Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, famously argued that human beings are always and everywhere radically free. However, our freedom comes at a price: we experience anguish and uncertainty to the extent that we are aware that we are absolutely responsible for the choices that we make.

The term "bad faith" - mauvaise foi - refers to the strategies that we employ in order to deny the freedom that is inevitably ours.

Normally this means taking on the guies of an inert object so that we can appear to ourselves as thing-like. In this way, we are able to deny that we are responsible for the choices that we make, thereby freeing us from the uncertainty of freedom.

For example, confronted by a difficult moral decision, we might tell ourselves that we are compleed to act in a certain way because it is required by our job, or by conventional morality, or by the responsibility we have to our family.

The reality, however, is that we can never escape our freedom, nor our awarenes of it, since it is built into the very structure of consiousness. The paradox of bad faith is that we are simultaneously aware not aware that we are free.

If we have another drink or a slice of cake, can we say that we were just following orders?

I'll take that slice of cake if anyone has one

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to 's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In 's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In 's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer -

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III

This is the land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In 's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of 's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V

Here we go round the ly pear
Prickly pear ly pear
Here we go round the ly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Where do these philosophers get off making such wild assertions to begin with. Like the assertion Sartre makes here that we are always and everywhere radically free. Free in what way?

Consider this:

If you are hungry and have no money. What choices do you have?

You can either beg for food, try to forage for food, steal food, or choose to go hungry.

In fact, you might suggest that you have the further choice of actually working to pay for the food. Assuming there is employment available to be had.

But what if you didn't want to choose any of those?

What if what you'd really like to choose is to not have to eat at all? That would be your choice if you were truly freeto choose. You'd just choose to not be dependent on food and then you wouldn't be bothered by the whole onslaught of mandatory choices required to constantly obtain food.

Do we truly have the freedom to choose to just not be dependent on food at all?

If not, then how can we say that we are free to choose anything? You can give me a myriad of choices of how I might obtain food, but if my true choice is to not be bothered with having to find food in the first place, then do I truly have any choice at all?

Any of the lesser choices I might choose to obtain food have already been forced onto me by my biological need to eat.

I have no choice in the matter.

Even to choose to starve to death would not be my choice, because my choice would be to not require food in the first place.

The choice I would like to choose if I were truly free to choose is simply not an option. So I'm stuck with having to select from a bunch of choices that I'd rather not make. I have no choice at all really.

That's what I would say to Sartre.

He must not have been a believer in pre-determinism. I might be free to make the choices in my life, but I do not think I am free to choose the consequences of those choices (therefore, I am probably not totally free)...(If pre-determinism does exist, though ---> then all my choices have already been made for me and I am only a puppet in a play; free from worry and guilt anyway).