Sartre and the True Self: Bad Faith, Mauvaise Foi and the Dino Nugget Meme

Last updated: November 3, 2026

Jean-Paul Sartre denied that human beings have a fixed true self waiting to be found. In his lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, given in Paris on 29 October 1945 and published in 1946, he argued that for human beings existence comes before essence, and that a person is “nothing else but that which he makes of himself” (Philip Mairet’s translation). His name for the ways we dodge that freedom, by pretending to be a fixed thing or by pretending the facts of our lives don’t bind us, is mauvaise foi, usually translated as bad faith, which he analysed in Being and Nothingness (1943).

Now the dino nuggets. The image has three rows, each with an arrow pointing right. In the first, a tyrannosaur, a long-necked dinosaur and a triceratops turn into a chicken; in the second, the chicken turns into a pile of raw chicken pieces; in the third, the raw meat turns into three breaded nuggets in dinosaur shapes. The caption sits above the first and third rows: “And yet a trace of the true self / Exists in the False Self”. Somewhere in the processed nugget, the dinosaur survives. It’s a good joke, and close to the exact view Sartre argued against for decades.

The Chicken Really Is a Dinosaur

The meme’s biology is better than its philosophy. On the classification most palaeontologists use today, birds don’t just descend from dinosaurs, they count as dinosaurs.

The American Museum of Natural History, in the press material for its exhibition Dinosaurs Among Us (2016), puts it plainly: “Living birds belong to a group, or clade, called the Dinosauria”, and most scientists agree that birds are a kind of dinosaur in the way humans are a kind of mammal. London’s Natural History Museum tells the same story through feathered theropods. So the first row of the meme is literally true, with one caveat: chickens descend from small feathered theropods, not from Tyrannosaurus, which was a distant cousin, and certainly not from Triceratops, which belonged to a different branch of dinosaurs altogether. The second and third rows are where the trouble starts. Raw meat and nuggets are what other people made of the chicken, which is exactly where Sartre comes in.

Sartre’s Paper-Knife, and Why You Are Not One

For human beings, Sartre claims, there is no essence given in advance. We exist first, and become something through what we do.

He explains it with a paper-knife. The craftsman who makes one has a concept of it first: what it is for, how it is made. Its essence precedes its existence, and you can say what a paper-knife is before any particular one exists. For a long time, Sartre says, philosophers thought of humans the same way, as products of a divine craftsman with a plan, or later as instances of a universal “human nature”. He rejects both. “There is no human nature”, he says, because there is no God to have a conception of it. A person first turns up in the world and only afterwards defines himself by his choices. Hence his remark that the coward makes himself cowardly and the hero makes himself heroic, and either can stop being what he has been. A “true self” hidden under the false one would just be another paper-knife.

What Does Mauvaise Foi Mean?

In everyday French, mauvaise foi means something like disingenuousness: arguing a point you know to be weak, or pretending not to understand what you understand perfectly well. Sartre took this ordinary phrase and turned it into one of the central concepts of Being and Nothingness. In his technical sense, bad faith is a lie to oneself. Its strangeness, he insists, lies in the fact that the deceiver and the deceived are the same person. Ordinary lying is easy to understand because the liar knows the truth and hides it from someone else. In bad faith I must know the truth in order to hide it from myself, and still manage not to know it.

This is why Sartre rejected the most popular explanation of self-deception in his time, Freud’s theory of the unconscious. If an inner censor represses unwelcome thoughts, he argued, the censor must know what it is repressing in order to repress it, so the problem of a consciousness that both knows and does not know simply moves inside the psyche. Bad faith, for Sartre, is not something that happens to us from below. It is a project we carry out, a way of holding our own freedom at arm’s length.

His most famous example, besides the waiter discussed below, is a woman on a first date. Her companion takes her hand. To withdraw it would be to break the charm of the evening; to respond would be to commit herself. So she does neither. She leaves her hand in his, as Sartre puts it, as if it were a thing, and talks about lofty matters, treating her own body as an object that belongs to no decision. The example has been criticised, not least for how it casts the woman, but its structure is clear. Bad faith exploits the double nature of human beings: we are facts, a body, a past, a social role, and we are also the freedom that interprets those facts. Bad faith slides between the two, claiming to be only a thing when that is convenient and only free when that is.

Why would anyone do this? Sartre’s answer is anguish. Freedom is not a pleasant feeling for him but a vertiginous one: we are, in his famous phrase from Existentialism Is a Humanism, condemned to be free, responsible for what we make of ourselves without any excuse from God, nature or circumstances. Bad faith is the flight from that anguish. It is not a rare moral failing but the most natural strategy in the world, which is why Sartre spent so many pages on it and why his examples still feel uncomfortably familiar.

The Waiter Who Played at Being a Waiter

Bad faith is a lie you tell yourself about your own freedom, and Sartre’s most famous example, according to the SEP, is a café waiter who is a little too much of a waiter.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the waiter’s movements as a little too precise and a little too rapid, his bow a little too eager, as if he were performing the role rather than living it. He is playing at being a waiter, trying to be a waiter the way an inkwell is an inkwell, so that he no longer has to choose. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Sartre sums up the waiter’s position in the first person: “I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not”. A second example is a woman on a date who leaves her hand in her companion’s while pretending not to notice, so that the hand becomes a mere thing and she can put off deciding.

Behind both examples is a pair of terms. Facticity covers the facts we are stuck with at any given moment, such as body, past and situation. Transcendence is our ability to go beyond them. Bad faith plays one off against the other, sliding to whichever side is more convenient at the moment: I am only a waiter, nothing else is possible; or, I am pure freedom, what I did yesterday says nothing about me.

In image search this meme turns up as “self vs self”, which describes Sartre’s problem better than the caption does. The puzzle of bad faith, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy frames it in its section on Sartre and Freud, is how a “liar” and a “lied to” can share a single consciousness. Freud’s answer split the mind into parts with a censor between them, and Sartre objected that the censor would have to know what it hides, which only moves the puzzle somewhere else. So the self doing the hiding and the self being fooled are the same one, and there is no truer self underneath to hand the blame to.

Sincerity Has the Same Structure as Bad Faith

The meme misses this entirely: for Sartre, the sincere demand to “be who you really are” can itself slide into bad faith.

In the same chapter of Being and Nothingness, Sartre imagines a “champion of sincerity” who demands that a friend simply admit what he is, once and for all. The friend admits every act but refuses the label, insisting that his past does not define him. Sartre’s verdict is that both are in bad faith: the friend for acting as if his past had nothing to do with him, the champion for wanting him fixed like a thing. Sincerity, Sartre concludes, has the same structure as bad faith, and the SEP puts the point flatly: being strictly what one is cannot be achieved, given what consciousness is like.

Earlier, in The Transcendence of the Ego (written 1934, published in 1936 to 1937), Sartre had already argued that the self is not an inhabitant of consciousness but an object it builds by reflecting on itself, out in the world like other people’s selves. If he’s right, nobody is hiding a little dinosaur in the nugget; the nugget just has to figure out what it does next.

“True Self” Comes From a Psychoanalyst

The vocabulary of the meme is not Sartre’s. The pairing “true self” and “false self” was made famous by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and it means something different again.

In his 1960 paper “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self”, collected in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (1965, pp. 140 to 152), Winnicott described the true self as the source of spontaneous gesture, which grows when a caregiver responds to an infant’s own impulses. Only the true self, he wrote, can feel real. The false self forms when the child has to comply with others’ expectations instead, and in severe cases it becomes a defensive organisation that leaves a person feeling unreal or futile. In the same paper, Winnicott counted “the polite and mannered social attitude” as a healthy false self. His true self isn’t a fixed essence either, more a capacity to feel alive in what you do. In that sense the caption is fairer to Winnicott than to Sartre: something real can survive a lot of compliance.

Bad Faith in Everyday Life

Sartre’s examples come from Paris cafés in the 1940s, but the pattern is easy to recognise in modern speech. “That’s just who I am” is the classic form: a person presents a habit or a character trait as a fixed essence, as if they were a paper-knife designed for one purpose, and so excuses themselves from changing it. “I had no choice” is its twin, used when we did have choices but found all of them uncomfortable. Sartre was clear that even under extreme pressure we choose how to respond, though he later admitted that some situations constrain choice far more than his early work allowed.

Bad faith also runs in the other direction. Someone who treats every fact about their past as irrelevant, as if a promise made yesterday or a harm done last year did not bind them because they are free to reinvent themselves, is pretending to pure freedom and denying their facticity. The self-help slogan that you can be anything you want can work this way, when it forgets that freedom always operates in a concrete situation with a body, a history and other people.

A third form is collective. “Everyone does it” and “the system made me” can describe real pressures, and Sartre’s later Marxist work took such pressures very seriously. But they become bad faith when they are used to dissolve one’s own share of responsibility into the crowd. Sartre’s own example from Being and Nothingness is the soldier in a war: since he could have deserted, he argued with deliberate provocation, the war becomes his war. Few readers accept that conclusion in full, but it shows how far Sartre was prepared to push the idea that we are responsible for what we do with our situation.

Online life adds a new stage for the old drama. A carefully managed profile invites us to treat ourselves as a brand with a fixed identity, a kind of waiter performing a role so smoothly that the role seems to be all there is. Sartre would not have objected to playing roles; everyone does. He objected to forgetting that we are playing them, and to using the role as an excuse for what we choose.

Can anyone escape bad faith entirely? Sartre was pessimistic. In Being and Nothingness he suggests that even the person who tries to be perfectly sincere falls into a version of it, by claiming to be what they are in the way a thing is what it is. At best, bad faith can be recognised and resisted again and again, the way a habit is resisted rather than cured. That is a sobering view, but also a liberating one: the moment you notice yourself saying “that’s just who I am”, you have already caught yourself in the act, and catching yourself is the first step Sartre thought any of us could reliably take.

Know Thyself, but Which One?

The idea that wisdom starts with self-knowledge is old, and it does not settle whether there is a true self to know.

“Know thyself” was one of the maxims dedicated at the temple of Apollo at Delphi; in Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates mentions it alongside “Nothing too much” as one of the inscriptions “which are in all men’s mouths”. For the Greeks it was arguably first a reminder of human limits, roughly a warning that you are mortal and not a god, as Massimo Pigliucci sets out in Philosophy Now. Nietzsche later took the subtitle of Ecce Homo (written 1888, published 1908) from Pindar’s second Pythian ode: how one becomes what one is. Pindar’s line adds “having learned” what that is, which Nietzsche dropped. The formula sits neatly between the meme and Sartre. It allows that there is something you are, but says you only find it by becoming it.

Authenticity: What Sartre Offers Instead of a True Self

If there is no true self waiting inside us, what is the alternative to bad faith? Sartre’s answer is authenticity, a word he borrowed and transformed from Heidegger. In Being and Nothingness he mentions it only in a footnote, describing it as a self-recovery of being that was previously corrupted, and he promised an ethics that would explain it in detail. He never finished that book; his notes were published after his death as Notebooks for an Ethics.

The clearest definition comes in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946), where Sartre describes authenticity as having a true and lucid consciousness of one’s situation, and assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves. Authenticity, in other words, is not the discovery of a hidden inner essence. It is an honest relation to one’s own freedom and facticity: acknowledging the facts of one’s life without hiding behind them, and owning one’s choices without pretending they came from nowhere.

That is why the meme caption is so precisely wrong from a Sartrean point of view. It imagines the true self as the dinosaur hidden in the nugget, a fixed original nature that survives processing. For Sartre, there is no dinosaur inside. What persists through every transformation is not an essence but the freedom to take up what has been made of us and make something of it, which is a far more demanding, and far less comforting, idea than a buried true self. Simone de Beauvoir added that this freedom is always bound up with the freedom of others, so authenticity can never be a purely private achievement.

The word has had an odd career since. In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argued that modern culture had turned authenticity into a slogan of self-fulfilment, being true to yourself, often understood as following your feelings wherever they lead. Taylor did not reject the ideal, but he insisted that a self can only define itself against a horizon of things that matter beyond its own preferences. Sartre and Taylor disagree about much, yet both would agree that the popular search for one’s true self, like the meme’s dinosaur, misunderstands what it means to be a self at all. A self is not found like a fossil. It is made, and remade, in what we do.

So, Does the Nugget Have a True Self?

On Sartre’s account, no, and you do not have one either, at least not one hidden underneath. You have a past that is real and a freedom that does not go away.

Before this gets gloomy: the meme’s dinosaur trace is a fact about origins, like a person’s upbringing, body or nationality, what Sartre calls facticity, and he did not deny that facts like these matter. What he denied is that they decide what you will do with them. The nugget did not choose its shape. You, Sartre says, are always in the middle of choosing yours, even when you claim you are only being yourself. Sartre himself later decided he had overstated the point: rereading his wartime view in a 1969 interview, he said “I actually believed that!”, and settled for a man being able to make something out of what is made of him. Merleau-Ponty had raised a similar objection in the chapter on freedom of his Phenomenology of Perception (1945). A better question than “what is my true self?” might be: which of the things I call my nature am I using as an excuse?

For Sartre’s view of what other people do to that freedom, read our post on Sartre’s “hell is other people” and the edgelords who quote it.