mauvaise foin.
/ˌməʊveɪz ˈfwɑː/, U.S. /ˌmoʊveɪz ˈfwɑ/ Philosophy.
In the existentialist philosophy of Sartre: the self-deception practised by a person who wishes to avoid absolute responsibility for his or her own actions by not recognizing that human beings have free will and that no relationship is genuinely mutual. Also (in extended use): bad faith, disingenuousness.
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mauvaise foi1948
essentialism1949
1948 G. Bays in Yale French Stud. No. 1. 111 Man's liberty is an ‘engaged liberty’, his separation from others a linked separation; his creativity involves negativity or the possibility of escape into ‘mauvaise foi’.
1950 Mind 59 127 Miss de Beauvoir..offers diagnoses of types of mauvaise foi.
1958 H. E. Barnes tr. J.-P. Sartre Being & Nothingness i. ii. 48 It is best to choose and examine one determined falsehood which is essential to human reality and which is such that consciousness instead of directing its negation outward turns it toward itself. This attitude, it seems to me, is bad faith (mauvaise foi).
1978 D. C. Dennett Brainstorms 49 Normally there is harmony between our judgments and our behavior, and hence between our judgments and our beliefs, but when we are afflicted with Sartre's mauvaise foi, our sincerest judgments can be lies about our beliefs.
1990 C. Paglia Sexual Personae xxi. 555 In these responses, Wilde is in mauvaise foi. It is patently untrue that he ‘recognized no social distinctions at all of any kind’.
This is a new entry (OED Third Edition, March 2001; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1948