Necessity — Greek Ananke — occupies a peculiar and commanding position within the depth-psychological corpus. Neither a simple determinism nor an invitation to fatalistic resignation, the term carries, in Hillman's sustained engagement with it, the full uncanny weight of the Platonic 'errant cause': that which operates through deviation, irrationality, and compulsion rather than through law or purpose. Hillman's readings of Ananke draw on Plato's Timaeus, Parmenides, Orphic cosmology, and mythic drama to establish a goddess who is genuinely inaccessible — without altar or image — and whose workings the soul experiences as inescapable yoking rather than rational governance. The tension between Nous and Ananke, between reason and unreasonable necessity, structures not only Platonic cosmology but, for Hillman, the internal drama of every human life. Bernard Williams, approaching the same term from moral philosophy and classical scholarship, locates necessity in the archaic and tragic Greek expression of 'must' — not the categorical imperative of Kantian duty but a compulsion arising from the internalised other of shame. Von Franz connects necessity to synchronicity and causality, while Plotinus raises the question of involuntary wickedness under necessity. Cornford's commentary on Plato carefully distinguishes hypothetical from absolute necessity. Across these voices the term marks the boundary where rational persuasion fails, where psychology meets fate, and where anxiety — etymologically from Ananke — reveals its ultimate ground.
In the library
21 substantive passages
Necessity operates through deviations. We recognize it in the irrational, irresponsible, indirect… necessity appears in those aspects of the universe that are errant. Moreover, necessity is particularly associated with that area of experience that is unable to be persuaded by or subjected to the rule of mind.
Hillman argues, following Plato's characterisation of Ananke as the 'Errant Cause,' that necessity manifests precisely in irrational, deviating, mind-resistant experience rather than in law-like regularity.
In Aristotle, necessity is brought into relation with 'compulsion,' just as at the opening of Prometheus Bound Necessity appears together with Bia (Force or Compulsion)… Closed rigidity, inaccessibility, is precisely the feeling
Hillman traces the philosophical and mythic genealogy of Necessity as compulsion and inaccessibility, linking Aristotle, Greek drama, and Pausanias to show the term's consistently forbidding character.
anxiety does not submit to analysis; it works its ways inescapably until its necessity is admitted… The grounds of anxiety reside in necessity itself, as it is at this moment constellated, the necessity of this constellated image, the present pathe of the soul where the soul is now scared by the necessity yoking it to its destiny.
Hillman identifies anxiety etymologically and experientially with Ananke, arguing that no rational theory can account for it because it belongs to necessity itself rather than to any reducible cause.
To understand necessity in this way makes mistakes tragic, rather than sins to be repented or accidents to be remedied. Things cannot be, could not have been otherwise… there is usually a tug-of-war between the heart's calling and the mind's plan, a conflict within each human replicating Plato's two principles of nous and ananke, reason and unreasonable necessity.
Hillman applies the Platonic duality of nous and ananke to the lived experience of individual fate, arguing that necessity renders errors tragic rather than moral failures and structures the inner conflict of every human life.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
Time and Necessity set limits to all the possibilities of our outward extension, of our worldly reaches. Together they form a syzygy, an archetypal pair, inherently related, so that where one is the other is too. When we are under the compulsion of Necessity, we experience it in terms of time.
Hillman argues that Ananke and Chronos form an irreducible archetypal pairing, such that necessity is always experienced through time — as chronic complaint, deadline, and the anxiety of finitude.
Ananke is the Great Lady (potnia) of the Underworld, the invisible psychic principle that irreversibly draws all things to her, thereby pathologizing life… not only is Necessity beyond the reach of speech, but further, that necessity is experienced when one is c
Hillman identifies Ananke with the Underworld Queen and with pathologizing as such, insisting that necessity lies beyond therapeutic remedy, speech, or mystical approach.
The law it follows is Necessity, which wanders erratically. Little wonder that we readers are drawn to biographies and autobiographies, for they offer glimpses of how irrational Necessity works in a human life. Although Necessity's rule is absolute and irreversible, this determinism is indeterminate. Unpredictable.
Hillman characterises Necessity as a paradoxical absolute that is nonetheless indeterminate and unpredictable, visible retrospectively in biographical accounts of erratic but inexorable life-shaping events.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The image by which the flesh lives is the ultimate ruling necessity. We are in service to the body of imagination, the bodies of our images… when you flee Necessity you suffer in flesh, and worse, you lose the body of your imagination.
Hillman reframes bodily necessity as imaginal necessity, arguing that fleeing Ananke literalises the psyche's imagery into clinical symptoms and that true depth is reached only by submitting to what 'cannot be otherwise.'
His word is poreuteon: an impersonal expression of necessity, a frequent form of speech with Sophocles' heroes… What necessity are they expressing? It is an important question, and it is easy to go the wrong way towards answering it.
Williams analyses tragic necessity as expressed by Sophoclean heroes — not the 'must' of Kantian duty but an impersonal, shame-rooted compulsion arising from the internalised other who commands the agent's self-respect.
we are between two necessities. The Homeric, i. tragic, in particular Sophoclean, characters are represented to us as experiencing a necessity to act in certain ways, a conviction that they must do certain things.
Williams situates tragic characters between competing necessities, arguing that the source of such necessity is internal — an internalised other whose perspective the agent both respects and partially identifies with.
Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting
the subordination of necessity to purpose… There is the necessity which Aristotle calls 'hypothetical'… Necessity cannot be wholly persuaded by Reason to serve both its purposes, and Reason has to sacrifice the less important.
Cornford's commentary on the Timaeus distinguishes hypothetical from irreducible necessity and shows that even Platonic reason cannot wholly subordinate necessity, which remains a permanent and recalcitrant cosmic factor.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
in the seemingly contradictory notion of a Necessity which is also an Errant Cause, and associated, not with order and intelligibility, but with disorder and random chance.
Cornford highlights the Platonic paradox of necessity as errant cause — associated with disorder and chance rather than law — which underpins Hillman's later psychological appropriation of the concept.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
'The most central of the mixed rings is the source and cause of movement and generation for them all and he calls the goddess who steers, holder of the keys, Justice and Necessity'.
Sullivan documents Parmenides' cosmological use of Necessity as the force that governs Being and ensures the essential nature of things, providing the pre-Socratic foundation for subsequent depth-psychological elaborations.
Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
a connection with agchein, 'to strangle', has been suggested, in which case the binding cord (or serpent) would not be far to seek… 'for mighty Ananke holds it in bonds of the peirar which encloses it around'.
Onians traces the etymology of ananke to strangulation and binding, and documents Parmenides' and Orphic uses of the term as a cosmic constraint that encloses and fetters Being itself.
Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
Before the souls enter human life, however, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting) so that on arrival here all of the previous activities of choosing lots and the descent from the lap of Necessity is wiped out.
Hillman invokes the Platonic myth of Er to show that the soul descends from Necessity's lap into embodied life bearing an inescapable daimonic pattern, subsequently forgotten but never cancelled.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
Necessity, Chance, and Synchronicity. Causality has been accepted in some form in all civilizations.
Von Franz positions necessity alongside chance and synchronicity as one of the fundamental principles governing the relationship between psyche and matter, framing the triad within a Jungian philosophy of causality.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
if there is a Necessity, bringing about human wickedness either by force of the celestial movement or by a rigorous sequence set up by the First Cause, is not the evil a thing rooted in Nature? And if thus the Reason-Principle of the universe is the creator of evil, surely all is injustice?
Plotinus poses the problem of moral responsibility under necessity, questioning whether involuntary wickedness driven by cosmic necessity exonerates agents or implicates the Reason-Principle itself in evil.
Necessity, in fact, did not carry with it the associations of law and order, at any rate in the earlier phases of atomism… he had not arrived at what
Cornford notes that in early atomism necessity signified blind constraint without law — a proto-errant causality — and that Democritus failed to perceive its implications for moral determinism.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the interplay of necessity and contingency in the history of life on Earth is unclear. Gould has argued… that evolution is largely a matter of contingency… 'a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable.'
Thompson invokes the biological debate between necessity and contingency in evolution, providing a contemporary scientific frame that parallels but does not directly engage the depth-psychological treatment of Ananke.
Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
Athene… wears on her breast the Gorgo, that terrifying image of irrationality… her animal, the owl, is her 'wisdom,' but it is also a bird of doom… situated among the Harpies, Sirens, Keres, Moirae-winged images of fateful necessities.
Hillman reads Athena as a figure who mediates between Nous and Ananke, carrying within her iconography the terrifying images of fateful necessity even while embodying rational foresight.
Fatalism answers: Everything is in the hands of the gods. Teleological finalism says: It all has a hidden purpose… Heroism says: Integrate those shadows or slay them. In each of these replies, the accidental as category dissolves into the larger philosophy of fatalism, finalism, and heroism.
Hillman surveys and rejects standard philosophical responses to catastrophic accident — fatalism, finalism, heroism — as each erases accident as an authentic category, arguing instead for a necessity that preserves the accidental.
Hillman, James, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside