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D. z. Phillips on Waiters and Bad Faith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

R. F. Khan
R. F. Khan
Affiliation:
Monash University
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Abstract

Professor D. Z. Phillips in ‘Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter’ (Philosophy56, 1981) assigns to Sartre the view that ‘waiters are necessarily in bad faith’, i.e. the profession of waiting as such is in bad faith. What could this mean in the context of Sartre's philosophy? That waiters as a class seek to flee their freedom by adopting that vocation? It must mean something on those lines since, for Sartre, to engage in bad faith is (in a certain mode) to deny one's freedom. The question then arises: could Sartre have heldsuch a view ? And, if he could not have, how does Phillips manage tothink he did ?

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 229 , July 1984 , pp. 389 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 Jean-Paul, Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E., Barnes (London: Methuen, 1966), 59.Google Scholar

2 Jean-Paul, Sartre, The Reprieve (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 294.Google Scholar

3 Jean-Paul, Sartre, Iron in the Soul (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 74.Google Scholar

4 (Penguin Books, 1974), 92ff., etc.

5 Sartre explicitly refers to the ‘obligation’ imposed by the public on waiters to behave in certain ways (Being and Nothingness, 59). Phillips construes this to mean that for Sartre to be a waiter one must accept this obligation and that all those who do so are in bad faith. He has no justification for saying this. Sartre would pick out as being in bad faith only those waiters who hide their freedom from themselves under the guise of doing what the public demands; and this would equally apply to people in the other occupations Sartre mentions in this connection, viz. tailors, grocers, etc.Google Scholar

6 Cf. op. cit., 49.

7 Cf. op. cit., 48, 49.

8 Op cit., 55.

9 Op. cit., 60-67.

10 Op. cit., 439.