Law is Not In Fact Efficient to Originate Human Action. Nonetheless, We Mistakenly Treat Law As If It Is an Absolute and Indefeasible Determinant of Judicial and Other Human Conduct.

Out of 1943 France came a description of how all human action arises as a wholly negative procedure, explaining how and why what is absent and not yet existing, how and why what is desired and intended to be, is the fount of human action.

Language of law is a positive given factual phenomena, whereby police and prosecutorial officers, magistrates and legislators, invariably claim worldwide, to be originating social acts based upon given factual law language.

This author endorses the following rationale set forth by J. P. Sartre (1901-1980): ” No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological “state,” etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. For an act is a projection of the for-itself toward what is not, and what is can in no way determine by itself what is not.” (Sartre,J.P., Chapter Four, “Freedom”). And, further: “But if human reality is action, this means evidently that its determination to action is itself action. If we reject this principle, and if we admit that human reality can be determined to action by a prior state of the world or itself, this amounts to putting a given at the beginning of the series. Then these acts disappear as acts in order to give place to a series of movements...The existence of the act implies its autonomy...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 attained. 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… This 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.” And, further: “But if human reality is action, this means evidently that its determination to action is itself action. If we reject this principle, and if we admit that human reality can be determined to action by a prior state of the world or itself, this amounts to putting a given at the beginning of the series. Then these acts disappear as acts in order to give place to a series of movements...The existence of the act implies its autonomy...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 attained. 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… This 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.” (Sartre, J.P., Chapter Four, “Freedom”).

The ontological concept that no given factual state of affairs is per se efficient to determine a human being to act (or forbear action), is central to Sartre’s avant-garde explanation of how a human act originates. Human consciousness, which intentionally originates action, is an absolute freedom which cannot possibly be bound and determined by what already exists, else innovation could not freely suddenly surge up in the world. Hence given language of law, as a factual state of affairs, as an identity A=A, does not, cannot, itself determine the origination of either human action or, inaction. Nor can persons ontologically intelligibly claim to determine themselves to act or forbear action by law. Nor can persons correctly claim language of law to be the cause of their actions and or inactions, for human ontological absurdity consists in our being the indubitable sole authors of the intentional acts which constitute our manifold projects, who, nonetheless, in bad faith, designate some given state of affairs already contained in the world, (e.g., a law), as motive, cause, reason for our act.

Bibliography:
Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Philosophical Library. New York. 1956.