Another example from Being and Nothingness of a character in bad faith is the waiter. Using all his skills as a writer of fiction Sartre paints a vivid picture of the waiter in action. The waiter walks with a robotic
stiffness, restraining his movements as if he were a machine. He steps too rapidly towards his customers, he is too eager and attentive. We get the clear impression that he is playing at being a waiter. One com- mon view of Sartre’s waiter is that he is in bad faith for endeavouring through his performance to deny his transcendence and become his facticity. In other words, he overacts his role as a waiter to convince himself and others that he is not a person but an object, a waiter-thing. As a waiter-thing he would escape his freedom and the anxiety it causes him and become a sort of robot waiter; an object made to be a waiter and nothing but a waiter. He aims to become for himself the object, the function, the transcendence-transcended that he often is for other people in his role as waiter. He strives to be at one with his own repre- sentation of himself, but the very fact that he has to represent to him- self what he is means that he cannot be it.
Striving to be a thing in order to escape the responsibility of being free is certainly an identifiable and common enough form of bad faith. However, against this view of Sartre’s waiter it has been argued by some Sartre nerds, including myself, that although the waiter certainly strives to be a waiter-thing, he is not in bad faith because the purpose of his striving is not to escape his freedom. Arguably, he is no more in bad faith for trying to be a waiter than an actor is in bad faith for trying to be James Bond. A close look at Sartre’s description of the waiter reveals that, just like an actor, there is a definite sense in which he knows what he is doing. He acts with insincere or ironical intent, con- sciously – though not self-consciously – impersonating a waiter. As the expression goes, he is tongue in cheek. He is doing an impression of a waiter; a good impression that, like all good impressions, is more like whoever than whoever himself. He has become so good at it that it is like second nature to him.
To say that acting like a waiter is second nature to him is not to say that he believes he has become a waiter in the way that a rock is a rock. Rather, it is to say that he has become his performance in the sense that when he is absorbed in his performance he does not reflect that he is
performing. Sartre says that the waiter ‘plays with his condition in order to realize it’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 82). In saying this he does not mean that he plays with his condition in order to become it, but that his condition is only ever realized as a playing with his condition. As we’ve seen, a person can not achieve identity with himself and become once and for always what he aims at becoming. The waiter can never be what he is, he can only ever play at being it.
It seems to follow from what has been said in the last couple of paragraphs that far from being in bad faith, the waiter Sartre describes is authentic, the very opposite of bad faith. Unlike the flirt he does not evade what he is – the transcendence of his facticity – by striving to treat his facticity as a transcendence and his transcendence as a factic- ity. Instead, he strives to take full responsibility for the reality of his situ- ation, choosing himself positively in his situation by throwing himself wholeheartedly into his chosen role. He strives to embrace what Sartre calls in his War Diaries, his ‘being-in-situation’ (War Diaries, p. 54). A waiter in bad faith would be a reluctant, rueful waiter who kept on thinking, ‘I’m not really a waiter.’ He would be a waiter who chose to wait at tables while wishing he was someone else somewhere else.
I was a school teacher for ten years. For the first few years I endured it just for the money and more or less hated it most of the time. I kept thinking, this isn’t me. But it was me because I was doing it. You can’t claim you’re a writer, a sports commentator, a movie star or anything else if what you actually do everyday is teach classes. I was in bad faith. To be authentic I needed either to throw myself into the role with sus- tained enthusiasm or find something else to do that I felt committed to doing. As I couldn’t find anything else at the time that paid the bills so well as teaching I decided to throw myself into the teaching role with more passion. At first it wasn’t easy but eventually the more enthusi- asm I put in the more reward I got out and I liked myself more for mak- ing the effort. It helped a lot that I changed my situation to a school where the teachers were slightly less dull and uneducated and the chil- dren slightly less vile. Deliberately changing my situation was not an
act of bad faith but a way of taking possession of my broader being-in- situation. Bad faith is moaning about your circumstances but doing nothing to change them. A teacher in bad faith, or a waiter, or a bus driver, or a soldier, or a sales executive, all resist embracing their being- in-situation. Being-in-situation is a vital feature of being authentic and is central to the project of becoming an existentialist. We will revisit the existentialist idea of being-in-situation in the next chapter.