Abstract

The thesis of this dissertation is that Sartre's early philosophy provides concepts--the concept of "bad faith" in particular--which can be useful tools in the interpretation of oppressive behaviour. ;Sartre's account of the human conditions has often been interpreted as one in which the human subject appears as an individual, radically free consciousness which ought to be unaffected by its environment, history and contact with others. However, such an interpretation renders Sartrean existentialism of little use in explaining social phenomena such as racism and sexism in which the force of circumstances and the behaviour of others play paramount roles. In opposition to this approach, I argue for an alternative account of the Sartrean approach to human being, one in which the situatedness of freedom is stressed and through which the human condition is best understood as an ambiguous relation of free consciousness and facticity. ;From the standpoint of this account of human being as ambiguity, Sartre's concept of bad faith is examined. Through this examination, bad faith emerges as an attempt to resolve the ambiguity of human being by denying or ignoring one or other of the sides of the ambiguity. As such bad faith admits of two types; one in which transcendence is denied and facticity affirmed, the other in which facticity is denied in favour of pure transcendence. This stands in contrast to many commentaries on Sartre which tend to portray bad faith as being characterised only as a denial of transcendence. ;Two case studies are presented in which the behaviour and beliefs of an oppressor--in one case an anti-Semite, in the other a sexist objectifies women--are investigated and interpreted in terms of bad faith. In these studies one or other of the two types of bad faith are shown to be manifest. Furthermore the operation of bad faith is demonstrated to occur on three interrelated levels; the levels of the individual, one-to-one intersubjectivity and the group or collective