Omnis determinatio est negatio

Omnis determinatio est negatio, or “every determination is negation,” names a principle whose force depends on where negation occurs. Sartre accepts that determination involves exclusion, but rejects the claim that being therefore passes into nothingness by its own nature. Being is prior and positively full; nothingness is a dependent negation that consciousness brings to bear on being. The principle thus illuminates both the way a world is differentiated and the freedom through which a situation comes to count as lacking something.

Being and the priority of negation

Sartre first objects to treating being and nothingness as simultaneous opposites. Opposites may stand together as equally positive or equally negative terms, but nothingness is not simply being’s opposite: it contradicts being. To deny being, there must first be being to deny. Nothingness therefore presupposes an irreducible act of negation, and is logically subsequent to the being it negates.

The distinction exposes a tension in the account associated with Hegel. If pure being is defined as indeterminate and empty, that definition has already excluded every determination; it has introduced negation into being from outside. Yet denying that being is this or that cannot make it cease to be. Sartre insists that negation cannot touch being’s nucleus of plenitude and positivity. Being is empty only of determinations other than its identity with itself; nothingness, by contrast, is empty of being. The two are not interchangeable abstractions.

Nothingness depends on what it denies

The ordinary uses of “nothing” reveal its dependence on a field of being. An instruction to touch nothing refers to nothing in a particular collection of objects; a person who says they know nothing answers questions about specified events. Even Socrates’ claim to know nothing designates the whole field of being considered as truth. In each case, nothingness does not name an independent abyss but a negation bounded by what has first been specified.

The same logic unsettles the imagined nothing before a world. The “before” is framed retrospectively by consciousness already established in being, and the supposed nothing is understood as the absence of this world or of any world. Remove those specifications, including the temporal contrast between before and after, and the negation disappears into an undifferentiated state that cannot meaningfully be conceived as nothingness. Sartre’s reversal of the formula is that every negation is determination: a negation takes shape only by specifying what is denied.

This priority is not merely logical. Nothingness has no independent existence from which to act; it borrows its being from being, and appears only within being’s limits. If being disappeared altogether, nothingness would not inherit the world as a separate realm: it too would disappear. The image of nothingness haunting being captures this asymmetry. Being can be examined without finding nothingness as one of its ingredients, whereas nothingness can occur only on being’s surface.

External determination and the “this”

The principle also raises a question about how distinct objects are identified. Sartre separates the internal negation of the For-itself from the external negation through which a thing is distinguished from other things. A newspaper lying on a table does not itself deny that it is the table. If it made that denial as an internal relation, it would have to be outside itself in the table and would no longer be merely an in-itself. The relation that determines the newspaper as this rather than that therefore belongs neither to the newspaper nor to the table as an intrinsic feature.

Sartre accordingly revises the maxim: a determination that does not belong to the being it determines is an ideal negation. Such negation does not alter the object or implant a new character in it. Nor can it be reduced to a subjective classification, since that would leave the object’s differentiations as mere mental phantoms. It remains “in the air”: unsupported by either the in-itself or the For-itself, yet summoned by the For-itself as it encounters objects across a system of internal negations. The inkwell is apprehended as an inkwell because it is not the table, pipe, or glass; the distinction is real to experience without becoming an intrinsic change in any of those things.

Determination, situation, and action

The principle’s practical consequence appears in Sartre’s analysis of action. A factual condition—a political and economic arrangement, a psychological state, or a person’s suffering—does not by itself motivate an act. Action projects consciousness toward what is not yet. For a condition to appear as unbearable or lacking, consciousness must first withdraw from it, posit an alternative as possible, and apprehend the actual situation in light of that possibility.

Sartre illustrates this point with a worker who suffers without reflecting on the suffering or assigning it value. Suffering and being are then one for him; it is not yet a motive. Only after forming a project to change his situation can he regard it as intolerable. He imagines happiness as a possible state, presently absent, and returns to the actual condition to recognize that he is not happy. The factual state has not changed in itself; its meaning as a lack arises through the consciousness that isolates and negates it.

That act of appraisal makes freedom indispensable. The worker must wrench himself from the organized situation in which he is absorbed, and the past cannot dictate the meaning he gives it. Consciousness must be able to break with its past and confer significance on it from the standpoint of a project that the past does not contain. Sartre links this negative power to freedom: determination may disclose what is absent or unsatisfactory, but it cannot, on its own, compel the future action that answers it.