Being-a-Writer

I find Jean-Paul Sartre to be horribly mistaken about the problem of mauvaise foi (bad faith). Not completely mistaken, of course, as I have said in times past how I find his notion of “bad faith” – bad faith being, as simply put as possible, the way the self lies to the self about who it is in order to become who it thinks it ought to become – to hold up with man’s general inability to live authentically, nor mistaken in a philosophical way, given the ways in which the ontology presented in Being and Nothingness is so meticulously put-together that it seems difficult, to me, to surpass or reject.

But maybe I speak not just as a reader of Sartre but also a reader of Frantz Fanon, who himself seems to also have a problem regarding bad faith – that is, that as a black man in “not-that-racist” (re: racist) France, Fanon found his overdetermination coming from without rather than simply from within. Is it bad faith if one is not who the World say is? I will leave that one for the readers and interpreters and interlocutors of Black Skin, White Masks to decide.

For me, however, I find a different struggle with the idea of bad faith. Sartre’s bad faith functions as a problem that entraps us within certain modes of being. The most famous example, of course, is the waiter who is playing at being-a-waiter. His essential being, of course, is not as a waiter, but when he dons his clothing and waits tables he assumes the character and nature – even the being – of a waiter. This, Sartre would assert to us, is not the waiter as he really is nor is it the waiter as he ought to be. The waiter is likely being-a-waiter in order to fulfill some other purpose in his life (probably paying the bills). But, as Sartre often remarks, he has radical freedom to be what he wants to be. He could doff his waiter-ing garb and thrust his plates upon the faces of the café’s patrons and then off and become… something else.

Yet, deep within my soul, I find in myself the reality of being-a-writer. I have not donned any writerly-garb in order to become a writer. Nor have I really written anything suitably worthwhile to become a writer. I enrolled in a graduate program that improved my writing, no doubt, and that allowed me to become the sort of reader who is able to begin tackling Being and Nothingness, amidst others. But when I say that I am a writer, I mean something more essentialist rather than existential. I am not describing something that is definable or describable through external sources of knowledge and knowing. Rather, I am actually describing something more like the framework of my soul. As a Christian, I call this something a little more like “Calling” or “Vocation” or “Purpose.” There’s an Image that I have been made in – the Image of the Logos Himself – and that Image imprints upon my very being something of a distinct personal character.

No doubt, and I see proof for this too, I often live out of some kind of bad faith. I do not think that Sartre’s observation is wrong; I think that bad faith is the sort of relationship with freedom that mankind has under the domain of sin. I would even go further and assert that Sartre’s radically-free subject is always-already a subject of some kind of bad faith. Here I’d follow Louis Althusser in his description of the subject of ideology, but I would, using my fancy Christian language, replaced ideology with the true power that undergirds this bad faith: that is, Idolatry.

Bad faith for me, however, manifests in my incessant struggle to write. While Sartre’s waiter is playing at being-a-waiter and lying to himself that his internal nature is truly a waiter, when he is not, my true being of being-a-writer (that is, being-a-writer-in-itself, rather than for-itself) is constantly doffed in my life for the sake of other ‘beings.’ I will, for a short time yet, be-a-lab-manager, or be-a-Chicagoan. Maybe too I wrestle against the seductive ontological claim that calls itself ‘being-not-a-writer.’ This is the most devastating ontology.

I find it hard to be me, that is, Ian-who-is-a-writer. Part of it has to do with the stunning amount of inauthentic and haphazard writing that exists out there these days, both in journalistic and in academic circles. And do not get me started on “Christian writing,” because it’s a crapshoot nine out of ten times.

Here I am faced with a stunning reversal of Sartre’s bad faith: I cannot be what I really am, and instead I continually struggle with the becoming of what I really am. I am not becoming that which I wish to be or that which I radically choose to be. To risk sounding deterministic, I am becoming what I was already and am, but I am not that being right now.

This, to me, is the greatest difficulty.