This Philosophy Bites episode focuses on concisely focuses on a key practical implication of Sartre’s picture of the self as a fiction as described on our episode: bad faith, which is a matter of identifying one’s free consciousness as that fiction, or more precisely, denying that the self is a fiction, that we each have a fixed nature that constrains our future choices.
Sebastian Gardner gives some of the examples of bad faith from Being and Nothingness (which has a chapter toward its beginning called “Bad Faith”), leading up to Sartre’s claim that human nature is paradoxical: we both are and are not defined by our past behavior and characteristics.