Meet Jacques. Jacques works as a cashier at the local supermarket. A guy named Hector is a regular customer at the supermarket. He commonly encounters Jacques at the register. One day, Jacques is walking to his car to go home when he notices something strange in his path. If Jacques chooses to pick up a five-dollar bill that he found discarded on a sidewalk, then he must inherently know the weight of the responsibility, of the anguish, of being a model for all humans, and in addition that since he picked up the five-dollar bill, it is a requirement that all other humans would have done the same thing, and therefore would have made the same choice as Jacques made in this situation. Jacques could have done anything else. He could have taken out his Bic lighter and burned the bill. He could have taken it and thrown it into the street for a car to run over. He could have ripped the bill into sixteen pieces and thrown it like confetti over the person walking by. Yet, Jacques did what he felt was right, which was pick it up, cleanly fold the bill, slip it into his pocket, go to the bank next door, and ask if anybody was looking for a lost five-dollar bill.
The fact that Jacques felt that this was the right thing to do stems from not just the anguish he felt in choosing to pick up the bill off the ground, but also from the equally heavy sensation of forlornness. Jacques is an atheistic existentialist like Sartre, so he believes that God does not and had never existed, and that because of that, only Jacques could decide for all of humankind what to do with the five-dollar bill. The goodness in the value of doing this deed was determined by none other than Jacques, who also believes that the choice that he made only contained this supposed goodness and value because of the fact that he chose to do it in the first place instead of urinating on it and walking away. Urination was one of infinite possibilities that Jacques could have taken advantage of in this moment. Yet, since he was alone on the sidewalk, and though he was making a decision for all of humankind, the value of which he defined in choosing the action itself, the person who dropped the five-dollar bill could not depend on Jacques. The dropper, who happens to be Hector, has seen Jacques before, in fact constantly. Even despite this, Hector has absolutely no knowledge of what Jacques is capable of. Secondly, for Hector, despair is a demandingly heavy human responsibility through which he must depend on all of the Others of all humankind, such as Jacques, to secure his bill and try to return it to its rightful owner.
Jacques happens to meet Hector on the same sidewalk a few minutes later. Now Jacques has encountered a Sartrean situation, in which Jacques and Hector are both classified to one another as the Other, and both give one another the look of the Other. Again, Jacques must make a decision. Although human tendency will try to pull him to escape from this decision in the form of feeling all the responsibility of anguish, Jacques simply slips the five-dollar bill out of his pocket and hands it to his acquaintance, Hector.
They start a conversation with small talk, like how dollar bills are some of the germiest things that exist on Earth, about how the weather is slightly warmer than it should be in December and it is concerning, about how once Hector’s cat caught a mouse and dropped it in the swimming pool, et cetera. Eventually, this conversation leads Hector into asking how Jacques is enjoying his job at the supermarket as a cashier. Jacques enjoyed it at first; he worked with good, friendly people, he had funny experiences, et cetera. However, over time, he started to realize the monotony of swiping UPC codes under a red laser and giving change to customers almost every day, and driving to work and wearing the same uniform almost every single day. He could be using this time to delve further into his hobby of painting. Nevertheless, there he is, working the afternoon shift at the Stop and Shop on a Tuesday. Jacques and Hector each have an intending consciousness whose existence is based upon its consciousness of the nothingness of its existence by nature as hidden from the consciousness of the Other. Jacques does not know the intentions of Hector in this conversation, and vice versa; they each feel despair and anguish. Jacques and Hector are both about to experience bad faith in two different ways.
Bad faith is a result of two things: the combination and resultant nullification of facticity and transcendence, and the combination of all three sensations that stem from bad faith, which were anguish, forlornness, and despair. Jacque’s facticity includes being tall, skinny, and twenty years old hatched from a generation of atheists easily prone to early male baldness. Yet it also includes Jacque’s aspiration to be a painter. Unfortunately, he was in a pinch for money, needed a job, and started working as a cashier at Stop and Shop at the age of eighteen. Now, at age twenty, Jacques is tired of the monotonous dance of the cashier at Stop and Shop and wants to go home from the ceremony that his customers invited him to without his will two years ago. Jacques needed money, and he was desperate, so he began playing a cashier. That is not who Jacques is; Jacques truly is a young man who wants to be a painter, and at the same time the owner of a consciousness that nullifies itself into no-thing-ness with the cancellation of facticity and transcendence. Either way, as a cashier, Jacques is what he “is” not and simultaneously is not what he “is.”
Jacques began unemployed like Hector is. He had all the choices in the world as to who he could have been if he pushed himself hard enough. Following Sartre’s writings in Being and Nothingness, Jacques started at a subjective point, at which he could run everybody else in his world if he knew what he was doing. He could have striven to be the President of the United States, making them both his objects over which he has power, and his objects that perceive themselves as objects of Jacques’ allure because he would be ranked higher than them all. In the latter case, Jacques would have been the master over his slaves, the subject over his objects, and the sadist over his masochist objects.
However, he experienced anguish at all the job choices there were when there were job choices and therefore reverted backwards to the mode of transcendence in his bipolar consciousness. He had also felt forlorn because ultimately nobody could help him choose a job but himself, and he felt despair because he could not depend on somebody just handing him a job on the spot. Jacques declared that he was more than an eighteen-year old atheist who will turn bald at the age of thirty. First, he introduced a negation to his own life by pointing out that he does not have to function as an eighteen-year-old atheist object. Ironically, he rejected his own transcendence in becoming a cashier, because he objectified himself as a person who necessarily had a purpose to make money. But now, Jacques feels shame. Moneywise, things are going well for him right now, and all he can ever be is a cashier at Stop and Shop. In summary, Jacques has solidified his transcendence into being an object of other people’s desire. He is the masochist now; he must enjoy the pain of being an object of the desire, and judgment, of his customers, while they reassure him that being a cashier is good for the society’s needs by telling him that he should not be aspiring to be anything else but a cashier as a result of his feelings and to be proud of being a cashier. They tell him that a cashier is who he “is,” when he really “is” an aspiring artist. The customers know that they themselves can be whatever they want, and by helping Jacques out by guiding him to his own albeit false transcendence, they can simultaneously rule over him by objectifying him. Jacques is the slave to the master of society, and the masochist to a society of sadists.
Hector is unemployed, so he is longing to know what it is like to have a job by talking to Jacques. Currently, he is experiencing anguish, and he wants to escape it too. In this conversation with Jacques, Hector is prepared to act as the champion of sincerity to Jacques. He knows that Jacques has been feeling down lately about his job, because Jacques just told him how he is always bored, that those funny experiences are happening less often, and that he has not received a pay raise in two years of working at Stop and Shop. He refuses to be defined as a cashier, although all the evidence points directly to that very definition. Hector, as his good close acquaintance, lets Jacques know that he should cheer up. Hector thinks that by telling Jacques to feel proud about being a cashier, he is turning Jacques from the object of a “cashier” into a person who is proud to be a cashier who has transcended from being jobless. In reality, Hector is behaving just like Jacques’ customers always behave to Jacques. Therefore, Hector is also in bad faith because he was trying to help Jacques. Hector objectified a person who was already objectifying himself in shame by trying to have him transcend, and he also transcended his objectivity of having no job by becoming an object of bad faith by doing so.
Frankly, no matter what Jacques or Hector does to try to escape anguish and ambiguity, they are never going to be who they truly “are.” While Jacques truly “is” an aspiring artist, he truly “is” a consciousness of nothingness with an endless amount of projects to transcend into. While Hector truly “is” unemployed, he truly “is” this same no-thing-ness, and “unemployed” counts as a “thing.” No matter what, Jacques and Hector are in an inescapable field of never being able to “be” what they are while always being what they “are.”
In any case, there is another factor to Jacque’s decision to remain in shame. Jacques has a little crush on another customer named Lindsey, a dog groomer. You can say that he really really likes Lindsey. When he first met Lindsey, Jacques did not have a job. He was stuck in the mode of subjectivity as an object of his joblessness. In other words, at this point Jacques felt like he was objectifying himself by remaining as the object of “an eighteen-year-old who is unemployed.” This is a similar but different situation to how he grounded himself in his own transcendence just as Sartre’s café waiter did the same. It is different because Jacques is simultaneously stuck in not only the shame of being an object of other people’s desire as a societal role, but also the anguish of trying to show that he can truly be whatever he wants to be. He met Lindsey in a time when he felt objectified and felt he was simply playing the role of a jobless person. He wanted to indirectly prove to Lindsey that he could be more than that. He applied for the job at Stop and Shop under the glaring pressure of having a crush, the “glaring” coming from both how he perceives Lindsey as perceiving him, and from the Other being Lindsey, her look classifying itself as the “look of the Other.”
One day, Lindsey approached Jacques’ register. He was prepared to prove to Lindsey that he has transcended over his objectivity of being the object of “an eighteen-year-old who is unemployed.” He started talking to her about how he feels so empowered now, and that since he was able to earn himself this job, he can do anything he wants in life with his newfound confidence. Furthermore, he starts listing out all of the things that he can be doing now: he can go on to be a manager, a CEO, and, someday soon, the President of the United States of America. Jacques has accomplished the exact opposite of the first situation in which he became an object of other people’s desire. In the first situation, Jacques escaped anguish and led himself into shame. Now, he is attempting to transcend his shame and the objectivity of his “role” by shelling out to Lindsey all the future possibilities, thereby leading himself from shame right back into the anguish from which he quickly ran. He is helping Lindsey by showing that she was right all along about how he could prevail in life as he did. Now he is too subjective rather than too objective. He has grounded himself in his transcendence and led himself into inescapable anguish.
On the same token, Jacques was a masochist to the sadist society of customers in the first situation. This time, he is the sadist, proving to Lindsey that since he can be whatever he wants, she can be the same. She must be proud of being a dog groomer. She must objectify herself into being a dog groomer to ironically transcend the objectivity of being just a pretty girl. He has become the sadist master over Lindsey, the masochist slave who must endure the same pressures that Jacques feels almost every single day, wearing the same uniform and driving the same route every single day. Remember that Lindsey is a customer to Jacques, so she is inherently a member of that society of customers aforementioned. In conclusion, the slave is now a slave to a slave, and a master is a master to a master. Jacques and Lindsey cancelled each other out. Therefore, the sadomasochistic strategy which each was or is utilizing at some point failed and has proven to be ineffective.
Sartre’s definition of bad faith applies to everyday relationships, such as that between Jacques and his Other, Hector; Hector and his Other, Jacques; Jacques and his Other Lindsey, and Lindsey and her Other, Jacques. All three of them have the “look of the Other” that attempted to help the other Others out through getting them out of the dumps about being a cashier, getting oneself out of the objectifying pressure of joblessness by becoming a cashier, and through being proud of becoming a cashier. Unfortunately, Jacques, Hector, and Lindsey were all in bad faith in this mission of transcendence and positivity. Not only did they contradict their own helpful strategies through bad faith, but they also got themselves wrapped up in an unappealing sadomasochistic web. Bad faith may be a convoluted contradiction, but it surely is a universality which we must all face in one way or an Other.
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