Sartre's concept of bad faith describes the flight from freedom into the comfort of determinism — telling yourself you have no choice when you do, letting role or circumstance substitute for genuine decision. Authenticity, its opposite, is the ongoing and difficult willingness to acknowledge that you are choosing, that you are responsible, that there is no human nature or divine assignment to hide behind. Juana lived in a world that told women they had no choice; her intellectual life was a sustained act of bad-faith refusal, an insistence that she was not simply what her circumstances had made her.
Juana