Necessity

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Before the gods there is a knot that cannot be untied. At or near the beginning of things stands Ananke, coiled with Chronos, Time, around the still-unformed world — a serpent of two heads gripping the egg of all that will come to be. The Orphic poems gathered under the name of Orpheus make the two of them parents of the cosmos: Time, who lets things unfold in order, and Necessity, who sees to it that nothing unfolds otherwise than it must. She is older than the powers usually invoked to explain a life. The Moirai, the spinners and measurers who allot to each mortal a thread and a length, are her daughters or her near kin in the genealogies, and they apportion; Ananke does not apportion. She names the constraint itself — the bare fact that the world yields only so far and no farther — prior to any question of who gets what share. To her almost no temples were raised. A power one might please with a gift attracts cult; a goddess who cannot be argued with, bribed, or deflected offers nothing to bargain with, and the Greeks who lavished hecatombs on more tractable deities passed her by. Constraint, having no ear, is given no altar.

The word that carries her name, anankē, leads its second life in philosophy, where it does the heaviest work in the language. There it marks the line between what merely happens to be the case and what could not be otherwise — between the contingent and the necessary, the distinction on which every later metaphysics of modality is built. To say a thing is by necessity is to say that its denial is not merely false but impossible, that no rearrangement of the world could have made it so. The Greeks reached for the same figure whether they meant the goddess at the world’s foundation or the cold force of a demonstration, and the doubling is not careless. The compulsion a proof exerts on the mind and the compulsion that fixes the courses of the stars were felt as one kind of pressure under two faces.

Being bound: the Presocratic and Platonic uses

The earliest sustained philosophical use binds being itself. In the great poem of Parmenides, what is cannot not be, cannot come to be or perish, cannot move or alter; the goddess who instructs the poet says that mighty Necessity holds it fast in the bonds of a limit, fettered and motionless, complete on every side like a well-rounded sphere. Necessity here is not an external jailer but the very condition of being’s being one — that which forbids the seamless whole to have any crack through which change or nonbeing might enter. To think being at all, on this account, is to feel the grip of anankē close.

Plato gave the idea its most influential cosmological shape. The Timaeus sets two principles at the root of the visible world: Intellect, nous, the ordering mind of the divine craftsman who looks to the eternal patterns; and Necessity, the recalcitrant ground of the material substrate, what the dialogue elsewhere calls the errant or wandering cause — the stubborn, half-formed disorder that resists being made over into the good. The cosmos is not the unopposed work of reason. It is a settlement. In the hosted Jowett rendering the account runs that “the creation is mixed, being made up of necessity and mind. Mind, the ruling power, persuaded necessity to bring the greater part of created things to perfection” — persuaded, not commanded. Reason does not abolish Necessity; it talks her round as far as she will go, and the visible world is the negotiated result, beautiful where persuasion took and flawed where it met a limit. This is one of the most consequential moves in ancient thought, because it refuses to make evil and disorder positive principles. They are the residue of what persuasion could not reach — the trace of the errant cause that mind worked upon but did not fully master. The Timaeus thereby installs Necessity at the heart of cosmology while denying it the last word.

Running alongside this metaphysical sense was an astronomical one, and the two fed each other. The heavens move in fixed periods; the planets return; the revolutions cannot run otherwise. An unalterable sky is the most vivid daily spectacle of necessity there is, and from it the inference came easily that whatever the unalterable heavens govern is likewise fixed. That conviction is the spine of astrology and of the broader practice of reading the future from fixed signs — see divination — and it presses straight into the question of whether anything at all is left to a human being to choose. If the stars cannot deviate and the stars rule the sublunary world, then the chain of compulsion reaches down into the smallest decision, and the space for choice narrows toward nothing.

The Stoic chain

The Stoics drew that chain as tight as it would go. In the system founded in the Painted Stoa at Athens around 300 BCE and given its rigorous architecture a generation later, necessity, fate, and the divine reason that pervades the cosmos were not three things but one. The logos — see logos — is the active, fiery breath that orders all matter; heimarmene, fate, is that same ordering reason seen as the unbroken sequence of causes; and necessity is the modal face of the same fact, that given the causes, the effects cannot fail to follow. Nothing happens loose from the series. The same providence that the Stoics called god, reading the world as a single rational animal whose every part conspires with every other, is from another angle the iron law that nothing could have gone differently. The consequence for freedom is severe and was felt to be so even within the school. What is going to happen will happen regardless; the one thing in a person’s power is whether the assent the soul gives to events is given willingly or under protest. The dog tied to the cart, in the school’s own image, follows the cart either way — running freely if it consents, dragged if it resists — and wisdom is to run. Freedom, on this reading, is not an exemption from the chain but a right relation to it: to want what the logos wants. The fuller treatment of the cosmic order as binding sequence belongs to Stoicism and to fate; what concerns Necessity proper is the claim that the sequence admits no alternative.

Aristotle had already complicated any such totalizing picture by distinguishing the kinds of necessity — the absolute necessity of what holds always and everywhere from the hypothetical necessity of what must be if some end is to be reached — and by reserving, in his famous discussion of the sea-battle that may or may not occur tomorrow, a domain of the genuinely contingent against which the Stoic chain would later be pressed. The long quarrel over free will is in large part the quarrel over how far Necessity’s writ extends, and whether the future is as fixed as the past.

Loosening on the return: the Neoplatonist refusal

The Platonist inheritance reopened what the Stoa had sealed. Plotinus, in the third century CE, treated the question head-on in the tractate of the Enneads that asks after free will and, more daringly, after the will of the One itself. His refusal is precise: he will not make even the first principle a captive of necessity. The One does not overflow because something compels it to overflow — there is nothing prior to it that could compel anything — and yet overflow it does, the whole procession of reality streaming from it without diminishing it. The standard reading of emanation turns on exactly this point: the source gives rise to all things not by constraint and not by deliberation, but by being what it is, the way light comes from the sun without the sun choosing or being forced. In MacKenna’s hosted rendering, the freedom of the Good is “the result of no compulsion but means only that The Good is no other than itself, is self-complete and has no higher.” Necessity and freedom, at the summit, coincide: what the Good does it does of its own nature, and its nature is not a cage but its very self. There is no daylight between what it must be and what it wills to be.

Lower down, the picture changes by degrees, and this gradation is the Neoplatonist’s real answer to the Stoic. Where the Stoa saw a single unbroken chain holding equally at every link, Plotinus saw a descent that thins as it falls. Necessity tightens toward the bottom of the procession, where soul is entangled with body and matter and the revolutions of the stars, and loosens toward the top, where intellect — see nous — and the soul that has turned back upward live in a freedom that bodies and heavenly spheres do not possess. Fate governs the sensible order; the soul that ascends passes out from under fate’s jurisdiction into the liberty of the intelligible. So the same cosmos that binds the embodied self does not bind the contemplative one to the same degree. The providence the Neoplatonists called pronoia — see divine providence — is not, on this account, identical with iron compulsion, as it had been for the Stoa; it is the care of the higher for the lower, leaving the lower a real, if shrinking, room to turn. Necessity is genuine, pervasive, and to be reckoned with; it is simply not, for the Neoplatonist, the last word about the soul’s freedom, any more than it was for Plato the last word about the cosmos. Neoplatonism thereby keeps the goddess in her place and denies her the throne.

The texts and the scholarship

The double life of anankē is read off a small body of decisive passages. The philosophical sense is anchored in the proem of Parmenides’ poem, surviving only in fragments quoted by later authors, above all in the commentary of Simplicius; in the Timaeus, the single most influential ancient text on the relation of order to constraint, available in the hosted Jowett translation and, for philological precision, in R. D. Archer-Hind’s facing-Greek edition of 1888; and in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Δ.5 and De Interpretatione 9. The Stoic fusion of necessity, fate, and reason survives only in fragments and testimonia — the school’s own books are lost — collected in Hans von Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Teubner, 1903–1924) and quoted by Cicero in the De Fato, by Diogenes Laertius in the seventh book of the Lives, and by the school’s critics. Plotinus on the freedom of the One is the sixth Ennead’s eighth tractate, hosted here in Stephen MacKenna’s translation (the five-volume Medici Society Plotinus, 1917–1930), with the modern critical Greek established by Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer.

The mythic Ananke is harder to reconstruct, because the cult that would have preserved her was so thin. The chief evidence is the Orphic theogonic tradition, known not from continuous poems but from quotations and summaries in the Neoplatonist commentators — Damascius above all, in the De Principiis — who treated the Orphic verses as a sacred parallel to Plato; the modern philological reconstruction of those theogonies is Martin L. West’s The Orphic Poems (Clarendon, 1983), with Luc Brisson’s studies tracing how thoroughly the late Platonists read Orpheus through their own metaphysics. The whole question of how the personified goddess relates to the philosophical concept — whether the concept is the goddess demythologized, or the goddess a personification of the concept — is the subject of Heinz Schreckenberg’s Ananke: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Wortgebrauchs (Beck, 1964), the standard lexical and conceptual history of the term across archaic poetry, tragedy, and philosophy. For the long argument over how far Necessity’s writ runs — the ancient debate on freedom and determinism into which all of this flows — the synthesizing modern account is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s survey of ancient theories of freedom and determinism, which maps the road from the Stoic chain through the Peripatetic and Platonist objections.

What the word keeps registering, across all 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 · Fate · Stoicism · Plotinus · Neoplatonism · Plato · Free Will · Soul · Logos · Divine Providence · Orpheus