Dictionary

counterfinality en · NOUN

Etymology

Coined by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Meanings

1. A set of circumstances in which one phenomenon (such as a group of people) opposes or undermines another phenomenon that produces or sustains it (for example, peasants deforesting hillsides in order to expand cultivatable land, resulting in flooding and the loss of the same).
   • But at the level of technical ensembles of the activity/inertia type, contradiction is the counter-finality which develops within an ensemble, in so far as it opposes the process which produces it and in so far as it is experienced as negated exigency and as the negation of an exigency by the totalised ensemble of practico-inert Beings in the field. 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, Verso, published 2004, page 193:
   • Yet technology may well serve as adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery—an alienated power, what Sartre calls the counterfinality of the practico-inert, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and seems to constitute the massive dystopian horizon of our collective as well as our individual praxis. 1991, Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, page 35:
   • Of itself, counterfinality gives rise only to necessity, and there is no guarantee that it will ever be overcome by group praxis. 1986, Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles, University of Chicago Press, page 161:
2. The tendency to increase ones value of or commitment to something when it involves unanticipated negative side effects.

Forms

wikipedia: Jean-Paul Sartre