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By Root 447 0

By Sartre’s understanding, any demand for sincerity does just this. He even says, “The essential structure of sincerity does not differ from that of bad faith.”7 When we ask Gob to be sincere, we are not asking him to accept his essential and radical freedom, or his responsibility for the events in his life. Instead, we are acting as though there’s some other independent essence of Gob—his Gobness, we might say, just as there’s an essence of being a chair (it’s “chairness”). In demanding sincerity, we want Gob to act in conformity with his Gobness, to play the role of Gob as we’ve come to know and tolerate him. This involves denying his freedom just as much as any other form of bad faith. Just because Gob is playing the role of Gob doesn’t mean that he isn’t playing a role.

Since sincerity itself is just another form of bad faith, we seem to be left with few, if any, options. We are doomed to lives of bad faith, and we might as well get used to them. All is not so bleak, however. The term bad faith already points the way to the alternative: good faith. So what is good faith? How is it distinguished from sincerity? And what happens when someone lives in good faith? Remember, the problem with sincerity boils down to treating someone as something that he or she is not. For Gob to be “sincere,” he must treat himself as though he had no choice but to act in this way. But the facts are otherwise. Gob is a radically free being. Whatever he is doing at the moment, be it an illusion or talking to his brother or having sex with his former high school civics teacher, he chose to do it—and he can choose to quit.

Good faith, then, is not “being oneself” but accepting the type of being one is, accepting radical freedom and responsibility (the two go together). It’s a frightening prospect: to live without identifying with one’s roles, without guidelines telling one how to live. It is a goal that is rarely achieved because it is difficult to break out of our roles, or even to be sure that we have. Oddly enough, one of the few times that we certainly act in good faith is when we act ironically. For instance, Gob is acting in good faith when he pretends to be waiter. He knows he’s not a waiter. He’s just Gob, choosing to have a laugh at the idea that he’d work for a living.

The terms good faith and bad faith already imply which we ought to prefer. Sartre is an advocate of life lived in good faith. But what do we gain by good faith? Self-respect, dignity, maybe—not much, really. We do, however, lose quite a bit. We lose our roles, our guidelines—indeed, even our identities. What we get in return is little compensation. We get something we already had: freedom, freedom without limits. Sartre openly acknowledges that this isn’t a great deal. We’re taught to value freedom, but absolute freedom like this is paralyzing at best. As Sartre puts it, “Man is condemned to be free.”8 The only difference good faith makes is that we acknowledge it.

Gob Makes Huge Mistakes in Good Faith

According to Sartre, good faith is a struggle. On one hand, we easily fall prey to bad faith because it’s comforting to have roles to play. Good faith, on the other hand, is frightening and difficult for most people. In some ways, Gob seems to be an exception to this rule. He often goes from bad faith to good, and back again—sometimes in the course of a single scene. Gob seems to slip easily into good faith, but has trouble maintaining it. The siren call of bad faith is just too strong. Nonetheless, let’s take a closer look at some instances of Gob’s good faith, and see what the outcome is.

Our first example of Gob’s good faith is, appropriately, a parody of Sartre’s most famous example of bad faith. When Gob becomes a waiter in “S.O.B.s” he does so in good faith. At first, he is not mistaking himself for a waiter—he is play-acting, in an ironic way, at being a waiter. He’s making a joke. Because of the distance that he acknowledges between himself and the role of “waiter,” it’s obvious that Gob took on the mannerisms freely. He didn’t initially deny