Inglaterra: Guillermo y María:

Here I would like to start addressing an external critique: why would we enter into shared delusions, often harming others and ourselves, in defiance of a pre-reflective awareness that this is the case? Is anguish really so bad that we would be prepared to constantly endure a low-level awareness of a problem, rather than fixing it? This, to many laypeople I have spoken to about authenticity, is the weakest point of the abstract story. So why, if we doubt that everyone feels anguish to be a significant threat, would be give into bad faith and the inauthentic life?

One answer is that it can be the only way to keep a coherent self in existence at all, under threat of a total disintegration which goes beyond anguish. In the usual case of bad faith, although other selves are available to us, it is merely painful for us to switch to or adopt them and avoid anguish. In Catalano’s example of the struggling rower with his date,469 _{for instance, he stays with a grandiose} self-image since it is less painful to endure the suppressed sting of anguish than to abruptly realise he is out of shape, that he is not suave, and that his date is laughing at him. In this case it is

reasonably safe to describe the problem as one of self-honesty. The evidence is there and clear-cut; does the rower listen? This is straightforwardly a matter of personal responsibility, of the kind captured by the naïve reading of the ASJ authenticity definition. Moreover, there is a readily available path out of bad faith; the only thing stopping us from taking it is ourselves.

To see how we could face a stronger motivation to bad faith, we have to make sense of the idea that it can be “painful but not difficult” to effect a change in our projects. Earlier we glossed the

difference between the two as being a difference between describing our experience of the transition as valuable or disvaluable and describing the underpinning structure of our projects as such, but this needs unpacking to be useful. Recall to begin with that projects cause there to be values in the world at all, and those values are of the form of a demand. This demand is, either that some unrealised state of affairs should come to be, or that something which already is should either continue to exist or stop existing. As we saw, our overall set of projects is, or can be, immensely complex, and together these disparate parts form “the organic totality of the projects which I am”;470_{every project we have is linked back to this totality since “the possible under consideration} refers to other possibles, these to still others, and so on to the ultimate possibility which I am”.471 _If

469 _{See Chapter Four, above, for my discussion of this example.} 470_{BN, p.476.}

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the objective circumstances a project needs are threatened, we will experience a normative pull on us to remove the threat or replace/repair them. For instance, my project to stay dry will be

threatened if the roof leaks, so I experience the leak as disvaluable. As we also saw above,472 _when projects are destroyed or defeated this can happen without us experiencing a value associated with that change. If I go to the builder’s merchant expecting to buy slate rooftiles and find they only have terracotta, the project “get slate tiles” loses its validity473_{and is replaced immediately by “get}

terracotta tiles”. If (since) they both service the project “repair the roof as soon as possible” equally well, there is no problem. However, there are cases where a project shift does evoke the experience of value, and it is there we can find the source of the “pain” in a project shift.

In the simple case above, the two projects are functionally indistinguishable in the support they provide for an overarching goal; it does not matter whether the tiles are slate or terracotta if we only care about whether there is a watertight roof or not, so the shift carries no positive or negative value. Yet if we imagine a more complex case where there is a tension between two alternatives, we can see how the pain of making a choice comes about. Imagine a committed carnivore whose choice to eat meat has become integral to their life. They have learned to cook all kinds of meats with skill, spending huge amounts of time studying butchery and acquiring expensive equipment like smokers, outdoor barbecues, high quality knives etc for this purpose. Imagine they then read a philosophy paper which shows, beyond their ability to deny it, that eating meat is irredeemably immoral. Yet their meat-eating does not stop; they find themselves wracked with guilt and doubt about their behaviour but continue. Let’s further assume that they are authentic but they still feel this pain.474 One way to explain this situation is in terms of a normal protection mechanism for valid projects and the sheer number of projects that vegetarianism touches on. If our projects manifest threats to their realisation as disvalues, then abandoning the project has to be a danger itself. My deciding to give up is just as much a threat to a project as missing the objective prerequisites (e.g. tools, materials). A vague disillusionment and lapsing, i.e. a faltering of my mobiles, is a threat to my vegetarianism as much as an objective consideration like having to eat meat or starve. Yet, if our projects are simply annihiliated when they are no longer valid,475 _{how can we hold and sustain a wrongheaded project} outside of inauthenticity (bad faith)?

472 _{In the sections on truth and knowledge in Chapter Four.}

473 _{i.e. since fetching slate tiles is no longer an option, the motif relating to slate is not available so a full project}

structure of motif-mobile-end is denied to us.

474 _{I.e., they don’t have a bad faith project like an inferiority project that demands they try and fail at}

something and which latches onto meat eating as moral failure to sustain it.

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One answer comes from looking at the (subjective) validity of our projects as dependent on an equilibrium between those projects, and asking what causes that equilibrium to be disturbed. If they do not rule each other out absolutely, or all mutually reinforce each other, the equilibrium is

maintained; if a project or set of projects conflicts with the others, there is an imbalance that must be corrected; we can recreate a stable configuration again at the cost of giving up some projects or committing to new ones.476_{This is what is meant by the “fundamental modification of my original} choice of myself”477 _{that we discussed earlier with reference to freedom more generally. However,} there is and has to be a certain tolerance for sustaining projects where it is unclear if they fit together. This tolerance is a function of the ambiguity of our projects, and of the ambiguities of possible engagements with the world. The inauthentic character (and ignorance as a form of bad faith) exploits this ambiguity, which is unavoidable. In Truth and Existence, we see the tubercular T. ignoring the symptoms of her disease,478 _{the cough, blood in the phlegm, etc. She avoids treatment} by ignoring the possibility that they are unrelated; in her case it is clear to anyone, especially to her, that they ought to mean she has a serious problem. We could imagine more borderline cases than hers – an intermittent cough, exhaustion which starts at the same time as the in-laws arrive in town, etc. What makes it alright to ignore coughing three times a day (or more precisely, not to assimilate it into a “tubercular reality”) is that the other symptoms are missing, and the severity of the cough is exceptionally mild. The question has to be, what makes the isolated cough fine to ignore, but a persistent one a genuine problem?

An answer comes from a basic Sartrean point, which was implicitly there in his essay on

intentionality: our projects are not given to us all at once and immediately; they evolve over time. Whilst we are infallibly aware of the current479 _{and past phases of a project insofar as we are that} project, we are not aware of all the twists and turns of chance that will influence it, nor are we always perfectly aware of all the other (sub) projects that we will be required to adopt along the way. I might form a project to buy cat food, but until I encounter the blocked road on the way to the shop that project does not explicitly contain a sub-project to follow a diversion. Avoiding obstacles on the way to the shop, an ambiguous and loose (sub) project, is the most specific commitment I

476 _{See the discussion of the project of fatigue and the “price” of resisting fatigue at BN 476 – 86.} 477_{BN, p.486.}

478_{T&E, p. 33 onwards.}

479 _{We have to be aware of the current dimension of a project because that awareness is the same as being}

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had when I set off. So long as any current threat to our projects is necessary but not sufficient to collapse a project, we can keep our old commitments. Coughing a few times might be necessary but not sufficient to incorporate a tubercular element to my character, for instance. It ambiguously points to irritants in the air, to eating too quickly, to the flu, and to tuberculosis – to a horizon of things so wide it barely counts as evidence for any of them. This horizon of possibilities is a horizon of possible/virtual futures where I ambiguously might be fine after some water, better when the pollen count goes down, or where my life is in grave danger. All of these things are given as possible by the project, but none of them are definitive.

It is only as a part of a constellation of related symptoms that a cough makes tuberculosis a live possibility or a certainty. As the evidence accumulates, the number of healthy futures the present can refer to goes down, until the possibility of good health collapses around us. The same general point is true for any project we might want to have, even in spite of certain projects where it seems like one piece of weak evidence settles an issue.480 _{Apparently glimpsing enemy soldiers in the} brush, even just seeing something glint a mile away, might definitively warrant hiding more deeply, readying weapons, signalling reinforcements, etc. These cases are unusual and don’t hurt the overall point. Staying alive in war might involve a subproject like “avoid false negatives at all costs”; there’s a special, non-bad faith, consideration there about the nature of evidence since even one enemy patrol will kill you. Nonetheless, it’s still ambiguous if the enemy is about; I am just committed to acting in spite of that ambiguity because of potential practical consequences of inaction.

In sum, there has to be a well-formed motivational structure under these more ambiguous cases; there isn’t either total random chaos or Buradin’s ass. Unless a certain state of affairs is completely pushed out of the horizon of possibility, our related projects will exert normative force on us, they will always “demand” to keep going and for that state of affairs to be realised or preserved. In the bad faith case, someone like Sartre’s tubercular woman can organise their life around never being (reflectively and thematically) aware of their condition, but in that instance there is no genuine ambiguity about the situation – they are well (pre-reflectively) aware that all their healthy futures have collapsed. However, we can experience ambiguity in good faith simply because it isn’t clear what will happen in the future, what demands will be placed on us, or whether our projects are really coherent. Preserving an uncertain engagement with the world is legitimate insofar as we might still verify it later. We can hold two or more contradictory projects at once without a problem

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so long as they are all provisional,so long as they are all waiting to be proven to fit the objective world or dissolved. This makes the nature of the “pain” in project shifts so common-sense as to beggar belief: if projects conflict, whichever way I act will be resisted by the other projects, for as long as all are held in being. This resistance manifests as feelings like being conflicted, torn by indecision, or troubled by a choice we are sure we must make but which we still despise.

Of course, we all know that some project shifts are more painful than others; deciding whether to buy shares in Boeing or Activision is nothing like deciding whether to end a formerly close

relationship. One way of looking at why is by imagining us as having a soup of hypothetical minimal projects which all exert one quantum of normative force. Two projects which co-depend effectively exert twice their valuative weight, since challenging one is effectively the same as challenging both. One threatened project which is intimately bound up with a hundred other projects will punch at a hundred times above its weight, and so on. The only hard constraint here is that, in line with our conclusions about authenticity, the value of freedom itself remains absolute. Whilst Sartre himself would doubtless be appalled by this quasi-utilitarian schema, it lets us explain why some projects are harder to defeat than others since we have to push through a greater mass of disvalue to open up the space for their collapse. When we claim we have become vegetarian yet still feel conflicted, it would be more accurate to say we are actively clearing the ground for full-fledged vegetarianism to take place but are currently in limbo, waiting for our projects to grow into forms that can come into conflict with the established equilibrium. How do the projects solidify? By exposing ourselves and the new, nascent project to the world, testing the truths it supplies us with, verifying that it works by actively trying to engage with the world through it.481 _{Contact with the world shrinks the horizon of} possible futures until our projects become certain; it makes our available motifs more certain and workable. Once we have verified our projects (knowledge), the pain or disvalue coming from alternative projects (knowledge) will dissipate.

Why does Sartre claim that this process is not difficult even though it can be immensely painful? I understand this to mean something simple: we can always freely choose to start down any path that is within the horizon of our possibilities, and the only thing stopping us from following through on a valid project is the pain, the resistance our prior projects throw up to the tipping of the balance. In this wide sense, it is easy to change projects, and does not require any fundamental, structural

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change to consciousness. One added benefit of this reading is that it contributes to and explains the experienced stability of our projects without removing the threats that provoke anguish; it allows some of our projects to become entrenched but leaves the strangeness of action untouched.

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