QuestionsAre we free?Bad faith: we are free, and we flee that freedom
Are we free?Free will

Bad faith: we are free, and we flee that freedom

The waiter in the café (Sartre)

Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 · 1980Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free.
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What it claims

We are always free. Bad faith does not remove freedom: it flees it, and only a freedom can flee it.

Why

We can only flee what we know: someone who hides his freedom from himself therefore knows he is free.

The same idea through history
Jean-Paul Sartre1943In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes bad faith (lying to oneself about one's own freedom) and concludes that freedom is the condition of every act: we cannot not be free. Three years later he will sum up the idea in the phrase "man is condemned to be free" (see the argument on the student).
In short

"Bad faith: we are free, and we flee that freedom" is an argument by Jean-Paul Sartre (Being and Nothingness, 1943 (Part I, ch. 1 and 2; Part IV, ch. 1), 1943) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: We are always free. Bad faith does not remove freedom: it flees it, and only a freedom can flee it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 6 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Being and Nothingness, 1943 (Part I, ch. 1 and 2; Part IV, ch. 1)
Valid

A café waiter moves a little too fast, bends a little too politely, carries his tray like a tightrope walker. What is he doing? Sartre answers: he is playing at being a waiter. He is not one the way an inkwell is an inkwell. This morning he could stay in bed and get fired. But he behaves as if his job entirely determined him, as if he had no choice. For Sartre, this is bad faith: a way of fleeing one's freedom by passing oneself off as a thing. And this flight proves the thesis. One can only flee what one knows: so we know we are free, and we are not free to stop being free.

P1A human being is not what he is in the way a thing is. The waiter cannot be a waiter as the inkwell is an inkwell: he plays at being one.
P2Bad faith consists in acting as if it were not our free choice to hold this role, make these gestures, follow these duties (for instance "to get up each morning at five o'clock").
P3Belief in determinism is the most convenient form of this flight: we take refuge in it "if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse".
P4One can only flee what one knows: "I flee in order not to know, but I can not avoid knowing that I am fleeing". Whoever hides his freedom from himself therefore knows it is there.
P5This awareness of freedom is an evidence that determinism cannot erase: it has nothing to set against it at the level of lived experience.
P6 · implicit premiseAn immediate evidence of consciousness, which cannot be removed and which one knows even while fleeing it, is not an illusion: it is true.
P7This freedom cannot be lost: "we are not free to cease being free".
Therefore we are always free. Bad faith does not remove freedom: it flees it, and only a freedom can flee it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, one can accept everything and still hold that we are victims of a universal illusion: we all feel we are free, we know it even when we flee it, but this feeling could be an illusion produced by our brain or our society. That is the objection of Spinoza, Nietzsche or Bourdieu.
The argument is valid. P1 and P2 describe bad faith, P3 makes it a flight from freedom, P4 says one only flees what one knows, and P5 and P6 say that this knowledge is true. P7 adds that one cannot cease to be free. The weak points are P4 (can one hide something from oneself without knowing it? this is the objection from psychoanalysis), P6 (is a lived evidence always true?) and the step from "I believe I am free" to "I am free".
Analogy. A man afraid of heights closes his eyes at the edge of a cliff. Closing his eyes proves he knows the cliff is there: one does not flee a precipice that does not exist. For Sartre, bad faith is this gesture of closing one's eyes before one's own freedom.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1945 · attacks the conclusion

There is never determinism and never absolute choice: I am never a thing, but never bare consciousness either. To be born is to be born of the world and into the world: we are both acted upon by the world and open to an infinite number of possibilities. Freedom is therefore "situated", and one cannot separate the share of the situation from the share of freedom.

Sartre replies
Jean-Paul Sartre 1943 · Sartre's anticipated reply (1943)
Sartre already sees "the paradox of freedom": there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human reality everywhere meets resistances and obstacles it has not created, but these have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is.
The debate goes on (our summary) The two philosophers agree that freedom is always in a situation. They part ways on the meaning of the situation: for Sartre it comes entirely from our choice, for Merleau-Ponty part of it is given by the body, history and other people, and carries us "by virtue of a state rather than an act". Sartre himself later insisted on the weight of social conditions (Critique of Dialectical Reason, 1960). The debate is about how large that share is.
Pierre Bourdieu 1972 · attacks the conclusion

Class conditions produce habitus: durable, internalised dispositions that generate our practices and representations. Even when a conduct seems guided by a free project, it is determined by the implicit anticipation of its consequences, and so by the past conditions that produced the habitus, and it tends to reproduce the objective structures of which it is the product.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre, who died in 1980, did not answer Bourdieu on this point as far as we found. He could have said that habitus describes a facticity, what is given to us, whose meaning and weight are still to be chosen. Bourdieu would say that this "choice" is itself produced by habitus. This disagreement is one of the great debates between a philosophy of freedom and sociology. Bourdieu specifies that habitus is a principle of "regulated improvisations", not a machine for repeating.
Freudian psychoanalysis (as Sartre presents it) 1943 · attacks premise 4

One can hide something from oneself without knowing it. Psychoanalysis replaces bad faith with the idea of a lie without a liar: the ego is separated from the unconscious by a censor, so one is deceived without deceiving oneself. A flight from freedom would therefore not require knowing that one is free.

Sartre replies
Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre answers that, to repress with discernment, the censor must know what it is repressing. It is therefore aware of what it hides, in order not to be aware of it: in his eyes, it is itself in bad faith. Psychoanalysis moves bad faith, it does not remove it.
The debate goes on (our summary) The argument targets the Freudian model of the "censor". Many psychologists today allow for unconscious processes with no censor that would know what it represses. If so, part of our conduct escapes our knowledge without bad faith, and P4 weakens: the flight from freedom could be, in part, simple ignorance.