Are married couples in bad faith? Marriage seems to be the
foundation of every society. However, is it really a necessary institution? Why
is it that we need families? When a couple gets married, sometimes one plays
the role of a husband and one plays the role of a wife. If they do that as if
there is nothing else they could possibly do other than being husband and wife,
are they not operating in bad faith?
I always wondered why my parents are still taking care of me
and paying for my tuition. At any point, they could stop paying for me and start
traveling the world or do whatever they want. Despite their freedom, they keep
on being married, supporting me through school. Why do they do that?
Society is the sources of the power that perpetuates bad
faith. If my parents suddenly stop supporting me and leave me homeless when I
have done nothing wrong, other members of the society would think less of my parents.
If my parents suddenly get divorced, the society is going to do the same (at
least in a Chinese society). This is why my parents are operating in bad faith:
the society is pressuring them to do so.
The construction of the institution of marriage seems to
perpetuate the bad faith of married couples and singles who are seeking to be
married. People want to get married nowadays when they want to become a unit
with another person and maybe raise a family. They will support each other through
health and sickness. According to marriage laws, couples that are not married do not have rights to
hospital visitation when there’s accident or illness; they do not have rights
to family health coverage, inheritance rights, or rights to be parents for
their children. Why is this so? By making certain privileges only available for
married couples and not the other kinds of couples, the marriage laws are coercing
bad faith onto members of the society. They believe that the only way to get
these benefits is to get married to one person and that’s it. These laws
coerces people to look feverishly for “another half” while in fact they have it
in their freedom to not do that.
According to Marx, property is the ultimate culprit that
makes people alienate themselves from the production of their labor, from their
activity, and from their species-consciousness. I want to argue that in
marriage, one free being makes another free being a property. It is the
ultimate objectification and the denial of the sense of freedom. By marrying one person, I am saying no to all
the other people in the world; I am saying that nobody else can take my married
partner as a spouse; I am saying that I won’t take care of anybody else’s child,
that by default I won’t care for anybody else when they are sick, and that I
won’t give my inheritance to anybody else but my spouse. Like the rights to
property, the rights to married spouse denies rather than grants access. Marriages
separate people/couples from other people/couples. Marriages make people alienate
themselves from the way they act around each other – the goal for social action
becomes the attraction of a spouse or the protection of a married spouse from
being attracted to other people. A man’s way of acting around people has value
in so far as it gets him a potential spouse for marriage. This, wouldn’t you say,
is an alienation of one’s social interactions from oneself? Furthermore, the
relationship between a married couple seems to be more often dominated by the
production or maintenance of “marriage” than by real friendship between the two
partners.
Am I right to say that the marriage laws coerce us into the bad faith? Would you agree with me that marriage is an institution that
perpetuates bad faith? Is it true that by taking another
person’s hand in marriage, I am alienating myself (a social actor) from my social interactions? 
Brianna,
ReplyDeleteYou have some very interesting ideas here, but I think this post is too ambitious. You try to cover too much ground.
For instance, I do not think you have expounded nearly enough on how marriage could be in bad faith. To me, it seems that you propose the idea, take it as a given assumption, and then move on. I will elaborate. You give the example of your parents, but this example focuses on only one aspect of a typical marriage: child rearing. In this example, you wonder why your parents perpetually support you, but you do not ever draw the connection that perhaps the only reason they support you is because they are denying their transcendence. That is, they believe they are supportive parents in the way an inkwell is an inkwell. At least, this seems to be what you are implying, but you never explicitly make this connection. Explicitly making a connection between the definition of bad faith—denying that one’s self is both transcendence and facticity—seems necessary to show that a particular thing is done in bad faith.
With this definition in mind, there are many instances in which marriage could be in bad faith, but it is not necessary that marriage itself is an institution of bad faith. For example, it is certainly possible that your parents chose to set themselves the project of being supportive parents without denying their ability to transcend that role. You are right in claiming that there are immense pressures to take care of one’s own children. Much of this pressure comes from societal norms. I also think a great deal of it comes from the freedom you have with the life of an infant (similar to Sartre’s example with heights), but I do not think these pressures conduce bad faith. One could conform to these norms and expectations without acting in bad faith (e.g. without denying one’s transcendence). Conformity does not require bad faith unless the object of conformation is an act of bad faith itself.
It seems to me that one of the most difficult things about marriage is that one is consistently confronted with one’s freedom and ability to transcend one’s role as a married individual. This could be the reason why we have divorces, affairs, and other such things. According to this reasoning, one might be tempted to say to say, then, that a successful marriage is often in bad faith because those people are often denying their ability to transcend the marriage. But again, I say that it is not necessary that a successful marriage be in bad faith. It is more than possible to recognize a commitment as something that one could transcend if one chose to do so.
I agree with Brianna that marriage implies some degree of bad faith. General vows for a husband to take another as wife and vice versa imply some given role, and the commonality between most people's weddings suggests that there is a factive role. By this I mean that many people promise the same things when they get married, producing an overlap between most wives and husbands in their role as a spouse. Where this overlap occurs is where the facticity of being a wife/husband exists, where people play at being a wife or play at being a husband.
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ReplyDeleteI think Pierce is a little too critical of Brianna's post. I think what Brianna is implying about bad faith in a marriage has merit in it. It is something that people do not often consider a position of bad faith, but is interesting to look at. What makes marriage similar to the example of the homosexual and his friend is that the institution of marriage not only labels those who choose to participate in it, but it also implies that one acts or does certain things BECAUSE of this institution. Like Brianna said, marriage is often seen as a way to start a family, but one certainly does not have to be married to have a family, nor does one have to be married to remain faithful to one person for the rest of his or her life. Where marriage differs from the homosexual and his friend example is in its implication of a commitment. Legally, marriage does imply a commitment, so getting married does imply more facticity than the homosexual and his friend example. So I would not say that participating in the institution of marriage is in bad faith. But I do think that there exists a legitimate argument behind calling oneself a husband or wife as situation of bad faith.
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ReplyDeleteCarrie,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that Brianna is on to some good ideas here. I agree that there are many practical instances in which the married individual is practicing bad faith, but I disagree that marriage itself perpetuates bad faith. What constitutes a marriage is largely determined by what the individual thinks of it. If the individual perceives marriage as a facticity, then we have a situation in which the individual has set him or her self a project in bad faith. I think what is preventing us from complete agreement is how we are defining marriage. If marriage has to be a particular way, then it is in bad faith. If we allow some freedom in the definition, then marriage itself is not in bad faith, only those people who perceive it as untranscendable are.
Since we have things like divorces quite often these days, I think marriage is NOT something that most people go into truly believing that they must stick with that person for the rest of their lives. Regardless of the religious undertones in most marriages, it seems that many do not believe that marriage is untranscendable.
I would agree that marriage perpetuates bad faith. Not only does marriage come with many societal obligations, but the law itself "forces" married couples into doing a lot of things that wouldn't seem inherently reasonable to a society without the pressure for marriage present in our culture. I'm not saying that marriage is a bad thing at all; it is set up as an effective way to propagate a species and raise children who will do the same. It just isn't the only way. For example, I believe it was in Plato's "perfect city" that children were all raised communally without the "parental bonds" we have come to expect, and in theory it would accomplish the same overall goal. Even if marriage don't technically FORCE anyone into doing anything other as, say, a law would, the fact that there is such pressure to marry, such negative stigma about children being born out of wedlock, and everything else implied by marriage all make it hard to argue that marriage doesn't promote "bad faith." However, this is an example of when bad faith isn't necessarily "bad," as it were, because as a society getting people to act this way if beneficial to everyone. It's like how it's "bad faith" to assume that you can't slaughter your friends and children, you definitely could try, it's just not something anyone wants everyone to be considering as an viable option.
ReplyDeleteI believe that all the issues that have been hit on have been incredibly on point. However, I agree that Pierce brings up important, critical points but only for the purpose of making Briana's ideas clearer.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of bad faith in marriage does not seems unique. We do not even need to use institutions to find easy examples of bad faith. Therefore, I do not think it is unique to participate in bad faith in marriage, but Briana is right to point out that marriage may be one of the most likely institutions to produce bad faith. If individuals did not act in bad faith in their marriage quite a few of us would argue that those in the marriage were hardly in a marriage at all -- or at least were in a poor example of one. And here in lies the problem, our preconceived notions of what marriage is and supposed to be would seem to promote bad faith and dissuade anything else as only a marriage in name, if at all.
I think it is a mistake to feel we must rebel against the institution of marriage on these grounds, however. It is not the case that marriage is a malicious institution meant to deny our transcendence -- as this particular form of bad faith -- but that we must call for a social reconstruction of our ideas of marriage that promote bad faith as the most appropriate form of marriage [just as we have started to question whether marriage between a man and woman is the most correct form of marriage].