Get your head around that one. It isn't so easy. We find ourselves so accustomed to seeing ourselves as being something that the notion of existing in the state of not-being is difficult to come to terms with. "I'm just like that" he says, "I'm a painter" says she, "I am that I am" quoth God, suffering from a major complex of bad faith. It's a way of conferring responsibility onto an almost inanimate object, that object we call ourselves, the me. If we are, in the manner of a stone or a speck of dirt, we excuse ourselves from the obligation to control our actions, to exercise our options in the realm of possibility. Of course, running around saying "I am not, currently acting as a painter..." would sound a bit silly, but that's beside the point. What is at stake here, beside the awkward philosophizing, is a sublimated world-view constantly reinforced by popular expression. Say, if you like, "I am a painter", but don't confuse it with being a painter and all that it implies. You are not so solid, nor unchanging. People all too frequently limit their own potential by believing themselves to already be a certain thing. You are not. You are Protean.
If man is what he is, bad faith is forever impossible and candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being. But is man what he is? And more generally, how can he be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If candor or sincerity is a universal value, it is evident that the maxim "one must be what one is" does not serve solely as a regulating principle for judgments and concepts by which I express what I am. It posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are. But what are we then if we have the constant obligation to make ourselves what we are, if our mode of being is having to obligation to be what we are?Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.[...]
In a parallel situation, from within, the waiter in the café can not be immediately a café waiter in the sense that this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass. It is by no means that he can not form reflective judgments or concepts concerning his condition. He knows well what it "means": the obligation of getting up at five o'clock, of sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going, etc. He knows the rights which it allows: the right to the tips, the right to beling to a union, etc. But all these concepts, all these judgments refer to the transcendent. It is a matter of abstract possibilities, or rights and duties conferred on a "person possessing rights." And it is precisely this person who I have to be (if I am the waiter in question) and who I am not. It is not that I do not wish to be this person or that I want this person to be different. But rather there is no common measure between his being and mine. It is a "representation" for others and for myself, which means that I can be he only in representation. But if I represent myself as him, I am not he; I am separated from him as the object from the subject, separated by nothing, but this nothing isolates me from him. I can not be he, I can only play at being him; that is, imagine to myself that I am he. And thereby I affect him with nothingness. In vain do I fulfill the functions of a café waiter. I can be he only in the neutralized mode, as the actor is Hamlet, by mechanically making the typical gestures of my state and by aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter through those gestures taken as an "analogue".[...] Yet there is no doubt that I am in a sense a café waiter -- otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or a reporter? But if I am one, this can not be in the mode of being in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not.
