Counterfinality
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 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."
- 2 The tendency to increase ones value of or commitment to something when it involves unanticipated negative side effects.
Example
More examples"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."
Etymology
Coined by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.