For Sartre, the ‘double property’ of selfhood means that we can never be anything. Being a homosexual, for example, is a matter of accepting a particular identity and maintaining this identity by means of certain choices and actions. A homosexual, then, is not something ‘I am’; it is something I create and constitute through my ongoing, moment-to-moment decisions. In this sense, it is an identity that is never stable and complete; it is something I can freely modify or reject at some point down the line. Again, this is why “[I am] what I am not” (103). Whatever I am as a complete and determined ‘being-in-itself’ is penetrated by the ‘not’ of choice and consciousness, of ‘being-for-itself.’ And there is no way to achieve a unity or synthesis between these two aspects, to become ‘in-and-for-itself.’ It is because of this structural instability that self-deception and bad faith are impossible to avoid. It is, as Sartre says, an “immediate [and] permanent threat to every project of the human being” (116). But where does that leave us with respect to authenticity? Being and Nothingness isn't very helpful. In this work, Sartre refers to ‘authenticity’ (authenticité) as a kind of “self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted” (116), but he does not explain what this self-recovery consists of. Yet from our previous discussion of bad faith and looking at his reflections on authenticity in other works, we can get a sense of what he has in mind.
In his War Diaries, Sartre describes the possibility of being shaken out of bad faith with an example of a young man being called up to war:
I can imagine someone being called up who was a highly inauthentic bourgeois, who used to live inauthentically in all the various social situations into which he was thrown — family, jobs, etc. I can grant that the shock of war may suddenly have induced him to a conversion towards the authentic, which leads him to be authentically in situation vis-à-vis the war. But this authenticity, if it is true, needs to conquer new territory. It first presents itself in the form of a desire to revise an old situation in the light of this change. It first gives itself as anxiety and critical desire. Here, this way of extending authenticity mustn't be confused in any sense with an increase in authenticity. The authenticity is already there. Only it must be consolidated and extended. (1996, 280)
In this transformation, the socially prescribed identities that create the illusion that the young man is a secure and complete thing, a being ‘in-itself,’ collapses. He is now “no longer a ‘family man,’ he's no longer practicing his profession, etc.” (280). These public personas cannot provide a ground or support for his being anymore. He now sees that any identity that he takes over can be called into question. But authenticity (or ‘good faith’) is not just a matter of questioning; it is acting in a new way, changing one's life in the face of the question. “The desire to call [oneself] into question, if it is sincere, can appear only against a background of authenticity. And it's not enough to call into question: it's necessary to change” (280, my emphasis). Sartre is suggesting that authenticity, as ‘self-recovery,’ is a twofold process. First, it requires a lucid awareness and acceptance of the structural instability or ambiguity at the core of the self. And second, it requires a willingness to act and “adapt one's life” (280) to this ambiguity. In good faith, the young man acknowledges his factical situation, that his past actions added up to being a particular kind of person, but he simultaneously acknowledges his transcendence, seeing that this pattern of conduct does not determine who he will be in the future, because he can freely choose to act from a range of possibilities that are open to him and that he alone is responsible for these choices. This is why Hazel Barnes writes that “the existentialist in good faith will recognize that at any moment, simultaneously, he is and is not his situation” (1967, 55). Sartre explains this position in Anti-Semite and Jew when he writes, “Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it … sometimes in horror and hate” (1948a, 90). But authenticity is never secure; the man will always be tempted to flip back into self-deception. When the war ends, his wife and friends will call on him to take over his old identity and be the man that he used to be. This is the test. “Perhaps he'll yield,” says Sartre, “but he can't revert to this old error vis-à-vis [his wife] without, at a stroke, tumbling headlong into inauthenticity” (1996, 281).
Sartre's account seems especially bleak because whatever identity or project I happen to commit myself to in the attempt to be true to myself is ultimately arbitrary and futile because of the structural instability of the self. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir describes Sartre's position as one that encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost. Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a ‘useless passion,’ that he tries in vain to realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? (1948, 10)
But Beauvoir goes on to point out that simply because our projects are ambiguous and futile does not mean they are meaningless. “The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity,” she writes. “To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed” (129). What Beauvoir is suggesting is that when we accept our structural ambiguity rather than fleeing from it, we can begin to focus on what we actually do in the world rather than trying to be something, because we now realize we can't be anything. This is why, in Notebooks for an Ethics, Sartre writes, “Authenticity reveals that the only meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being). … So, originally, authenticity consists in refusing any quest for being, because I am always nothing” (Sartre 1992, 475; see Carman 2009, 239).