Necessity

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, following Plato’s Timaeus, identifies Necessity as the Errant Cause — the irrational, wandering principle that escapes rational persuasion and operates through deviation and indirection.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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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 surveys philosophical definitions of necessity — from Aquinas’s ‘that which cannot not be’ to Aristotle’s coupling with compulsion — and traces its mythological embodiment in Ananke’s inaccessibility and rigidity.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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If anxiety truly belongs to Ananke, of course, it cannot be ‘mastered by the rational will.’ When anxiety floods us or attacks us, we can but receive it as a gap (chaos) in rational continuity. Hence, anxiety does not submit to analysis; it works its ways inescapably until its necessity is admitted.

Hillman derives anxiety etymologically from Ananke and argues that psychological anxiety is the soul’s experience of necessity itself — unreducible to any rational theory and operable only through admission.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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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. Inexorably everything belongs, fatal flaws and all.

Hillman argues that the proper register for necessity is the tragic rather than the moral or therapeutic: it transforms errors into inexorable belonging rather than remediable faults.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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not only is Necessity beyond the reach of speech, but further, that necessity is experienced when one is c[onfronting what cannot be remedied]… Nor are mysticism, orphicism, history, science, a match for her force.

Hillman identifies Ananke with the Underworld Queen’s domain and argues that necessity is precisely the domain where no therapeutic, mystical, or rational remedy obtains.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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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.

Hillman describes Necessity’s paradoxical character — absolute yet indeterminate, irreversible yet irrational — and situates biographical narrative as the medium through which its operation becomes visible.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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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 re-locates necessity in the imaginal body — the soul’s images — arguing that flight from necessity literalizes into clinical disease, while acceptance preserves imaginative embodiment.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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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.

Hillman presents Ananke and Chronos as an archetypal pair — a primordial syzygy — such that temporal anxiety and necessitous compulsion are structurally inseparable.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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The source of the necessity is in the agent, an internalised other whose view the agent can respect. Indeed he can identify with this figure, and the respect is to that extent self-respect.

Williams locates the necessity experienced by Homeric and tragic characters not in external fate but in an internalized social figure whose authority is inseparable from the agent’s own identity and self-respect.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis

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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 analyzes the impersonal grammatical form of necessity in Sophocles and warns against reducing tragic compulsion to Kantian moral duty, insisting on its distinct psychological character.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993supporting

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What is the permanent and irreducible factor confronting Reason and never wholly subordinate?… There is the necessity which Aristotle calls ‘hypothetical’… the subordination of necessity to purpose.

Cornford’s commentary on the Timaeus identifies necessity as the permanent, irreducible counterpart to Reason that can be persuaded but never wholly subordinated — the cosmological ground of the Hillmanian reading.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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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… among the Harpies, Sirens, Keres, Moirae-winged images of fateful necessities.

Hillman shows that even Athene, goddess of rational order, carries necessity’s mark — the Gorgo, the owl, the Moirae — demonstrating that reason cannot fully purge itself of necessity.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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In speaking of this world of duality, Parmenides once describes ‘Necessity’ (Ananke) as fettering the sky so that it keeps the ‘limits of the stars’… it compels behaviour that ensures existence and continuance.

Sullivan traces Parmenides’ use of Ananke as a cosmological binding force that maintains the limits of Being — a pre-Platonic precedent for the depth-psychological understanding of necessity as binding and limit-setting.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting

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The etymology of ananke, commonly translated ‘necessity’, is uncertain but a connection with anchein, ‘to strangle’, has been suggested, in which case the binding cord (or serpent) would not be far to seek.

Onians recovers the somatic and etymological roots of Ananke — possibly ‘to strangle’ — grounding the concept’s binding, fettering quality in archaic bodily and cosmological imagery.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

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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’s Timaeus commentary establishes the paradoxical Platonic conception: necessity is simultaneously errant and causally operative, associated with disorder rather than with the regular lawfulness often attributed to it.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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Necessity, Chance, and Synchronicity. Causality has been accepted in some form in all civilizations.

Von Franz positions necessity alongside chance and synchronicity as the three fundamental modes of causal and acausal order, situating it within a Jungian framework of psyche-matter relations.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting

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Necessity, in fact, did not carry with it the associations of law and order, at any rate in the earlier phases of atomism… to say that a movement happens ‘by constraint’ is not to say that it conforms to any law.

Cornford argues that in early Greek atomism, necessity designated blind constraint rather than lawful regularity, a crucial distinction that separates ancient ananke from modern determinism.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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Before the souls enter human life, however, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting)… the inescapable and necessary pattern of my lot remains and my companion daimon remembers.

Hillman renders Platonic eschatology as psychological phenomenology: the soul forgets its choice at birth, but the daimon — the image of necessity — retains the pattern that governs character and calling.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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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?

Plotinus raises the ethical aporia of necessity: if necessity causes wickedness, is evil natural and justice abolished — a question depth psychology inherits in its treatment of pathologizing as archetypal necessity.

Plotinus, The Six Enneads, 270supporting

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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.

Thompson invokes Gould’s contingency thesis to frame the biological tension between necessity and chance, paralleling at the evolutionary level the philosophical tension Hillman addresses psychologically.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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We must study necessary causes, though such study be only a sober amusement, because this is the only way of approaching the manifestations of rational purpose in Nature.

Cornford notes the Platonic injunction to study necessary causes as the indispensable, if secondary, pathway toward understanding rational purpose — framing necessity as epistemologically instrumental.

Plato, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside

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