Chapter 73
What must be versus what might be otherwise; determinism and freedom in events.
98 passages · 26 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
Necessity is the name for what cannot be otherwise. Contingency is the name for what is, but might not have been, or might have turned out differently. Between them lie the notions of chance, possibility and fate. Around them gather some of the oldest quarrels in the Harvard Classics: whether events are bound together by any real tie, whether a man’s choices are as determined as the fall of a stone, whether God’s foresight fixes the future, and whether a statesman who pleads necessity is telling the truth. The idea earns its place among the great ideas because it reaches into almost every province of these books. Physics, theology, ethics and politics all meet it, and so do tragic poetry and the private crisis of a young philosopher. To ask what must be is always, in the end, to ask what is left to us.
The most searching analysis of necessity here is Hume’s, and it begins by taking necessity apart. When we watch one billiard ball strike another, Hume says, observation discloses no connexion binding the effect to its cause. Without experience no one could foresee what would follow1. Events seem “entirely loose and separate,” and no tie between them is ever perceived2. Where, then, does the idea of necessary connexion come from? It arises not from any single instance but from repeated conjunction, and from the felt transition by which the mind, after many repetitions, passes from one object to the idea of its usual attendant3. Hume does not conclude that nature is lawless. Every natural effect, he holds, is precisely determined by its cause4. But necessity in this sense is nothing beyond constant conjunction and the inference built on it5.
From this follows the radical contingency of matters of fact. The contrary of any fact is always possible, because it implies no contradiction6. That like qualities must bring like effects seems nowise necessary7. The course of nature might change without absurdity, so the future cannot be demonstrated from the past8. Pascal had reached a kindred caution by another road. The recurrence of effects leads us to infer a natural necessity, he observes, yet nature often deceives us and breaks her own rules9. Mill, inheriting this empirical temper, held that even the so-called necessary truths are to be explained by experience and association rather than by any deeper source10.
Kant resists this dissolution, at least where morality is concerned. Laws known from experience are contingent, he argues, and therefore can never yield the necessary rule that duty requires11. He distinguishes physical necessity, which is determination by other causes, from the causality of a free will12. He also observes a curious doubling. An action may be objectively necessary and yet subjectively contingent, when the will is also subject to impulses13. Speculative reason leads to the necessity of a supreme cause, while practical reason leads to the necessity of laws of action14.
Schiller takes up the same vocabulary and turns it toward beauty. The sensuous instinct yields only accidents, while the formal instinct gives universality and necessity15. The one impulse imposes a physical necessity and the other a moral one. The play-impulse removes both constraints, and with them the merely contingent16. By making our formal and material constitution contingent, play paradoxically suppresses contingency and gives form to matter17. Only in the Absolute Being, Schiller allows, do physical and moral necessity fully coincide18. In ourselves we see the necessary following upon the contingent19. Freeman draws the line between the physical and the chosen in another field. Skulls and hair fall under physical necessity, but language has a chosen and contingent character20. Pascal, meanwhile, asks the question in its simplest form: whether a remark happened by chance, or was forced from a man by his principles once the occasion arose21.
Contingency also belongs to the being of things, and not only to our knowledge of them. Dante places brief contingencies, things generated with or without seed, at the lowest reach of the heavenly powers22. He sets aside as idle the schoolman’s question whether a necessary conclusion can follow from contingent premises23. Pascal turns the point upon himself. The self, consisting in thought, might never have been, and so it is not necessary24. Darwin carries contingency into the history of life. Permanent modification depends on many contingencies25, and there is no law of necessary development at all. Variability is seized by natural selection only so far as it profits the individual26.
Against these modern analyses stands an older conception, in which necessity is less a relation between events than a sovereign power over them. In Aeschylus, Prometheus acknowledges the irresistible might of Necessity27, and he declares art far weaker than she, whose helm is held by the triple Fates28. Dante makes even Fortune’s swift changes the work of necessity29. Milton’s chorus says that Samson died not willingly but tangled in dire Necessity, whose law joined him with his foes30. Bagehot singles out the same lines for comment31. Goethe’s Ferdinand sees every avenue barred and Egmont’s fate as inevitable32. FitzGerald’s Omar extends the image to all men: each is a link in an eternal chain none can break, and creation’s first morning wrote the reckoning of the last dawn33.
The Stoic answer to such a power is not defiance but consent. Marcus Aurelius sets necessity beside providence as serving the whole universe34. Destiny, he teaches, is made up of all existing causes, and what it brings should be accepted as one accepts a physician’s disagreeable prescriptions35. Events are to be welcomed gladly as necessary and as flowing from one source36. To follow what happens is a necessity imposed on all37. Parts perish of necessity through change38, and certain odors necessarily come from certain bodies39. In the same spirit Marcus treats men’s faults as natural and necessary, like the juice of a fig-tree40. It is impossible that shameless men should not exist, and we should not require the impossible41. Emerson gives the Stoic order a moral cast, making retribution a universal necessity: wherever a part appears, the whole appears42. Browne baptizes the Stoic conception, holding that fatal necessity is nothing but the immutable law of God’s will43.
When necessity is conceived not as divine order but as mechanism, the response changes from consent to revulsion. Carlyle laments that in a mechanical age a nightmare of Necessity has usurped the throne of Freewill44. An iron and ignoble circle of Necessity now embraces all things in place of Godhead45. Mill records the same oppression from within. The doctrine of Philosophical Necessity weighed on him like an incubus, making him feel the helpless slave of antecedent circumstances46.
That anguish points to the central question of the idea, which is whether human actions themselves are necessitated. Hume answers yes, and insists that everyone already believes it. Philosophers hold the connexion of causes and effects to be necessary. A clock’s irregularity, or a physician’s surprise at a symptom, shows only the presence of concealed causes47. Motives and voluntary actions are joined as regularly as natural causes and effects, so that apparent caprice in conduct is explicable in the same way48. Our everyday reliance on the actions of others shows that all mankind accept the doctrine of necessity49. Learning and action presuppose it. A prisoner weighing his escape reasons from the guard’s character as he reasons from the stone walls, for natural and moral evidence form one chain50. Human conduct is foreseen with the same assurance as physical events51. Men act on necessity even while they resist acknowledging it in words52. If necessity in matter is only constant conjunction and inference, and these hold in voluntary action, the same necessity must be owned in both53. On this definition it is universally allowed to belong to the will54.
Hume then claims that liberty and necessity were never really at odds, so that the dispute is merely verbal55. A spectator infers our actions from our motives and character, and that predictability is the very essence of necessity. Liberty taken as the opposite of necessity would be nothing but chance56. Kant reconciles the two by another route. He grants that natural necessity appears to contradict freedom and insists that both must be maintained57. Both must be thought as united in the same subject58. The contradiction disappears once man as appearance, subject to natural laws, is distinguished from man as thing in itself, independent of them59. Mill found his own release in a third solution. Character is formed by circumstances, yet our desires can help shape the circumstances that form it60.
These reconciliations did not satisfy everyone, and Hume himself names their limit. He states the objection that voluntary actions under necessity form a chain running back to the original cause, leaving no room for contingency or liberty61. He concedes that to reconcile the contingency of human actions with divine prescience and absolute decrees exceeds the power of philosophy62. Franklin’s youthful pamphlet on liberty and necessity shows how the subject could unsettle a reader. He wrote it against Wollaston’s reasoning, and his master Palmer found its principles abominable63.
The poets press the moral stake. Dante’s Marco argues that if heaven moved all things by necessity, there would be no justice in rewarding virtue64. Dante grants that love may arise of necessity, yet the power to dismiss it or harbour it remains in ourselves65. Milton’s God says that beings serving necessity rather than choice could offer no true allegiance66. Hearts that are not free cannot be tried, and service rendered by destiny finds no acceptance67. Here freedom is not a concession wrung from necessity but the condition of merit itself.
The theological form of the problem concerns foreknowledge. Chaucer’s narrator reports the clerks’ dispute over whether what God foreknows must needs be68. He weighs simple against conditional necessity and free choice, citing Augustine, Boethius and Bradwardine, then declines to settle the matter69. Dante offers the classic image of resolution. Contingent events are seen in God’s eternal sight without being necessitated, just as a ship is not driven by the one who watches it sail70. Milton agrees that foreknowledge did not necessitate the fall and left free will unimpelled71. Whether God Himself is bound is a further question. Augustine denies that God is under any necessity or constraint against His will72. Raleigh warns that to deny God the choice of when to create is to reduce Him to natural necessity73.
Necessity descends, finally, into the field of action, where it means the pressure of circumstances. Mardonius must fight for want of provisions, or else endure extremity74. Creon yields, saying one must not fight at such odds against necessity75. Enis-el-Jelis calls necessity imperious, though she still hopes God may decree a reunion76. Virgil tells Dante he is led through Hell by strict necessity and not for delight77. Necessity can transvalue as well as constrain: Lear finds that its art makes vile things precious78. Descartes counsels making a virtue of necessity, holding impossible for us whatever lies beyond our power79.
But the appeal to necessity is also a political argument, and so it is open to suspicion. Pascal notes that necessity compels states to compromise their laws80. Burke treats the accession of William as an act of necessity rather than free choice81, and praises the nation for refusing to turn a case of necessity into a rule of law82. Only a necessity that is not chosen but itself chooses can justify a resort to anarchy, and such a necessity is part of the moral order83. Lessing’s Minna voices the general doubt when she demands to know how reasonable a man’s reason, and how necessary his necessity, really are84.
The same tension governs judgments about history. Burke denies that the revolutionary horrors were the inevitable result of a patriots’ struggle85. Yet he also calls certain outcomes inevitable, planted in the nature of things rather than left to chance86. Emerson holds human history predetermined toward moral issues while still admitting individual freedom87. Mill charges the economists with ascribing natural necessity to social arrangements that human effort can change88. He denies that economic laws hold by any inherent necessity independent of institutions and customs89. Lowell praises Lincoln’s policy for being pliable to contingencies, as a man who controls circumstances allows for their eddies90.
Across these books the question changes form without being settled. For the tragedians necessity is a goddess. For Marcus it is the order of the whole, and for Browne the law of God’s will. For Hume it is a habit of inference, and for Kant one side of a twofold standpoint. For Mill it is in turn a nightmare, a solved puzzle and an economists’ error. What remains open is whether such reconciliations preserve the freedom that Dante and Milton thought justice requires. Hume himself confessed that the deepest form of the question, the one that touches God’s decrees, lies beyond philosophy’s reach.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
See also: Duty 1a