Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar

Abstract: On one particularly relational reading of Sartre, bad faith has been described as necessarily social (Eshleman 2008). I expand on this reading by arguing that authenticity is correspondingly an interpersonal virtue by drawing on Sartre's discussion of play and play-acting in BN that has been largely under-utilised by his commentators. 

On my play-centred reading, what it means, ontologically, to be an ambiguous creature (an interplay of transcendence and facticity) is to be condemned to play-act as something. To play(-act) as X is to posit for oneself the rules X that give one's acts their meaning and worth, and since one freely posits X one is free to reject X and posit Y instead. Practically, the vice of bad faith or inauthenticity lies in either, on one extreme, seriousness (i.e. rejecting truth of play by feigning identification with what one plays as) or, on the opposite extreme, nihilism or asceticism (i.e. rejecting truth of play by feigning absolute transcendence from what one plays as). Correspondingly, the virtue of authenticity lies in playfulness, which is the truthful owning up to the task of playing. How do other people fare in my play? Rules and (practical) identities which one lives by acquire their weight when others join in as co-players. Authenticity, therefore, is an interpersonal virtue: whilst inauthentic players either surrender the rules wholly to others or reduce others to props in a game of their own, authentic players affirm others as fellow players, at once rule-givers and rule-followers, with whom the rules are held in common.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Manuel Dries, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.