The Logic of Hegel

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Necessity gives a point of view which has important bearings upon our sentiments and behaviour. When we look upon events as necessary, our situation seems at first sight to lack freedom completely. In the creed of the ancients, as we know, necessity figured as Destiny. The modern point of view, on the contrary, is that of Consolation. And Consolation means that, if we renounce our aims and interests, we do so only in prospect of receiving compensation. Destiny, on the contrary, leaves no room for Consolation. But a close examination of the ancient feeling about destiny, will not by any means reveal a sense of bondage to its power. Rather the reverse. This will clearly appear, if we remember, that the sense of bondage springs from inability to surmount the antithesis, and from looking at what is, and what happens, as contradictory to what ought to be and happen. In the ancient mind the feeling was more of the following kind: Because such a thing is, it is, and as it is, so ought it to be. Here there is no contrast to be seen, and therefore no sense of bondage, no pain, and no sorrow. True, indeed, as already remarked, this attitude towards destiny is void of consolation. But then, on the other hand, it is a frame of mind which does not need consolation, so long as personal subjectivity has not acquired its infinite significance. It is this point on which special stress should be laid in comparing the ancient sentiment with that of the modern and Christian world.

By Subjectivity, however, we may understand, in the first place, only the natural and finite subjectivity, with its contingent and arbitrary content of private interests and inclinations,—all, in short, that we call person as distinguished from thing: taking 'thing' in the emphatic sense of the word (in which we use the (correct) expression that it is a question of things and not of persons). In this sense of sub-activity we cannot help admiring the tranquil resignation of the ancients to destiny, and feeling that it is a much higher and worthier mood than that of the moderns, who obstinately pursue their subjective aims, and when they find themselves constrained to resign the hope of reaching them, console themselves with the prospect of a reward in some other shape. 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). In its truth subjectivity is immanent in the fact, and as a subjectivity thus infinite is the very truth of the fact. Thus regarded, the doctrine of consolation receives a newer and a higher significance. It is in this sense that the Christian religion is to be regarded as the religion of consolation, and even of absolute consolation. Christianity, we know, teaches that God wishes all men to be saved. That teaching declares that subjectivity has an infinite value. And that consoling power of Christianity just lies in the fact that God Himself is in it known as the absolute subjectivity, so that, inasmuch as subjectivity involves the element of particularity, our particular personality too is recognised not merely as something to be solely and simply nullified, but as at the same time something to be preserved. The gods of the ancient world were also, it is true, looked upon as personal; but the personality of a Zeus and an Apollo is not a real personality: it is only a figure in the mind. In other words, these gods are mere personifications, which, being such, do not know themselves, and are only known. An evidence of this defect and this powerlessness of the old gods is found even in the religious beliefs of antiquity. In the ancient creeds not only men, but even gods, were represented as subject to destiny (πεπρωμένον or εἱμαρμένη), a destiny which we must conceive as necessity not unveiled, and thus as something wholly impersonal, selfless, and blind. On the other hand, the Christian God is God not known merely, but also self-knowing; He is a personality not merely figured in our minds, but rather absolutely actual.

We must refer to the Philosophy of Religion for a further discussion of the points here touched. But we may note in passing how important it is for any man to meet everything that befalls him with the spirit of the old proverb which describes each man as the architect of his own fortune. That means that it is only himself after all of which a man has the usufruct. The other way would be to lay the blame of whatever we experience upon other men, upon unfavourable circumstances, and the like. And this is a fresh example of the language of unfreedom, and at the same time the spring of discontent. If man saw, on the contrary, that whatever happens to him is only the outcome of himself, and that he only bears his own guilt, he would stand free, and in everything that came upon him would have the consciousness that he suffered no wrong. A man who lives in dispeace with himself and his lot, commits much that is perverse and amiss, for no other reason than because of the false opinion that he is wronged by others. No doubt too there is a great deal of chance in what befalls us. But the chance has its root in the 'natural' man. So long however as a man is otherwise conscious that he is free, his harmony of soul and peace of mind will not be destroyed by the disagreeables that befall him. It is their view of necessity, therefore, which is at the root of the content and discontent of men, and which in that way determines their destiny itself.

148.] Among the three elements in the process of necessity—the Condition, the Fact, and the Activity—

a. The Condition is (α) what is pre-supposed or ante-stated, i.e. it is not only supposed or stated, and so only a correlative to the fact, but also prior, and so independent, a contingent and external circumstance which exists without respect to the fact. While thus contingent, however, this pre-supposed or ante-stated term, in respect withal of the fact, which is the totality, is a complete circle of conditions, (ß) The conditions are passive, are used as materials for the fact, into the content of which they thus enter. They are likewise intrinsically conformable to this content, and already contain its whole characteristic.

b. The Fact is also (α) something pre-supposed or ante-stated, i.e. it is at first, and as supposed, only inner and possible, and also, being prior, an independent content by itself, (ß) By using up the conditions, it receives its external existence, the realisation of the articles of its content, which reciprocally correspond to the conditions, so that whilst it presents itself out of these as the fact, it also proceeds from them.

c. The Activity similarly has (α) an independent existence of its own (as a man, a character), and at the same time it is possible only where the conditions are and the fact, (ß) It is the movement which translates the conditions into fact, and the latter into the former as the side of existence, or rather the movement which educes the fact from the conditions in which it is potentially present, and which gives existence to the fact by abolishing the existence possessed by the conditions.

In so far as these three elements stand to each other in the shape of independent existences, this process has the aspect of an outward necessity. Outward necessity has a limited content for its fact. For the fact is this whole, in phase of singleness. But since in its form this whole is external to itself, it is self-externalised even in its own self and in its content, and this externality, attaching to the fact, is a limit of its content.

149.] Necessity, then, is potentially the one essence, self-same but now full of content, in the reflected light of which its distinctions take the form of independent realities. This self-sameness is at the same time, as absolute form, the activity which reduces into dependency and mediates into immediacy.—Whatever is necessary is through an other, which is broken up into the mediating ground (the Fact and the Activity) and an immediate actuality or accidental circumstance, which is at the same time a Condition. The necessary, being through an other, is not in and for itself: hypothetical, it is a mere result of assumption. But this intermediation is just as immediately however the abrogation of itself. The ground and contingent condition is translated into immediacy, by which that dependency is now lifted up into actuality, and the fact has closed with itself. In this return to itself the necessary simply and positively is, as unconditioned actuality. The necessary is so, mediated through a circle of circumstances: it is so, because the circumstances are so, and at the same time it is so, unmediated: it is so, because it is.