Bad Faith and Checklist Tourism: A Sartrean Analysis

Abstract

This project offers a unique contribution to the scholarship on Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith by providing a sustained exploration of bad faith in the context of contemporary tourism. More specifically, I explore the bad faith of what I call "checklist tourism," which defines the tourist trip as a rapid succession of visits from one "must-see" site to the next, snapping photos and collecting souvenirs along the way. I argue that checklist tourism offers a safe and comfortable structure for travel that protects tourists against Sartrean anguish--that is, the experience of alienation, fear, freedom, and responsibility--that travel can sometimes evoke. This analysis contributes to the literature on bad faith in three main ways. First, I provide an extended analysis of the Sartrean spirit of seriousness, highlighting part of this concept that has thus far been underdeveloped in the scholarship. I argue that checklist tourism manifests the spirit of seriousness, which accepts the obligation of "must-see" sites and belief in the transcendent value of the material objects seen on the tour. Second, I explore the embodied bad faith of the possession and appropriation of the material world (rather than studying the possession of people, as most scholars have done), arguing that the tourist attempts to appropriate tourist sites through bodily engagement with them. Third, I develop a theory of play as authenticity, and I offer a systematic investigation of it as a rejection of the ontological bad faith project to be self-identical (i.e. to be God), and a reflective conversion to self-recovery. I then explore the character of the "post-tourist," which has been developing in the tourism literature and which represents a way of touring that rejects the seriousness of the "must-see" sites in favor of an attitude of levity, spontaneity, and playfulness.