Authenticity and Bad Faith

Living Authentically

For existentialists, authenticity means owning your freedom — making choices that are genuinely yours, not dictated by social pressure, convention, or self-deception.

Bad faith (mauvaise foi), as Sartre described it, is the opposite: pretending you are not free when you are. It is a form of lying to yourself about your own agency.

Sartre's Famous Examples

The Waiter: A café waiter performs his role with exaggerated precision — each gesture is a little too perfect, a little too "waiter-like." He is playing at being a waiter rather than authentically being one. He uses the role to hide from the anxiety of freedom.

The Woman on a Date: A woman lets a man take her hand and pretends not to notice, treating her hand as a mere object rather than acknowledging the choice she is making. She is in bad faith — denying her own agency in the moment.

Authenticity Doesn't Mean Selfishness

Importantly, authenticity is not "doing whatever you want." Sartre argued that in choosing for ourselves, we choose for all of humanity — our choices imply what we think humans should be.

Simone de Beauvoir added that authenticity requires working for the freedom of others, not just yourself.