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Bad Faith
“Shrewsbury – bad faith” by Robby Garbet (formerly at Flickr)
Bad Faith (French, mauvaise foi) is a social-psychological and philosophical idea conceived by Jean-Paul Sarte where one apparently ignores the possibility of actively choosing one’s commitments. Instead, one becomes a passive pawn for external forces, or merely avoids making a decision about what to commit to.
An example could, perhaps, be the Nazi guard who arbitrarily executes ordinary people for Adolf Hitler despite inner moral attitudes decrying this behavior.
The idea of bad faith is predicated on the assumption of a “gap of nothingness.”
The “gap of nothingness” concept suggests that human beings are not mere stimulus-response machines (à la behaviorism) but possess the psychological freedom needed to make responsible decisions in response to incoming stimuli. The illustration often given in undergraduate humanities courses, rightly or wrongly, is that animals will eat whenever hungry, whereas human beings usually delay eating until a personally or socially appropriate time.
bookcrazy adds:
I think Sartre has a very complex connotation to the term [bad faith]. Sometimes wide, sometimes narrow. Very closely related to the concept of authenticity, he has used the term to show the shackles that man chooses despite the knowledge of freedom, at least deep within. » See in context
More examples of bad faith can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith_%28existentialism%29
Related posts » Existentialism, Fromm, Erich
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Free Will
"WE'RE FREE TO CHOOSE" - National Archives and Records Administration (NARA, 1941 - 1945) - 516103 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Free Will is the belief that human beings have the ability to make choices. Most philosophers advocating the belief in free will agree that personal freedom has practical limits, but not all agree that the freedom to choose is limited with regard to ethics. That is, some say that we can always choose the good, even though we may not always be able to choose certain activities.
The view that we can always choose the good, however, is complicated. As both Catholic theologians and psychiatrists will say, personal culpability for doing bad things might be lessened by such factors as peer pressure (with teenagers), stress, trauma, emotional immaturity or instability, and so-called mental illness or mental injury. Of course, just what constitutes a bad thing is not always agreed upon among theologians and psychiatrists—masturbation being a good example.¹
J.-P. Sartre called the practical limits of personal freedom ‘freedom in facticity’, meaning that individuals have a limited range of choices, particularly with regard to available opportunities and activities.² But for Sartre individuals can choose to do ethically right or wrong actions, and to give or not give consent to issues involving ethics.
Some thinkers like B. F. Skinner and Daniel Dennet believe that we have no real freedom but our thoughts and actions are the outcome of a complex series of antecedent causes.
Meanwhile, the Protestant Christian reformer John Calvin believed that some people are predestined for hell and others for heaven.
Who can figure!
Related Posts » Behaviorism
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¹ Here’s a good comment: http://www.debatepolitics.com/archives/40072-masturbation-religion-and-psychiatry.html
² When I was at school a common example you’d hear was, “can someone in a wheelchair be a mountain climber?’ Today, however, this example doesn’t really hold up because new attitudes about persons with so-called disabilities are, in many cases, contributing to these people being seen as persons with difference. And in many instances, truly extraordinary things are being achieved by persons different from statistical norms. See, for instance, The Blind Painter (below).
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Individual Rights and Freedoms
Detail from Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder. Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. via Wikipedia
Individual Rights and Freedoms is an admirable political ideal that aims to defend the fundamental rights of an individual within society. However, once put into political practice, defining and upholding the idea of individual rights and freedoms usually presents an ongoing challenge.
For sociologists like Zygmunt Baumann, modern democracies exhibit an uneasy tension between individual rights on the one hand, and individual freedoms on the other hand.
The problems is this: How can individuals be perfectly free while belonging to a society which by definition requires some kind of functional interdependence? What if, for example, your neighbors’ freedom to have a party interferes with your right to sleep at night or, if you work the night shift, during the daytime?
Due to potential conflicts like these we have laws that are continually being created or modified to try to protect and promote individual rights, as well as the ideals upheld by a certain social body.
This sounds great. But some like Scott Turrow suggest that laws do not necessarily solve problems because justice systems often favor high status groups at the expense of lower status groups. And in unduly corrupt societies, legal systems tend to go lightly on some offenders while slamming others.
The following outlines some of the issues about rights and freedoms as experienced in Canada: “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
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Watson, J. B.
Watson, J. B. (John Broadus, 1878-1958 )
American psychologist who developed the work of the influential Russian Pavlov and others to establish the school of Behaviorism.
Watson has been roundly criticized by depth psychologists, writers and theologians, alike, but we must remember that he was reacting to the introspective (and arguably unscientific) psychoanalysis of his time.
Watson believed that given the right conditions, a person could become almost anything. That is, he emphasized observable environmental factors and apparently related behavior.
Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.
John B. Watson, Behaviorism (revised) University of Chicago Press, 1930, p. 82
This view dominated American psychology into the 1950s until modern genetics and other, philosophical and theologically-based arguments threw Watson’s one-sided theory into question.
But it’s clear that nurture – as opposed to nature or spirit – remains an important factor in human development.
And the above shows that Watson was being scientific by stating that he was extrapolating from observation.
In other words, he wasn’t completely wrong. However, most find distasteful his entire disregard for the ideas of inherited traits, mind (i.e. subjectivity), free will, grace and animal rights–although not everyone necessarily dislikes his work for all of these perceived deficiencies.
The following from Aldous Huxley illustrates the, perhaps, general dislike for Watson among those who champion and regard themselves as belonging to the literary establishment.
For practical or theoretical reasons, dictators, Organization Men and certain scientists are anxious to reduce the maddening diversity of men’s natures to some kind of manageable uniformity. In the first flush of his Behaviouristic fervour, J.B. Watson roundly declared that he could find “no support for hereditary patterns of behaviour, nor for special abilities (music, art, etc.) which are supposed to run in families.” And even today we find a distinguished psychologist, Professor B.F. Skinner of Harvard, insisting that, “as scientific explanation becomes more and more comprehensive, the contribution which may be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero. Man’s vaunted creative powers, his achievements in art, science and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold him responsible for the consequences of his choice – none of these is conspicuous in the new scientific self-portrait.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, cited by Brad in “The Long Dark Night of Behaviorism” at Psych 101 REVISITED » http://robothink.blogspot.com/2005/09/long-dark-night-of-behaviorism.html
Watson’s academic career came to a standstill when it was made known that he was having an affair with one of his students, Rosalie Rayner.
Not surprisingly, he went into and excelled in advertising.
Watson has been lampooned for raising his children according to a strict, authoritarian schedule devoid of affection as if they were lab rats.
To add to his notoriety, his son William committed suicide at age 40.
But as any good scientist will note, this tragic event cannot be directly attributed to upbringing. The two factors of William’s unusual upbringing and his suicide may only be said to exist in a correlational relationship, not necessarily a causal one.
Before Watson’s own death he destroyed a significant amount of personal notes and letters, making historical reconstruction of this pivotal and provocative thinker somewhat difficult.
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Break out the bubbly!
We just finished posting the entire Think Free database!8)
Over the past few months we’ve got all kinds of new ideas and really great suggestions from our visitors.
Thank you!
Now we’ll be focussing on beefing up existing and adding some new entries.
It’s a brand new day at Think Free!
Image Credit:
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Resized from “Chuck-berry-2007-07-18.jpg” by Håkan Henriksson (Narking) , GNU Free Documentation License
Adi Da (aka Free-John, Da 1939- )
Adi Da (aka Free-John, Da 1939- ) Originally Franklin Jones, Adi Da is an American guru born in Jamaica, New York. He has also gone under the names of Da Free-John, Bubba Free-John and Heartmaster Da.
Adi Da claims to have reached enlightenment at age three years. In their Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religions and the Occult, Mather and Nichols note that this achievement did not last. In his college days Adi Da explored different forms of hedonism, to include LSD and open sex.
To this criticism Adi Da replies that his activities were an essential stage within his path of discovery.
Adi Da also says he is an incarnation of the Brahman. Like many New Age enthusiasts, he denigrates organized forms of Christianity. And like most Hindus and devotees of Hinduism, Adi Da counters the Christian claim that Jesus is the only son of God.
For Adi Da Jesus is one of many avatars or “incarnations,” not unlike that which Adi Da, himself, claims to be.
But Adi Da is not just critical of organized Christianity. He, in fact, contests all organized religions, claiming the truth of the spiritual quest may be found in one’s own heart.
To realize this apparent truth, veils of selfishness and ignorance must be recognized and dispelled.
Ironically, his California group gatherings and North American tours exhibit many of the characteristics of organized religion, with Adi Da at the center.
Listed in several cult and manipulation internet indexes, Adi Da has founded the Free Communion Church/Dawn Horse Fellowship and Laughing Man Institute.
While claiming to be beyond any particular system, he studied under and has theological affinities with several Hindu gurus, the most salient affinity being the belief in reincarnation. It has also been suggested that he possesses psi abilities and can read the thoughts of his disciples, an alleged ability known as siddhis in Hindu and Buddhist belief systems.
Some call Adi Da a religious genius, others a profound theologian and yet others suggest he’s the head of a “dysfunctional organization” for sincere but sorely misguided seekers (Source » http://www.adidaarchives.org ).
On the World Wide Web:
- http://www.adidam.org/ (Official web site)
- http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/adida.cfm/ (Mixed opinion)
- http://guruphiliac.blogspot.com/2005/06/big-adi-daddi.html (Negative opinion)
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Apostle
Apostle (Greek: Apostolos, derived from apo [away] + stellein [to send])
The Apostles were, for the most part, ordinary folk transformed by Jesus Christ to assist and continue in his spiritual mission.
For Christians, the number twelve suggests that the apostles are a divinely chosen group since this number parallels the twelve tribes of Israel, as outlined in the Old Testament.
Collectively the apostles are: Simon Peter, James, John, Andrew, Philip, Bartholemew (possibly Nathanael), Matthew (possibly Levi), Thomas, James the Less, Thaddaeus (possibly Judas the son of James), Simon the Zealot or Cananean, and Judas Iscariot.
Judas Iscariot, who helped with the accounting, was the one who betrayed Jesus.
Matthias was chosen to replace Judas after his death by suicide.
Paul was another later addition.
Since one apostle went bad and two new apostles were added, critics could say that the emphasis on the number twelve does not really make sense.
Biblical defenders reply with various theological arguments, which in essence say that apparent discrepancies such as these amplify rather than nullify the “Living Word.” » Bible
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“Altar mosaic” by Platform 3 at http://www.flickr.com/photos/platform3/381073540/, Creative Commons License
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![Live (& learn) [Explored #12]](http://static.flickr.com/8406/8747311620_5891c8983f_m.jpg "Live (& learn) [Explored #12]")
