Jean-Paul Sartre is generally recognized as the "existentialist". According to his book titled Being and Nothingness, while his examination into being-in-the-world, he considers the concept of mauvaise foi or bad faith. Bad faith is being guilty of considering yourself not as a free person but as an object and believing that we are not burdened by the human condition.
             As explained in class lectures, Sartre indicated that bad faith is not a state of consciousness that is imposed from without, but a willing act of accepting a situation as fact, by oneself, all while knowing that it is objectively faulty evidence. In other words, when practicing bad faith, the individual is hiding the truth (whether pleasing or displeasing) from themselves. Although bad faith is similar to lying to oneself, it is more than just a simple self-deception since it consist of just one individual.
             Another way to explain Sartre's bad faith is that it is also the individual's way of trying to escape the responsibility of being a conscious subject or being for itself. This individual's consciousness is trying to appropriate a false notion of self. Take for example the waiter and the young woman on her date, as Sartre illustrated in the textbook. The waiter continues to perform his duties while he angrily bickers silently about the injustices in his life and the woman on her date takes the holding of the hand as a sensitive gesture, all while truthfully knowing that it is just a prelude to sex. These examples concerning bad faith shows us how we all take part in roles that take away our choices and allow ourselves to become objects.
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