ABSTRACT
Sartre’s discussions of anguish and bad faith appear one after the other in the first part of Being and Nothingness, titled “The Problem of Nothingness.” 1 The concept of anguish is the last topic introduced in “The Origin of Negation,” the first chapter of Part One, and it is immediately followed by the second chapter, devoted in its entirety to bad faith. Together then, the analyses of anguish and bad faith form the final section of Part One, where the concepts of “consciousness,” “nothingness” and “freedom” are introduced. Following a highly technical discussion of negation and a critical examination of the treatment of the notion of nothingness in the history of philosophy from Hegel to Heidegger, the concepts of “consciousness,” “nothingness” and “freedom” are brought together when Sartre points to humans as the site where nothingness comes into being, where being and nothingness, two distinct ontological regions, meet. Immediately after he identifies human existence with conscious existence and argues that “freedom is the being of consciousness” (EN 63/BN 66), he turns to the analyses of anguish and bad faith, which complicate this notion of freedom. At this point in the book, Sartre admits, freedom is still an abstract principle, to be dealt with “in all its fullness” only at a later point (he specifically refers to Part IV, Chapter One, “Being and Doing: Freedom”). By studying anguish and bad faith, two modes of existence that problematize freedom, Sartre begins making freedom concrete, showing how one becomes aware of freedom in anguish, and how and when freedom turns against itself in bad faith. Anguish and bad faith then, allow the readers to develop a fuller understanding of freedom, by providing a sense of how it is lived (through the phenomenology of anguish) as well as how freedom itself is negated (in instances of bad faith).
