Stalin Joseph Correya

Bad faith is commonly conceived as lying to oneself or self-deception. This folk definition is too simplistic as it undermines the rich ontological underpinnings of bad faith. While both simple self-deception and bad faith are opposed to the general phenomenon of lying (to others), for Sartre bad faith is also meant to explain both the working of consciousness and the ubiquity of pre-judicative nothingness. Together, consciousness and nothingness supply the special ontological foundation required for bad faith to operate. To enter into bad faith is to escape from the anguish of the experience of insubstantiality and freedom into deterministic attitudes about the self, such as the deceiver/deceived bipolarity of Freudian psychoanalysis. Sartre rejects the thesis that there can be hidden motivations in consciousness by arguing for the reflexivity and the translucency of consciousness. Further, he would take the ubiquity of nothingness to explain the wide prevalence of bad faith as a state-of-being in the world. Bad faith cannot be equated with simple cases of self-deception as bad faith is sustained by a unique mix of ontological postulates. Sartre argues for this point cogently through his examples of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. In these examples, Sartre shows that sincerity, the purported anti-thesis of self-deception, causes one to fall even deeper into bad faith.

In this paper I probe the narratively constructed self as a _proper object of negation_ in the Madhyamaka. The paper borrows idioms and tropes from Western theories of the narrative self to illuminate and contemporize the discussion. Since Mādhyamikas reject the two-tiered interpretation of the Buddhist two truths, they are philosophically unobligated to reduce the self. Although both Mādhyamikas and Ābhidharmikas would accept the conceptually constructed self as conventionally real, they would disagree about its ontological significance. For the latter, the narrative self as a conceptual construct necessitates reduction. Mādhyamikas, who reject the _svabhāva-dharma_ architecture, can be less dismissive of the conventional self. Their conventional self is a narrative construct, but of what kind? The paper tries to answer that question by bringing Mādhyamikas into interlocution with select modern narrative self theorists. It divides into two sub-sections. Each pivots on a theme about the narrative self in contemporary discourse. The first asks how important is ethics for the constitution of the conventional self. The second discusses fictionality of the self in the Madhyamaka.

The paper taps the agency of the imaginary interlocutor in the _Mūlamadhyamakakārikā_ of Nāgārjuna to delineate _existential anguish_ in the Madhyamaka. The paper asks whether the protestations of the imaginary interlocutor cannot be recast as _anguished_. It claims that an objection to emptiness (_śūnyatā_) can be voiced even after the metaphysical commitment to _intrinsic existence_ (_svabhāva_) has been relinquished. By interpolating _anguish_ into the Madhyamaka, the paper posits an unorthodox phenomenological objection to _śūnyatā_.