Sartre and the Waiter

Philosophy Short and Sweet

Jean-Paul Sartre smoking in Venice (public domain, says Wikimedia Commons)

It must have been Les Deux Magots, or Café de Flore, or one of those legendary cafes where Simone de Beauvoir used to hang her hat and then have her cigarette lit. Her lover, Jean-Paul Sartre, went there, as she did, to write, to read, to discuss and debate the age-old philosophical questions with other intellectuals. In the second chapter of the book L’Être et Le Néant (Being and Nothingness) Sartre talks about the “bad faith” of the waiter. There he is, the pretentious little shit (I’m kidding!) drinking his outrageously priced coffee and smoking his cigarette and thinking about Descartes and who is the I in I think. Mr. Waiter comes up to his table, all smiles and politeness, and offers to refill his cup, and what does Jean-Paul think about that? Well, I’ll tell you what. He thinks, What a phony baloney! The waiter is pretending to be pleased to wait on this pampered intellectual. It is “bad faith,” he wrote, to even call the waiter ‘the waiter,’ because that is not his or anyone’s authentic self. The condition of being a waiter is a job, a role, a form. That person’s true self, same as yours or mine, takes many forms: child, parent, employee, employer, student, teacher, reader, writer. The authentic self is interior and it is static, formless, and irreducible. We do not see it. We sense it some other way. The Self is behind the thought. The Self is doing the job, playing the role, having the thought. The Self is the Observer. We are all play-acting, says JP. All of us. We assume roles and characteristics—Republican, Democrat, Good Person, Bad Person, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Atheist—and we adopt ideas about ourselves based on these various and particular forms, all of which are reducible and ultimately meaningless. This is the nothing of existence. The Self, the Being, Right Here and Right Now is all that there is. The past is gone, the future is nothing, except in the mind. The present moment is the only thing that is real and irreducible and formless. And just knowing this, that is the simple choice of self-awareness, means that you can now live authentically—live authentically now. You have to play roles. That is an inescapable condition of living and acting in the world. Just don’t forget, stay aware of your human reality and true Self.