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Step 4 of 7~8 min read~33 min left
The Waiter in Bad Faith
Examine Sartre's most vivid illustration of freedom denied.
“The waiter who is too waiter-like, whose movements are too precise, too quick and too regular, whose face expresses perhaps a trifle too solicitously, a trifle too eagerly, is playing at being a waiter. [...] He is playing at being a waiter in a café. [...] His condition is wholly one that he himself has assumed: his condition is not given to him. He can never be a waiter as an inkwell is an inkwell, as a stone is a stone. [...] This attempt to escape from the anguish of freedom into the spirit of seriousness, by making oneself a thing, is what Sartre calls ==bad faith==. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943), Part One, Chapter II, trans. Hazel Barnes; reconstructed in Being and Nothingness Wikipedia and IEP 'Sartre: Existentialism'”