Anguish and bad faith

J. P. Sartre’s discussions of anguish and bad faith appear one after the other in the first part of Being and Nothingness, titled “The Problem of Nothingness”. This chapter examines Sartre’s notions of anguish and bad faith through their relationship to one another as well as to freedom, which Sartre understands as the defining feature of human existence. It deals with an analysis of two interpretations that understand anguish as extrinsic, and in this sense, accidental to the awareness of freedom. Anguish just is the manner in which the ambiguity that defines human existence becomes explicit and is experienced by the subject. The object of dread is nothing, or the possible as such, inasmuch as all possibilities are possible for freedom, the “possibility of being able”. The ambiguity of anguish—as an excited anticipation and alarmed dread—renders it analogous to the ambiguous nature of the human condition.