Becoming Xvi

8/14/2019 Becoming Xvi

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BECOMING XVI: NECESSITY

We now come to Necessity, that which is so because it is, as Hegel terminates

these difficult three introductory paragraphs (149). I will take them as a whole

before reading the Zusatzto 147.

We have then a circle of possibility and immediate actuality. All the indications

are that Hegel not merely has time in mind but that he is guided by the

previous unfolding of the dialectic (he explicitly prescinds from mere discussion

and so we may on occasion do the same) to a conceptual representation which

clearly show the necessity, at a certain moment of the dialectic, ofa temporal

process, of Time, without his needing inappropriately to mention it, as I am doing.

Time itself, along with nature and individual mind as a whole, are moments of the

dialectic. In immortality nature and individual are absorbed and thereby uniquely,

most properly and without loss activated, i.e. not merely for the first time or asit were parousially. There is no End of Time if time is not, nor could there be

anyhow since the expression, understood temporally, is a straight contradiction.

There is much of Hume in Hegel and Hume is thus, so to say, redeemed, if he

needs it. He is anyhow absorbed, not needing to be neurotically dismissed, as by

the partisans of restoration, a word always smelling of death and decay.

This circle, as externality (of actuality), is what is called Real Possibility.

Called by whom? Here is a hint of concession to the immediate. Yet, as circle, it

is the totality, and thus the content, the actual fact or affair in its all-round

definiteness. We are speaking of Essence as replacing Being, but at the sametime of Idea and Manifestation as one, going a step beyond speaking of Idea and

its manifestation. A relation of God and Nature transcending contingency is also

intimated, though contingency is contained within it as dialectical moment.

This circular unity, again, realises the concrete totality of the form, the

immediate self-translation of inner into outer, and of outer into inner. The self-

translation is immediate, i.e. the unity is this translation, which yet remains

precisely a translation, while realises gives the link with Real Possibility. This

self-movement of the form is Activity, distinguished now from Actuality. Activity

carries into effect the fact or affair as a real ground which is self-suspended to

actuality. It carries into effect, again, the contingent actuality, the conditions;i.e. it is their reflection-in-self and, at the same time, these conditions are self-

suspended to another actuality, the actuality of the actual fact. Fact and

conditions pass into one another and this is necessity, their necessity. If all the

conditions are at hand, the fact (event) mustbe actual; and the fact itself is one

of the conditions. The fact itself is one of the conditions. Just one, it is surely

implied, recalling Hegels dialectical placing of Existence earlier. As with Kant

previously, a long meditation upon Hume is surely evidenced here. Why does

Hume speak of causality as a necessary connection, only distinguishing cause

from effect in terms of before and after, here disappearing in the circle of

contingency?


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But then the fact itself, if it is one of the conditions, must be condition for some

new fact behind the fact, or is this rather the fact over again? That is, as infinite,

as for Hegel it must finally be since each category is such as representing, in its

moment, the Absolute, must not the fact ever direct to further recesses, as

thought thinking itself thinks itself thinking itself (cf. McTaggarts scheme of

infinite reflexive perception of perception, determinate correspondence) or asknowledge includes knowledge of knowledge ad infinitum?

The reason Hegel gives for his thus reducing fact from its more usual

clinching role is that being in the first place only inner, it is at first itself only

pre-supposed. There is, indeed, an ambiguity about fact, which may easily

strike readers of Wittgensteins Tractatus. Fact aspires to connect with reality

beyond all argument, yet it is squarely based in our language, such as that It is

a fact that... Facts are irreducibly propositional and hence even relational. Yet

they are presented in isolation, the abstractive essence of fact, precisely as

demanding to be related. They are not, for example, substances. Fact is indeedpre-supposed, by our system of predication one might well say, but at first only

only! This, that Hegel calls developed actuality, dialectically developed this can

only be, is Necessity, viz. this real Possibility we have been discussing. As thus

presupposed, however, a fact is what is so because its circumstances are so,

and at the same time it is so, unmediated: it is so, because it is. It is brute,

brute fact. Thus we naturally regard and speak of what we immediately

experience before asking why about it. As developed and explained here it

forms part, or logical moment rather, of a Necessity not immediate to us.

He will say of Activity, and we note it already now, that it carries into effect,

although it is the movement, yet has... an independent existence of its own

(as a man, a character) requiring, he adds, both conditions and fact for its

possibility (148, c.). This is the subjective moment, here shown as not

dependent on affirmation of man as man (man or character, he seems to say,

though man as character equally calls man as man in question) but within

dialectical Reason alone. The existence of Activity is a consciousness, a

differentiation, since a knowing. Ifthe computer knows, it is conscious, whether

or not we add It is not conscious, therefore... Such consciousness however

need not be interpreted in the narrowly psychologistic sense. On the other hand

the notion of intentional systems would need modification before incorporation

into an absolute idealism, where the knowledge is utlimately self-knowedge asincluding all (the sense of the Delphic response to Socrates, i.e. to philosophy, in

Hegel's interpretation).

There is thus much more to Necessity than a mere union of possibility and

actuality, which leaves everything open. Necessity is the notion itself, in some

nearer sense than that in which everything is this. We have to rise beyond

actualities, the category thereof. These are forms only, collapsing and

transient, however much they may seem to satisfy us in this mere moment

which we have reached. Deeper in and further up, thought as it were exhorts.

We proceed.


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In 148 Hegel refers back to these three elements in the process of Necessity,

Condition, Fact, and the Activity, conscious, as he has remarked, of the greater

difficulty now attending our reading. We may wonder why or how it is a

process. They constitute necessity, he also says.

The Condition is (a) what is pre-supposed or ante-stated, i.e. it is not onlysupposed or stated. It is not, that is, only a correlative to the fact but also prior,

even independent. It is a contingent and external circumstance which exists

without respect to the fact. This must be read in the light of his earlier

exposition of the Condition. This term though, pre-supposed and ante-stated,

is equally a (or the?) complete circle of conditions, the external world as it is,

we might say, using Hegels term.

These or this are passive, are used as materials for the fact, used up as he

also says repeatedly, into the content of which they thus enter, as the

manifestation which necessity, the notion, is, we might also say (to ourselves),

thinking of previous moments in this discourse of the dialectic.

The Fact, now, is also (a) something pre-supposed or ante-stated, whether to

the Condition or the Activity or both is as yet unclear. A purely reciprocal

correlation with the Condition(s) seems denied. Yet it too, we go on to read, is

prior and independent. Yet this is called a process, even if not as such

temporal. Thus at first the Fact, as supposed, is only inner and possible, and

also, being prior, an independent content by itself, i.e. it is not, like the

Condition, a contingent and external circumstance. It is inner. Again, by

using up (they use or use up one another) the conditions, it receives its

external existence, this Fact which was at first only inner, realising thedeterminations1 of its content. These do indeed reciprocally correspond to the

conditions. The fact both presents itself out of these as the fact and also

proceeds from them, i.e. at the same time as it is pre-supposed and ante-stated

to them. The mutual identity, beyond reciprocal implication, of Inner and Outer, is

here confirmed.

Even the Activity, or third element, has an independent existence of its own

(as a man, a character), although possible only where the conditions are and

the fact, i.e. along with them in what is, we shall see and have seen, necessity.

It is the movement which translates the conditions into fact, and the latter into

the former as the side of existence. It is in fact, again, subjectivity, thought,

though Hegel does not yet say this, of particular or universal self indifferently.

The movement educes the fact from the conditions in which it is potentially

present. It gives existence to the fact. It does this by abolishing the existence

possessed by the conditions (my emphasis). This refers, I do not doubt, to the

upward spring of the mind outlined at 50. In itself it signifies, i.e. the actual

spring signifies, that the being which the world has is only a semblance and

that truth abides in God, in that in which we live and move and have our

being, to take a leaf out of the scripture. The world is the external, the alienated

Idea.

1 Wallace has articles.


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In so far as these three elements stand to each other in the shape of

independent existences, the world, its being so, the subject, this process has

the aspect of an outward necessity. It is not, it is implied, the whole story.

Outward necessity has a limited content for its fact, this whole in the shape of

singleness. The limitedness, however, is so to say formal rather than material. It

arises logically since in its form this whole is external to itself. It is self-externalised even in its own self and in its content. Any such world, as

externalised, would be limited in virtue of just this externalisation. This is what

Hegel means surely by self- or intrinsically externalised. The externality itself as

such is a limit of its content. This is the inward rationale of contingency within

ultimate necessity as the Notion. It is not, except immediately or vulgarly, the

empirical barrier at which ultimate necessity stops, in contradiction of itself,

such that Either man exists or God exists (Sartre). Necessity is, i.e. God knows

all things since this knowledge is prior to and not caused by them. Hegel simply

fills in the Augustinian-Thomist and arguably Aristotelian tradition here.Here, at

least, his thought coincides with the teaching of divine creation as necessarilyfinite, even though he will also speak of it as an entire manifestation. There too

he mirrors the distinct processions of Word, internal but also external in

incarnation, and creature, dis-covering a foundation of necessity for what in

religion is represented as contingent (as Aquinas or Augustine stressed with the

felix culpa) in the spirit of the thought of Duns Scotus on this point.

What is brought out here is a necessary connection between time and necessity,

revealed immediately in the past-present structure. By becoming past things,

events, are revealed as necessary. It was fated to be, we say, meaning that, as

now complete, it not merely cannot but could not, i.e. as complete, be otherwise.Refutations of fatalism turn upon just this point. Fatalism, however, in some

statements of it, is not the sound doctrine of Necessity that is ultimately one with

freedom.

So it is, moreover, with facts, therefore dependent upon the Condition(s) as

described above. The fact is what has become, even where it is an apparently

timeless definition such as that man is an animal. We thus suppose a stage of

becoming what something is, whether or not such a stage has occurred. Thus

God exists, completely, i.e. completedly, as result, says Hegel. This has to be

perceived and that is the Activity, ultimately of absolute self-perception.

This is in general reflected in Aristotle's term for essence, coined before the

medieval abstract term, namely, that which was to be, ti en einai, quod erat

esse. In so far as time becomes fact, therefore, it is no longer perceptible as time,

as condition. The upward spring has been made. The causal relation there

becomes reversible exactly as instanced in the relation between Condition and

Fact here and this will be further gone into under the category of Causality,

coming after Substance. Time's arrow is indeed reversible (Boltzmann) but then it

is no longer that arrow we had been calling time.

He thought he saw a bank-clerk descending from a bus,

He looked again and found it was a hippopotamus.


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This indeed, Necessity, is that true and final Leviathan glimpsed, differently, by

the author ofJob or by Thomas Hobbes, which we see, not underneath any and

every phenomenon or immediacy, but when we look again, as the poet-logician

here intimates.

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Hegel sums up (149). Necessity is in itself (an sich) the one essence... but now

full of content, in the reflected light of which its distinctions take the form of

independent realities. Distinctions now are logical as independent realities are

not, i.e. that is the distinction, the separation rather, we normally make. Here, in

absolute idealism, in the dialectic which issues in absolute idealism (it is not

anteriorly presupposed), they come together, are revealed as being one and the

same. Necessity is self-same or same all the way through, we might first

interpret. Thus it both has the form of independent realities and is absolute

form, essence. As such it is activity, the activity which reduces into

dependency (e.g. the conditions) and mediates into immediacy(my stress).

Whatever is necessary is through another. In this light, causality, Hume

identified and questioned it, giving reasons malgr lui, as he admits, since

reasons remain themselves causes, the inner the outer and vice versa. What is

the world without reason? (var. the reason) Gottlob Frege would later ask.2

This other, anyhow, before a trio of constituents and now a through (it is the

same), is a breaking up into Fact, Activity and Condition, an intermediate

actuality or accidental circumstance. We may call it either. So, being thus

through, the necessary is not in and for itself, just yet, but hypothetical, he

says, a mere result of assumption (of a necessary connection). But thisintermediation is just as immediately however the abrogation of itself. It, the

fact, closes with itself, somewhat as we indicated above, when discussing the

necessary contingency of the Outward. This contingent condition, as ground,

translates into immediacy, i.e. immediate necessity, lifting up the dependency

upon the other two constituents of the process, into actuality, our present

larger concern (142).

In this return to itself the necessary simply and positively is, as unconditioned

actuality. Hegel, we may or might think, is simply asking or compelling us to

recognise what stands close before us but needs to be seen in the mirror which is

reflection, like the nose on our faces. Mediated through circumstances, necessity

is yet unmediated, closer than I am to myself if I think of the activity

particularly. This will become clearer. Again, it is the undeniable, not such or

merely that or as if Hegel foists upon us now a maybe unwelcome positive thesis

in cosmology, but the undeniable as the undeniable, viz. Necessity, from which

all thought has to start. And thus it is thought itself that has brought us to this

and not, except in second place, some individual philosopher. Thus we are

engaged with a text, its import for us, and not with a man or individual, ruined in

essence.

2

Frege is frequently supposed in the Anglo-American camp to have been an anti-idealistor realist. Writings of Hans Sluga and others, this citation from The Foundations of

Arithmetic apart, seem to me to well document the contrary.


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The Zusats to 147 provides us with some final, indeed more cosmological

considerations upon Necessity:

When anything is said to be necessary, the first question we ask is,

Why? Anything necessary accordingly comes before us as something

due to a supposition, the result of certain antecedents. If we go no

further than mere derivation from antecedents however, we have not

gained a complete notion of what necessity means.

This would be his criticism of Hume.

What is merely derivative, is what it is, not through itself, but through

something else; and in this way too it is merely contingent. What is

necessary, on the other hand, we would have to be what it is through

itself; and thus, although derivative, it must still contain theantecedent whence it is derived as a vanishing element in itself.

How vanishing? It is absorbed, in the ingratitude of Spirit, the Activity which

is itself constituent of Necessity. Of this, It is, we say. We thus hold it to be

simple self-relation, in which all dependence on something else is removed. Nor

is there, therefore, some further end. In this sense necessity is called blind. He

speaks again of the process of necessity as beginning with the existence of

scattered circumstances. One recalls the treatment of Atomism in the Doctrine

of Being. These are an immediate actuality which collapses, a new actuality

proceeding. One recalls the upward spring of the mind from 50, insofar as

Activity, having an independent existence of its own (as a man, a character)

(148) is involved. There are thus two ways of seeing this now doubled Content,

as final realised fact or as these scattered circumstances positively or

positivistically viewed, though this is nought, is inverted into its negative, thus

becoming content of the realised fact. The dialectical striving towards result is

at work here, how we think it duplicating or identified with how it is brought

about. Implied, in contemporary terms, is a reconciliation of the mechanistic and

the teleological accounts of reality. Yet it is the former which is absorbed. The

immediate circumstances become conditions in the reciprocal sense outlined

above, being retained as content of the ultimate reality (my stress). This,

McTaggart will claim, is timeless immortality, without beginning or end, necessityin fact, which can however only apply to or be born bypersons. All else, unable to

be a condition in this sense, is misperception (or outside which is inside, we

might rather say). Hegel, however, speaks of circumstances and conditions (my

stress) here.

Yet in teleological action, we have in the end of action a content which is

already fore-known, not blind but seeing. This he identifies as rule by

Providence, where absolutely pre-determined design is the active principle,

fore-known and fore-willed. The priority, we know, is logical rather than

temporal.


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Necessity and providence, he goes on, are not mutually excluding but have the

same intellectual principle, viz. the notion, the truth of necessity. Yet

necessity itself is the notion implicit. It is no blind fatalism that seeks to

understand the necessity of every event. He refers here to the philosophy of

history as a Theodicy just inasmuch as investigating such necessity. Nothing, that

is, escapes this Logic as empirical, contingent or whatever. Will andaccomplishment are absolutely identical. Man, in his difference from God, is not

absolute. Here we see the folly of speaking of Hegels pantheism. We have to

transcend ourselves, actively.

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In speaking here of Man as something yet actual in his difference from God,

although not absolutely so, however, Hegel touches upon the question of an

Analogy of Being. More usually he eschews or avoids this approach or way of

speaking in his texts, his basic axiom, or one of them, being rather that

Everything finite is false, in line here with the mystical tradition or, rather, the

concurrence of mystical and philosophical writers on this point, particularly of the

Platonic school. Within this school, however, Aristotle, remarking that Being is

said in many ways, prepared the way for the medieval division on this point,

even though Aristotle arrives at the end of the Metaphysics at the position we

find, mutatis mutandis, in Hegel on this point of the relation, which is non-

relation, of the Absolute to things finite.

So Thomas Aquinas takes up Aristotles explanation of this analogia in terms of

the different proportion (ratio) of God to Gods act of being, from which his

essence or conception is not separate, and of finite things to their acts of being(actus essendi). Duns Scotus, in the next generation, says he knows nothing of

(nescio) or does not know any such act, as distinct from the act which is

essence or what a (given) thing is (essentia). There are many variants upon this,

for example in the interpretation of Cajetans (sixteenth century) commentaries,

deeply affected by the terminology at least of the by then far more numerous

and influential Scotist school, upon Aquinass Summa theologiae and more

especially of his treatise On the Analogy of Names (De analogia nominum).3

For Scotus the conceptof being is necessarily univocal, not analogical. Indeed the

controversy extends to asking whether analogy applies to words or concepts or

both. It is generally applied to concepts and there the dispute becomes whether

it is only a logical but also a metaphysical doctrine. In this latter sense there is,

nowadays, an increasingly insistent claim that there is ontological discontinuity

between the being of God and the being of creatures, which are nonetheless both

3 This title seems to imply that analogy is a logical doctrine rather than a metaphysical

theory of Being. Thus the contemporary Thomist Ralph McInerny interprets it, arguing

from Thomass and other texts. Viewed thus though it has a continuity with the practice

in theology of determining what it is correctto saymerely, thus reducing the doctrines

interest for any thorough-going philosophy such as Hegels. The point, however, for

Thomas was that he felt that one could not sayanything correctly about God (a pointcriticised by Hegel, at least regarding some uses made of such negative theology) and

hence pleaded for analogy.


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real. This though is little more than a religious refusal to engage in just those

thought-processes which Hegel works through in his Logic and elsewhere. It is a

general abdication or a plea to be allowed to take philosophy, which, like being,

has no parts (Parmenides), piecemeal, usually appealing to mystery. Mystery,

however, is just what such religious rationalism, in the negative sense, refuses to

acknowledge or live with, namely, that in the face of the absolute or except asidentified with it we both are and are not, are one with our Other or not-self.

Kant had already pointed away from this impotence of analogy in speaking not of

man but of the rational creature. Hume, after all, had already relativised

language about the finite Self. Thus far, though sceptical as to an Absolute, he is

in line with Catherine of Sienas report, I am he who is, you are she who is not.

In this discussion of Hegels the matter is touched upon while treating of a

determining divine or absolute knowledge. This too, mutatis mutatis is a theme of

Aquinas, on necessarily absolute omniscience, and uneasiness about it, in

relation to human freedom, lay behind much later theological disagreement,Calvinists finding comfort in the Dominican position that God necessarily makes

our actions free and as such pre-determines them. Against this were pitted the

Jesuit and related doctrines of Molinism, scientia media and so on, concerning

which the Pope of the day refused, in the early seventeenth century, to make a

decision in so far as it affected confessional theology. No one knows if the Jesuits

would have listened anyway and it is this school of humanistic thought,

embodied in Suarez, which came to Kant via Wolff and others. It includes, as part

of its indifferentist notion of freedom, the idea of a libertas indifferentiae as

essential to our free choice which is therefore independent even of God, this

being thought necessary by the pious for God to judge us. In effect, God isreduced to one among a plurality of actors and thus the way is prepared for

formal atheism. This is the background to Hegels distinctive remarks on ethical

matters, at which many have professed to be scandalised or at least puzzled. It is

quite clear that Hegel is in line with the Dominican and Thomist school on these

matters. Whether this is through having studied them or independently or both is

a question for the historians of thought. He is certainly well versed in earlier texts

as common patrimony of all the parties.

Regarding determining absolute knowledge, Hegel claims to show the identity of

freedom and Destiny or Fate, as this was anciently understood. Against this

background he criticises as less noble the modern insistence, which heeffectively finds neurotic, on renouncing only in prospect of compensation.

Destiny leaves no room for consolation and consolation is his subject here. We

need have no sense of bondage to Destiny. This modern point of view, that of

Consolation, nonetheless derives from Christianity and is a viewpoint which, he

will show, when rightly understood is superior. No room is left for consolation and

yet, via the revelation of divine or absolute Subjectivity, the Christian religion is

one of absolute Consolation. He cites the text God wills that all men be saved

which troubled Augustine so much, but he does not follow Augustines talk of an

antecedent and a consequent will. What God wills not merely is accomplished but

is and is what is. That teaching declares that subjectivity has an infinite value.


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So Hegel both eschews consolation and declares that the Christian consolation is

absolute. He is in striking accord with Thrse Martin, known as the saint of

Lisieux, who declared My only consolation is to have none, the classical

mystical doctrine of the Dark Night of the Soul (title of a work by John of the

Cross, a Spanish Carmelite friar).4 He thus overcomes the unreflected antithesis

between pagan resignation and Christian consolation. Some people are surprisedat his deigning to treat at all of the soft subject of consolation. It forms the

necessary pendant, however, to his superficially hard doctrine of necessity. He

claims to present the consolations ofnecessity itself as he establishes it here.

Any sense of bondage to Destiny springs from inability to surmount the

antithesis, from seeing what is as contrary to what oughtto be. We may again

surmise a Humean background here. In fact, if one says God is implied in there

being any world at all, i.e. not via a demonstration of a particular design, then

this abstract ought is already overthrown. In this same sense Aquinas places

the absolute good of God and the happiness (beatitude) that God is, as finisultimus of all, above the purely ethical or honourable good (bonum honestum)

which only derives its absoluteness from its being needed in the form ofvirtues

necessary for this other and final end. This, as an intrinsic necessity, is not

understood in the Utilitarian way. Happiness, rather, is itselfhchste Entfaltung

der Sittlichkeit (Martin Grabmann) and happiness, it is argued, just is in itself

transcendent. All things in fact participate in this end, interpreting participation,

however, as the absorption and negation Hegel describes.5

Because it is, it ought to be, Hegel thus argues. All shall be well and all manner

of thing, one might recall from a third lady thinker (Julian of Norwich), keeping in

the background Boethius assertions of, specifically, the consolations of the lady

Philosophy. In face of reality there is, finally, no contrast, no bondage, no pain,

no sorrow, and this attitude, it is true, is void of consolation. But, again, it is a

frame of mind which does not need consolation. Thats the consolation of it.

b.) Hegel speaks now of Subjectivity. It is personal subjectivity as having

acquired its infinite significance which gives rise to what we might call these

hang-ups of the Christian world. Christian or not, we live in a Christian or post-

Christian world, whether we talk about the French Revolution or the United

Nations. It is also a Greco-Roman and Jewish world. It is also an increasingly

Chinese world. Hegel speaks first of natural and finite Subjectivity, havingcontingent and arbitrary private interests. This is all that we call person and not

thing or the non-personal. In contrast to this obstinate pursuit of subjective

aims, he says, one cannot but admire the tranquil resignation of the ancients to

destiny. It seems higher and worthier, more religious, we might almost say.

But the term subjectivity is not to be confined merely to the bad and finite kind

of it which is contrasted with the thing (fact). Really it is immanent in the fact,

4 It is by the way striking that Hegel somewhere mentions Spanish poetry as a possible

distraction from the task of philosophy. Johns work consists in a commentary on his

own profound poems.

5 Cf. Especially 142Zus., final paragraph.


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as we have seen above in the treatment of Activity. Thus infinite it is the very

truth of the fact. Here Hegels reasoning coincides in its conclusion with his

picture of the Christian God as Absolute, but that is a circumstance not intrinsic

to the reasoning itself so is no objection to it, prejudices apart. The doctrine of

consolation, anyway, here receives a newer and a higher significance,

according to which the Christian religion is to be regarded as the religion ofconsolation and even of absolute consolation. Here he cites the Pauline

universalist text from the Epistle to Timothy, a first-century episkopos or

overseer of a community of Christians. This text was later made canonical and so

Hegel claims that Christianity teaches what it declares, that subjectivity has

an infinite value. This consoling power of Christianity just lies in the fact that

God Himself is in it known as the absolute subjectivity, as self of myself he

might have said, echoing Augustine. For inasmuch as subjectivity involves the

element of particularity, of differentiation, no doubt itself infinite if it

characterises God, or the Infinite and Absolute, ourparticular personality too

is recognised not merely as something to be solely and simply nullified, but as atthe same time as something to be preserved. This says, in effect, that it is

nullified, yet it is preserved. He does not and need not say how.

By contrast the ancient gods, he says, do not know themselves, are only known

aspersonifications. So they themselves are powerless before destiny, thus seen

as after all blind. But the Christian God is also self-knowing, absolutely actual

therefore. As so often in Hegel, we suddenly feel that he is but uncovering the

obvious. Each man, however, he goes on, is the architect of his own fortune, as

we can see once we shake off the miasma of a blind necessity, as opposed to the

all-seeing, omniscient necessity of Providence. All comes from the self. Hence theoracular advice, Know thyself was not restrictive or constraining in the sense of

restraining, but all sufficient, opening up more deeply reflected vistas moreover.

To blame circumstances is unfreedom. Whatever happens to a man is only the

outcome of himself. No doubt too there is a great deal of chance in what befalls

us but this chance, Hegel declares, has its root in the natural man. We might

take this as a variant upon the idea that pure chance is only real at the

phenomenal level, actually finding a strict causal explanation among things not

intended (the view offered in Aristotles Physics). Yet Hegel seems to be offering

a more anthropological view, in the sense of concern with the subject, borrowing

from or almost hijacking the theological perspectives of natural and

supernatural in order to press home the absolute requirement of self-

transcendence in order for man to be man, as knowing himself identified with

absolute perspectives, self in other, in Otherness itself, the truth of knowledge.

Thus he concludes by saying that our view of necessity determines our destiny

itself. It is at the root of the content and discontent of men.

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