Necessity and Contingency
38th installment to my philosophical system.
Nearly everything in philosophy can be blamed on Aristotle, most of all metaphysics. I’ve never been a fan of metaphysics because of what I felt to be unnecessary abstractions from experience. There is, however, one aspect of this “first philosophy” which I do enjoy ruminating upon: necessity and contingency. As we understand them today, necessity and contingency were born out of what were assumed to be “correct” logical deductions regarding the nature of things. Claims about reality are always prefaced by certain underlying aspects of the world which necessarily must be in order to make such claims in the first place; this division is what gave rise to the notions of necessity and contingency.
Firstly, regarding necessity, Aristotle breaks it into two aspects: absolute and hypothetical. On the one hand, absolute necessity is that which cannot be otherwise, like, for example, mathematical proofs or sound syllogisms—these are aspects of the world which are “eternal” and unchangeable. On the other, hypothetical necessity is something which “must” occur in order for another thing to actually be actualized in the world, like a house needing a foundation before it can be built, or a tree needing nutrients if it is to grow—these are conditional aspects of reality because they depend on other things in order to be brought about.
Secondly, contingency is merely that which can be, but is not necessitated by anything—these are accidental aspects of reality, things which occur but which are not destined to be so necessarily. From this, it would seem like hypothetical necessity and contingency are the same thing, but Aristotle makes the distinction in order to separate things that must happen from things that could happen by pure chance (accident). This distinction allowed Aristotle to explain why the world feels both orderly and unpredictable at the same time—it was his way of reconciling two interpretations (the necessary and the contingent) from one empirical fact.
I think it should also be mentioned that this aspect of Aristotle’s metaphysics is what gave rise to the rest of his philosophical system: from his matter-form distinction, to his four causes, to his virtue ethics, to his Physics (explaining all natural phenomena in terms of their necessary “natural motion”), and even to his Poetics (where certain events in the plot are necessary for a play to be considered a comedy or tragedy).
Every explanation in the Ancient Greek world revolved around the notions of necessity or contingency, because there had yet to be a method for thoroughly investigating nature without relying on (what we would today consider) baseless presuppositions or assumptions about reality; everything was dealt with strictly on first principles, and so, everything had a rational character to it rather than an empirical one.
As I argued for in my essay Science, the shift occurred—sometime around the start of the Islamic Golden Age—when philosophers sought to distinguish the teleology (purpose) of nature from the ontology (being or is-ness) of nature; here all wise men divided, and the former natural philosophers suddenly found themselves scientists. It should also come as no surprise, then, that during the Islamic Golden Age men were making great innovations upon Aristotle’s necessity-contingency dichotomy. So great, in fact, were the innovations that the whole system of Kalam was developed out of it: the speculative investigations of Aristotle, combined with the need to reconcile or refute the claims made by the kuffār with Islam, gave rise to Muslim philosophy, pioneered by men like Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, and Ibn Rushd.
But what is the nature of necessity or contingency, and why do we need it? Philosophers are obsessed with two things: wisdom and closure. Wisdom comes as a natural byproduct of experience, but closure comes only when you feel you’ve exhausted your wisdom when attempting to explain matters outside of your comprehension. What is closed is final and doesn’t have to be thought over again because it is already perfectly understood; but in the search for wisdom, one always has to necessarily dig up old grounds which were paved centuries, maybe even millennia, ago; philosophy is very much like that.
Philosophy is difficult because it makes two contradictory demands on an individual: that they continuously seek the truth, and that they find wisdom in never obtaining the truth through all their seeking. In a sense, every intellectual innovation was made on a false premise, because it assumed that the truth was out there to be held in the mind forever, never to be changed—in reality, we’ve only had the simulacrum of truth, because we’ve been thinking about truth wrongly since Plato.
Existence is not something which one can find the end of; much like a line, it extends infinitely, but the page upon which it is drawn—which in this analogy is life—must necessarily have edges which limit how far out it can extend. Originally, philosophers presumed the world to be something which was contingent on the necessity of the Gods; man was merely a byproduct of their will, and everything which occurred in the cosmos had its reason in the Gods. Everything which occurred in the world was already so, and so it appeared to man as if it had to be necessarily so—in that sense making everything a kind of hypothetical necessity, given that the Gods were the ones in control of all. However, this foolishness only lasted as long as man was willing to kowtow to unknown forces and propitiate total mysteries.
Hubris could only have arisen in man the moment he felt himself an equal to the Gods. The whole situation is enough to make us moderns die of laughter, for the original sages, poets, and wise men actually maintained their faith in their own myths in order to flatter themselves by saying the “ultimate truth” of everything was really something (the Gods) which they could engage with, and, perhaps even sway in their favor; it is as if Homer and Hesiod forgot they were making myth, and not truth—nay, to them, myth was truth, for truth originally meant aletheia (ἀλήθεια—lit. “non-forgetting”): the process of revealing, becoming known, or bringing reality into the light.
To the ancients, truth was something you participated in while you existed in the world; and so, it is no wonder why all the Pre-Socratics, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle after them, thought that all of reality could be unveiled and revealed to man as man made his way through the world. It must never be forgotten that the last words of Socrates were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; pay it and don’t forget.” Even in death, the greatest exemplar of the philosophical life wished to worship the Gods; from this, there can be no doubt that Socrates was not corrupting the youth of Athens by inclining them towards atheism, but rather inclining them to speculation about the Gods in order to further reveal them—discover them as true. That is what Socrates’s dialectical (maieutic) method has always been: to turn man’s mind upon himself, in order to truly inquire into his own truth—to find out whether he knows anything or not. That is true truth. That is what I find to be the truth—the never ending search that, in searching, reveals what we’ve known all along, and thus is really only our long forgotten wisdom.
From an existential perspective, wisdom is merely what allows us to live, indeed, may be called necessary for life—that which we cannot live without. I have spent the better part of my life wondering, and the other half forgetting why I ever wondered in the first place. I almost feel guilty for putting my younger self in such dire straits as I find myself in now.
It is nearly impossible, nay, is impossible, for me to set right what was made wrong so long ago—without doubt, there can be no turning back in life, no joy without the accompanying pain that follows its end; so much I’ve striven for, desired, loved, forgotten, languished in sloth, made contemptible out of spite, mocked out of fear, ridiculed out of shame, etc.—my whole life has been one long postponed dream, and I cannot speak to that younger me who saw the truth as something different, the truth which ruined him, and which he was unable to understand at the time.
Did I not survive it all so far, however? It may be that my wisdom then was not what it is now, and all my false ideas about myself were really ways of avoiding the suffering that lay at the bottom of everything which I strove to avoid, rather than confront. It was not wasted, though. I cannot say it was without its purpose. I cannot even say it was without meaning, for I managed to find something meaningful in it all in the end.
There was no pretense to necessity in anything I ever pursued—it certainly wasn’t felt by me to be necessary anyway. That is why my life is deep, my suffering great, and my fortitude literally incomparable: it has always been, I thought, my duty to avoid life, to drift by it like a leaf upon a raging river, to make no pretense to become anything in it; and all that “truth” now considered in my present maturity—what has it led me to? Nothing but the recognition of my own correctness. I lived my life so truthfully, so independently, so ethically with respect to my own subjectivity, that now I see almost no point in living further, having seen the true truth of the world.
I cannot see myself going through with the end of it, however, because I see no motivation stronger than stagnation; in that sense, I could never end myself, because I lack the fortitude to break from the truth, and lie to myself by ending my life, which has up until now been nothing but total truth. The truth of this world is in me, in the same way Tolstoy said where love is there is God. Merely having the truth is not enough to live off of, however. “Man shall not live on bread alone,” said our Lord and savior; and how great he did suffer at the hands of Satan—placing before him every possible temptation.
My greatest temptation is death. But I know there is no truth in death, in the same way there is no necessity in life. And so it must be. So it is. I must live so that I may die, not the other way around. My confusion about the nature of the world, all these ideals and aspects of existence, now only find their place in my beating heart. My own wisdom was forgotten because I hadn’t the maturity to see what the meaning of wisdom was. But now, I like to think the world is a bit more clear for me; not because I always lived my life truthfully, after my own interest and in my own way, but because I now understand myself enough to know why I was in the right with respect to my own life—why I lived it so honestly, so truthfully, so passionately.
I was false to myself for so long, the mask was lifted up before my face for years, which I deliberately kept up in order to ensure I would not be gawked at by the world for being some sort of eccentric—but now, what is any of that to me? Nothing. My truth is great, but not because it is true, rather, because it is true for me—without that, there would be no honesty in anything I relate. My writings are only done for the sake of myself, and in being truthful to myself in writing them, I hope to endow another with my own wisdom, in order that the nature of the world may not appear so foreboding and unforgiving to them as it did for me in my great ignorance. Existence is but a contingency made necessary.
Existence appears as a necessity that is comprehended through contingency, when in truth it is the other way around. To already exist seems to imply that there’s a sort of determined necessity which brought us about, but that is only assumed because we do in fact exist. The saying “it is what it is” perfectly exemplifies this: because a thing already is, it could not be other than what it presently is, but the mere existence of a thing does not carry with it the necessitated corollary people would assume it to have. Existence is a contingency, not a necessity.
The idea of necessity with respect to our existence is born out of the fact of our impossibility to conceive of the contrary: if we did not exist, we would have no content by which to infer our existence out of, and so, it would follow that we do, in fact, exist—otherwise there would be an incomprehensible nothingness which distinguishes the conscious from the unconscious, in a sense, the living from the dead. This, however, still does not get us to the necessity. In the same way every argument for God’s existence ultimately fails because there’s always doubt regarding His necessity—which implies a limit to His nature: a contradiction—there is always doubt regarding our own necessity.
Our own necessity is born out of our confusion regarding how contingent we all really are. We cannot even say that we are hypothetically necessary, because there is nothing within existence itself that must be—only what happens to be on chance. It is, after all, the highest form of vanity to assume our own importance. Once again, every existential issue man has faced throughout his course of being one among billions of species which have existed, is his inability to properly frame himself with the totality of existence as such.
Nobody really tarries with existential questions because everybody intuitively sees, or perhaps even knows, the bankruptcy that comes with describing, philosophically, the implicit emptiness in all our attempts at describing what lies at the core of existence. To be descriptive only is to forget what it means to be human, because human beings are more complex than one can even imagine—even the most creative super genius could not exhaust the source of infinity that is the human experience: I really do mean it, combine Shakespeare with Goethe, Da Vinci, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Montaigne, and Pascal, and you would still fail to bring the whole of man into focus.
Again, to be descriptive only fails because man must also be normative in his judgements: there comes a time in everyone’s life where they must make a choice which no amount of deliberation or right reason could be had in order to bring ease to their anxious hearts. It is here, then, that we must all accept Kierkegaard’s dictum of taking the leap of faith, and place our life entirely upon another. However, with me not believing in a God to place my life upon, I must perform an inversion of sorts, and fall upon what is actually there to catch me: nature. That is why my God is the God of Emerson or Spinoza, and is why I very much find myself most happy these days gazing at forests than being amongst other people—I find I relate much better to those things which simply live without speaking a word, than those who live and breathe and desire much more than they really need.
The necessity of life is only found in the long chain of contingency that upholds it. Though it was initially born out of metaphysical deduction from the representations of the world, we now know what it really signifies: a desire to systematize life, in order that its immensity may not consume us completely. I, however, find great comfort in knowing there is no end to its depths, and find the initial path Socrates led the only necessity there is: that of searching for the truth in a world where it continuously evades us.