could reason, might think of themselves as more inspiration. The funny thing is, who we are very much turns out to be, how we see ourselves.

Sartre tells us to avoid Bad Faith. Bad Faith is a term where we limit ourselves and who we could be by limiting ourselves, or by not owning who we are. An example might be a person who wants to become a teacher, but their parents want them to be a doctor. Because they disown the person they want to be, they decide they want to be a doctor, to placate their parents, they are acting in bad faith. Further, we can limit or facticity too. We might try to disown part of our own experience. If we had an experience in life we do not want to come to terms with, we are also acting in bad faith.

Of course as Robert Solomon says, Sartre’s philosophy is one of no excuses. It is a philosophy of personal responsibility and acceptance for what we are. I think by understanding who we are, and taking control of who we are, we live a life worth living. We have a fulfilling life experience.

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