What did Jean-Paul Sartre teach about the gaze and bad faith?

Who was Jean-Paul Sartre? #

A French philosopher, novelist and playwright, born in Paris in 1905 and dying there in 1980. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and in 1929, while preparing for the national philosophy examination, he met Simone de Beauvoir, his partner and fellow thinker for the rest of his life. With her he founded and edited the review Les Temps modernes.¹ His philosophical masterwork, Being and Nothingness, came out in 1943, during the German occupation of France; his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, given in 1945 and published the following year, made existentialism a household word.² His novels began with Nausea (1938), and his plays include No Exit (Huis clos), first staged in Paris in May 1944.³ After the war he was a leading figure on the French left; he admired the Soviet Union for years but condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. In 1964 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and declined it.⁴

What did Sartre mean by the look, or the gaze? #

That another person’s gaze changes how we exist for ourselves. His best-known picture comes from Being and Nothingness. Someone is crouched at a keyhole, so absorbed in what is happening on the other side of the door that they have no sense of themselves at all. Then footsteps sound in the corridor behind them. In that instant they become aware of themselves as an object, seen and judged by someone else, and what they feel is shame. For Sartre this shame comes before any moral judgement; it is simply what it is like to discover that we have a side that others see and we cannot control.⁵

The look is one of the keys to his account of relationships, which he saw as a constant struggle, each person trying to be the one who looks rather than the one looked at. No Exit puts three dead people in a closed room for eternity, each trapped under the eyes of the others, and gives the line usually remembered from it: “Hell is other people.”⁶

What is bad faith? #

Lying to ourselves about our freedom. For Sartre a human being has no fixed nature handed down in advance. We exist first and then make ourselves by what we choose, which is what he meant by ‘existence precedes essence’. We are, in his phrase, condemned to be free; we cannot stop choosing, and the weight of that brings anguish.⁷ Bad faith (mauvaise foi) is the many ways we try to escape that weight, most often by treating ourselves as a thing, as if we simply were our role, our character or our circumstances, with no choice in the matter.

His example is a café waiter whose movements are a little too quick, a little too eager, a little too much like a waiter. He is playing at being a waiter, as if the role could become what he is, the way an inkwell is an inkwell. But nobody is a waiter in that way; in Sartre’s words he is a waiter only “in the mode of being what I am not.”⁸ Bad faith can run the other way too, when someone pretends that their freedom floats free of the facts of their life, their body, history and situation.

How does Sartre’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #

Most closely in his attack on the roles we mistake for ourselves. Almost everything most people think of as who they are is a collection of stories, personal, family and social, and those stories make up the middle-world self, the ego. It is a construct, made largely without our noticing, and the more tightly it is held the more it feels like simply who we are. The middle-world self is a mask, what Jung called the persona, and the trouble is that we come to think the mask is our real face.⁹ Sartre’s waiter, so busy being a waiter, is a portrait of it. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?

There is common ground, too, in refusing to hand responsibility to someone else’s authority. Shamanism asks for no belief and no faith. Its suggestions and exercises are there to be tried, and their truth is found, or not, in each person’s own experience.¹⁰ See Is Therapeutic Shamanism a religion or belief system?

Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #

First, on whether there is anything beneath the masks. For Sartre there is no essence waiting to be found; we are what we make of ourselves. In Therapeutic Shamanism the stories of the middle-world self are not the whole of us. The Lower-World Soul is our true Self-identity, the unique individual that Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this intended us to be, and unlike the middle-world self it is not a collection of human-made stories.¹¹ Most people live and die never knowing who they really are, because modern societies are not designed to help anyone find their Soul.¹² So the work is less one of inventing a self out of nothing than of meeting the Soul and letting it begin to shape our middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer life, an anchor that stops us drifting and getting lost in the human-made stories.¹³ See Who is Bill Plotkin, and what is soul initiation?

Second, on the gaze. Sartre’s look is a human look, and what it brings is shame and struggle. Shamanism widens the circle of who is looking. In the Lower-World a Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer shows more love, acceptance, understanding and compassion than most of us show ourselves, and that relationship helps heal the self-criticism most people carry deep inside.¹⁴ Simply being in the Lower-World heals a deep sense of loneliness, isolation and separation that, as modern humans, we all carry, often without knowing what it is.¹⁵ Where Sartre found hell in being seen, animism finds kinship in being part of a world full of other beings, human and other-than-human. See What is a Power Animal? and What is animism?

Is bad faith the same as living from the middle-world self? #

Not quite. Both describe people taking a role or a story for who they are, and both see that as a loss of something real. But for Sartre the cure is to own one’s freedom fully, with nothing underneath to fall back on, whilst in Therapeutic Shamanism the cure is to step back from the stories, the capacity of the Aware SelfAware Self. The Witness: not a part of the self but a capacity for awareness, cultivated by hollowing-out, that can watch the flow of thoughts without being caught in them. More about this, and to root the middle-world self in the Soul below it and the Spirit above it.¹⁶ The middle-world self is not the enemy either; it is a part of us in its own right, needed for living in the middle-world, and the trouble comes only when it takes itself for the whole. See What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?