A will cannot act on a fully determined psychic process

Evidence

Furthermore, if the act is not pure motion, it must be defined by an intention. No matter how this intention is considered, it can be only a surpassing of the given toward a result to be obtained. This given, in fact, since it is pure presence, can not get out of itself. Precisely because it is, it is fully and solely what it is. Therefore it can not provide the reason for a phenomenon which derives all its meaning from a result to be attained; that is, from a non-existent. When the psychologists, for example, view the drive as a factual state, they do not see that they are removing from it all its character as an appetite (ad-peritio). In fact, if the sexual drive can be differentiated from the desire to sleep, for example, this can be only by means of its end, and this end does not exist. Pyschologists ought to have asked what could be the ontological structure of a phenomenon such that it makes known to itself what it is by means of something which does not yet exist. The intention, which is the fundamental structure of human-reality, can in no case be explained by a given, not even if it is presented as an emanation from a given. But if one wishes to interpret the intention by its end, care must be taken not to confer on this end an existence as a given. In fact if we could admit that the end is given prior to the result to be attained, it would then be necessary to concede to this end a sort of being-in-itself at the heart of its nothingness and an attractive virtue of a truly magical type. Moreover we should not succeed any better in understanding the connection between a given human reality and a given end than in understanding the connection between consciousness-substance and reality-substance in the realists’ arguments. If the drive or the act is to be interpreted by its end, this is because the intention has for its structure positing its end outside itself. Thus the intention makes itself be by choosing the end which makes it known. … Since the intention is a choice of the end and since the world reveals itself across our conduct, it is the intentional choice of the end which reveals the world, and the world is revealed as this or that (in this or that order) according to the end chosen. The end, illuminating the world, is a state of the world to be obtained and not yet existing. The intention is a thetic consciousness of the end. But it can be so only by making itself a non-thetic consciousness of its own possibility. Thus my end can be a good meal if I am hungry. But this meal which beyond the dusty road on which I am traveling is projected as the meaning of this road (it goes toward a hotel where the table is set, where the dishes are prepared, where I am expected, etc.) can be apprehended only correlatively with my non-thetic project toward my own possibility of eating this meal. Thus by a double but unitary upsurge the intention illuminates the world in terms of an end not yet existing and is itself defined by the choice of its possible. My end is a certain objective state of the world, my possible is a certain structure of my subjectivity; the one is revealed to the thetic consciousness, the other flows back over the non-thetic consciousness in order to characterize it. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1142 (#expands, via linked claim)

If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss. The decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet. Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not yet to the exact extent that the self which I am not yet does not depend on the self which I am. Vertigo appears as the apprehension of this dependence. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 239 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Psychic causality cannot be mechanical or constant-succession, only magic action at a distance — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 544; The self I am depends on a future self it cannot determine — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 239; Intentions cannot derive from a given, only from a non-existent end — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1142 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Intentions cannot derive from a given, only from a non-existent end #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1142
• The self I am depends on a future self it cannot determine #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 239
• Self-consciousness is not an added quality layered onto a psychic event #expands (0.72)
• An act is a transcendent psychic synthesis the for-itself must live #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 535
• Fatalism is active will disguised while in a weak position #expands (0.72)
• The inactive past cannot reach the present except through an ekstatic being #expands (0.70)