Dane Sawyer

Buddhism comes up several times in The Good Place. According to Buddhism, what we think of as a “self” or “soul” is merely a convenient designator, a useful fiction, that doesn't correspond to any actual thing in the world. In The Good Place, Eleanor's entire journey to becoming a better person is predicated on the belief that she can indeed change herself for the better. If change is possible, it is because that part of the self is capable of change. Buddhist equanimity does not involve ignoring the suffering of others. In fact, compassion is one of the chief virtues of Buddhism. Over the course of The Good Place, the characters transform from self‐obsessed people who don't understand the amount of harm they are causing to themselves and others into people who have come to grips with the consequences of their past deeds.

In this article, I consider the rising interest in mindfulness meditation in the West and submit it to an analysis from a Sartrean phenomenological and ontological perspective. I focus on a common form of Buddhist meditation known as ānāpānasati, which focuses on the breath, in order to draw connections between common obstacles and experiences among meditation practitioners and Sartre’s understanding of consciousness. I argue that first-person reports generally support a Sartrean view of consciousness as spontaneous, free, and intentional, but I also highlight areas where Sartre’s phenomenology and ontology oversimplify the complex relationship between the pre-reflective and reflective modes of consciousness. I contend too that Sartre does not always take seriously enough the distracted, unfocused, and obsessively thought-oriented nature of consciousness.

In this article, I reconsider the question of how best to understand Sartre's concept of bad faith by investigating it through the Derridean lens of deconstruction. I argue that Sartre's discussion of bad faith in _Being and Nothingness_ mirrors Derrida's criticisms of structuralism in 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'. Examining their distinctive discussions of 'play', I claim that Derrida's unique deconstructive interpretation of this notion operates within Sartre's criticisms of the 'spirit of seriousness'. I reinterpret bad faith as the attempt to solidify a permanent structure of one's personality, in order to avoid or escape from the 'play' or 'freedom' built into structures and our existential condition, and conclude that embracing 'play' is an essential characteristic of authenticity