Determinatio est Negatio

Neumann’s compressed formula for the founding act of consciousness. “To become conscious of oneself, to be conscious at all, begins with saying ‘no’ to the uroboros, to the Great Mother, to the unconscious… To discriminate, to distinguish, to mark off, to isolate oneself from the surrounding context — these are the basic acts of consciousness. Indeed, experimentation as the scientific method is a typical example of this process: a natural connection is broken down and something is isolated and analyzed, for the motto of all consciousness is determinatio est negatio. As against the tendency of the unconscious to combine and melt down, to say to everything tat tvam asi — ‘that art thou’ — consciousness strikes back with the rejoinder: not” (Neumann 2019, par. 51).

The formula borrows Spinoza’s metaphysical axiom and redeploys it developmentally: every determinate content of consciousness is the negation of a previously undifferentiated psychic continuum. The ego comes into being by withdrawing from, denying, and breaking up the pleromatic participation in which it was originally dissolved. Scientific analysis — the severing of a “natural connection” — is the mature form of the same primitive gesture by which the infant first distinguishes itself from the mother.

The concept ties the separation-of-the-world-parents (cosmogonic register) to the ego’s individual self-formation (ontogenetic register), and it names the direct contrary of the uroboric tat tvam asi. It is load-bearing for any account of why consciousness is constitutionally anxious: its foundational act is an act against the condition that gave it life. Every advance of consciousness is, on this reading, purchased by a refusal.

Relationships

• ego-consciousness
• uroboros
• separation-of-the-world-parents
• ego-as-last-born

Primary sources

• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)