Necessity

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Necessity is the name for whatever cannot be otherwise — what holds not by choice or chance but because nothing else is possible. In Greek the word is anankē, and it carries two lives at once: a hard idea in philosophy, the contrast to everything that merely happens to be the case, and a figure in religion, the goddess Ananke, who compels even the gods.

The personification came first. In the old theogonies Ananke stands at or near the beginning of things, sometimes coiled with Chronos, Time, around the unformed world; the Orphic poems make the two of them the parents of creation. She is the force that cannot be argued with or bought off — distinct from the more familiar Moirai, the Fates who measure out a life, in that she names compulsion itself rather than its apportioning. Cult was sparse: the Greeks honored many powers they hoped to please, but a goddess of sheer constraint offers nothing to bargain with, and shrines to her were rare.

In philosophy the term does the heavy work. Parmenides bound being with it: what is, must be, held fast “in the bonds of necessity.” Plato’s Timaeus sets Necessity against Intellect as the two principles from which the cosmos is woven — Reason persuading Necessity — what scholars often call the errant cause — toward the good as far as it will go, the visible world the negotiated result. The astronomical sense, of a heaven whose motions could not run otherwise, fed directly into the later conviction that the stars governed fate, and so into astrology and the whole question of whether anything is left to choose. The Stoics pressed hardest: for them necessity, fate, and the divine reason of the world were one thing, and freedom could only mean assenting to what was going to happen regardless.

The Platonist inheritance complicated the picture rather than settling it. Plotinus, treating the question of free will, refused to make even the highest principle a captive of necessity — the One is not compelled to overflow, though overflow it does — and argued that the soul that has turned upward is not bound in the way bodies and stars are bound. Where the Stoic saw an unbroken chain, the Neoplatonist saw a descent that thinned toward the bottom, necessity tightening as one fell away from the source and loosening as one returned to it.

What the word keeps registering, across these uses, is a single pressure: the recognition that the world is not infinitely pliable, that some things are simply fixed, and the long argument over where the fixity ends and freedom, if there is any, begins. The Greeks gave that pressure a face and called her Ananke. The philosophers spent centuries trying to say exactly how far her writ ran.

→ In the library: Plato — Timaeus (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — On Free-will and the Will of the One (Enneads VI.8, MacKenna 1926)

→ Related: The One · Emanation · Eros · Nous · Divination