Inez’s Manifestation Of Self-Deception

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Inez’s Manifestation of Self-Deception
The essay on Self-Deception and his play “No Exit” show Jean-Paul Sartre as a great thinker and an able writer. His essay outlines his thesis on self-deception while his play brings it to life. The character Inez is the pivotal character in the play. Her actions can be directly correlated with Sartre’s texts. As we will see, Inez’s behavior stems from her cynicism towards others as well as her loss of identity and her conscious drive towards suffering. Sartre strikingly points out that companionship is both a blessing and a curse.
Sartre defines consciousness as “a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being”(K 299) . This implies that our nature is to realize that our consciousness is nothing, that we are nothing. This is not to say that everything is nothing. On the contrary, the very idea of humans having a consciousness leads one to believe that consciousness is the very thing that saves us from damnation, that a higher being would not endow the human race with consciousness if it were not ultimately destined to transcend its own nature and fully employ all the realms of his own consciousness outside of the human body. I interpret Sartre’s definition of consciousness as nothingness of the ego. The ego is what blocks one from identifying their consciousness as nothingness. This said, humans must decondition themselves from the lies and untruth that plague this world. If we are to deny our conditioning; that is, deny what we are or what we perceive ourselves to be (i.e. a chef, a baseball player, a man/woman) we are deceiving what we were. To fully transcend, we must deny those impulses and states of being which naturally define us as human. In this process towards transcendence, we come across two obstacles: self-deception and sincerity.
Sartre says, “the one who practices self-deception is hiding a displeasing truth or presenti...