Necessary Concepts

“Necessity is the inseparability of terms which are different, and yet appear to be indifferent.” — Philosophy of Nature Vol.1, P. 210, Allen & Unwin trns.

The ideal of logical thinking is to solidly establish necessary connections between premise and conclusion, beginning and result, thought and being, or proposition and fact. Necessity here is meant as the immanent link of things, the link we find as simply what they are in their own free self-development — that is, in their ideal absolute self-abstraction. In common understanding that which is necessary is what is linked and inseparable, a connection which cannot not be. This necessity is the necessity which empirical science seeks in the model of experiment: to isolate a thing and see what is linked in itself, that which is there when it alone is present. In common consideration necessity as such is normally a relation between things, but not something which can be shown of things themselves. This is necessary for that, or, that necessarily follows this. This necessity, however, is not yet the necessity of truth as that which is itself necessary.

Necessary Necessity, Or Self-Necessity

To conceive of that which is itself necessary is something which is baffling at first thought. What in the world could it mean for the thing itself to be necessary? Seems a bit incomprehensible, doesn’t it? Take for example the necessity of self-identity in A=A. We fail to grasp anything that is itself necessary in something like self-identity for two reasons: we have completely abstract objects with no internal structure, and we have an external judge as the only link between the identical terms. This connection is necessary only for us who abstract A from itself and compare it to itself. In order for the object to posit its own necessity it would have to develop the self-referencing structure itself, not as we who are consciously reflective beings do with thought, but with the only thing available to such objects: their being itself.

For Hegel, this mysterious self-referencing trick is amazingly simple. To conceive of that which is itself necessary is to conceive of relations which relate in such a manner as to produce themselves necessarily. The necessity of self-necessity is the relation of a chain of necessary connections that come back around to link to the beginning in the end. This is the conceptual circle in which the necessary positing by every part in total posits an enclosing unity of them all. This circle of parts is a whole unbreakable and irreducible to anything but itself as a whole the moment it or any of its parts are posited. If there is the whole, there are all the parts; if there is a part there are implicated all the others in the whole. To be self-necessary is to simply be an object with a self-enclosed and regenerating structure such that the parts generate a whole in which all are generated in a necessary organization. This circular developmental system differentiates Hegel’s necessity from being a mere endless chain of efficient causes or sufficient reasons which have nothing which is ever self-necessary; it also differentiates it from such forms of necessity which dogmatically end in an arbitrarily privileged necessary absolute which is simply ‘obvious’.

Let’s use a rather fun example: a dog. A dog is necessarily itself as all of what it is in that each part is there according to the developments of a unity which is self-given by the object and connecting all parts of itself to itself as itself. Consider the logical dog, i.e. the necessity of the dog as a unique species-being. The logical dog is seen to be connected in a conceptual circle of self-generation as its enduring and reproducing species. As individual existents of the species their very body is a unity of self-necessity of parts and whole: the body and its organs are for the sake of the whole dog, to enable and maintain its basic biological ends of survival and reproduction, but likewise the dog is for the maintenance and ends of its parts. A single dog, whether male or female, is not absolute in the species for it exists in a sexual asymmetry for the sake of reproduction. In turn, pups are born, grow up and live lives which tend to regenerate the process anew. Regardless of what dogs do other than merely live and reproduce, regardless of their love for walks, pets, and chasing things for fun, these necessities are in themselves necessary in the species as species and cannot fail to appear in the species universal though they certainly can fail to appear in existent individuals.

Because actual natural beings may fail to embody their conceptual logical necessity and are thus incapable of being fully self-necessary, it is a misunderstanding of Hegel’s logic to think that it derives concepts that must exist regardless of conditions. Nature’s transgression of concept boundaries is nothing surprising, and Hegel notes:

It is not only that in nature the play of forms has unbounded and unbridled contingency, but that each shape by itself is devoid of its Notion. Life is the highest to which nature drives in its determinate being, but as merely natural Idea, life is submerged in the irrationality of externality, and the living individual is bound with another individuality in every moment of its existence. — Philosophy of Nature, P. 209

As is to be expected due to the external being essential to them, natural beings are necessarily open to intrusion into their determination because they are internally constituted and dependent on objects indifferent to them.

Nonetheless, the concepts of Hegel’s method are necessarily what they are. Their unity is necessarily a differentiated one which cannot exist without its parts, yet in the conclusion of development the parts are proved to themselves depend on their unity as a whole for their being. Whether we begin with an adult dog, a pup, or a dog fetus, the unity derived is necessarily the same when it comes to the ‘absolute form’ of the species. In abstract, the dog may of course be split into parts which seem to lack any necessary unity, such that we may imagine various parts independent of the whole, but with regard to the dog as dog nature refutes us whenever we see the process of its life in full. If one is stubborn and still doubts, let material biology be the judge: A living being’s genome contains the possible development of it from prick of hair to beating heart. The species, however, is no mere genome, it is a living being and as living being it posits every part including the genome’s unity (genetic combination in fertilization). So long as the minimal conditions for the possibility of its life are there, the dog maintains itself indefinitely through its own self-necessity — a necessity that is entirely within it as what it is.

Given these concepts and their unbreakable necessity, the practical thinker is left to wonder where in their own world this fits. Nature, after all, seems to have no care for these logical concepts. Let us now examine the reality of us and our world, a reality not of pure inner necessity, but muddled with arbitrariness and contingency. A reality where unity is not preordained by self-given inner reason, but mingles with increasingly complex yet contingent and non-logical Nature. In the real world nothing seems to exist that is able to absolutely overcome a second necessity to its ideal inner one, and thus something external is always present within the very being of material things, something which makes it impossible for them to be purely their own necessity. This external necessity marks all of nature, and it marks our very thoughts.

Contingent Concepts

Thoughts are not coordinated in nature, for Notionlessness holds sway here, and each material point appears to be entirely independent of all the others. . . . Since unity in nature is a relation between apparently self-subsistent entities however, nature is not free, but merely necessary and contingent. — Philosophy of Nature, P. 210

If necessary concepts are brought into unity through their inner necessity, contingent concepts are brought into unity through an external necessity. That which is contingent is that which is through and by external relation to others; it is that which can not be, or that which can be otherwise. As a form of necessity, however, it is a connection which must be there given conditions external to the object under inquiry. Because this connection is not posited by objects from within they have no power to generate this relation themselves.

Given this factor and that factor, an external relation must attain without fail. Given the factor of life, the history of the Earth, and the interplay of cosmic and microcosmic forces of matter, the dog necessarily has come to be on Earth at this time; however, this could have been otherwise with a different arrangement of the world. Though the dog may be necessary to itself, this necessity is itself a contingent necessity due to its dependence on factors beyond its control. Dogs could have been otherwise had the material history of the world been otherwise, and because their existence is tied to existents which do not necessitate dogs as their resultant unities, they are necessarily contingent beings. Self-necessity is thus differentiated between a relative form and an absolute form that becomes relegated to broader ontological concepts that cannot fail to attain. The existent forms of nature are necessarily contingent due to their dependence on external others indifferent to them, and contingently necessary in that these externalities necessarily come to relate by virtue of their empirical history and shared relations of existence.

On Absolute Contingency

One may find it tempting to consider all of existence as absolutely contingent, but this would be a misunderstanding of contingency itself. The purely contingent concept is an irrational madness, denying any internal order by positing pure externality in its entirety with no necessary things which can function as a reason. It begins with the irrational and irrationally connects to the irrational. Its unity is irrational, its parts are irrational, and thus their connection is likewise irrational — no reason is found in the unity. The purely contingent object is in fact neither an object nor a concept; it is only a fiction of the mind playing with abstraction. There can be no purely contingent object, something about it must be necessary even if the posited object as such has no internal necessity, e.g. a clump of dirt is a contingent object that at least exists by the necessity of matter and its gravity. Given that the actual objects which exist in the world are constituted in a chain of dependencies, this very dependency is a rationality even if utterly external to our assumed object.

The rationality of the natural mind has necessity, but it is not yet the fully internal necessity of the philosophical concept.

Contingent Connections of Natural Thought

In our natural experience of thought there is connection, but it is not based on a conceptual inner necessity; rather, it is based on external contingency. Two forms of external connection occur to concepts in our natural thinking: 1) things are externally united in the space of our mind according to the structures of the mind and its metaphysical concepts as well as our subjective judgments of what is and is not important; 2) objects are united in semi-arbitrary physical arrangement when stored as memories in the brain.

One natural form of concept is association, such that we hear, see, or feel, and recall or think as response something which has been associated with the stimulus. I see the word ‘cockroach’, and I recall a feeling of disgust. I hear ‘dog’ and I think of my own dog. I think freedom, and I think struggle. Associative memory and thinking are contingent to the individual and their unique circumstances and history. That freedom to me recalls a struggle, and that to another it recalls a flag, and to yet another it recalls a definition is proof enough of this contingency of natural thinking. Association is not the only contingent manner of thinking, so too are methods of formal logic. What system of logic we use to think, what axioms and postulates we accept, are contingent. Beside association there are unities which are merely postulated, defined and deployed by a myriad of criteria: utility, interest, abstraction, etc.

The association of ideas is not a mere quirk of consciousness, but has a basis in a physical reality and is to that extent a contingent necessity. The brain stores memory in physical arrangements, and often memories are linked physically despite having no chronological, rational, or thematic link; thus, one can experience a stimulus that recalls something in a manner that surprises since it seems like a random appearance of a disconnected thought in the flow of our experience. In this chronology of experience and its physical storing there is an external necessity of ordering connections through physics, chemistry, and biology in our own individual bodies. Though I could provide no inner reason for why a light beam striking a bead suddenly reminds me of someone, there is often no lack of an external reason, whether it be the association of place/time/object type, or that a memory of a glint in light or the emotion it elicited is physically connected to that other memory. If all other contingent links fail, the most basic explanation that can almost never fail to be given is that the physical arrangement of our being simply is as it is due to the physical contingencies of the world.

Because of their external necessity, contingent concepts and objects of existent nature can never be derived a priori. Here, yet again, we have another myth and misunderstanding of Hegel’s method denied, for no matter how much of the external world we take into account there is always more. In the Philosophy of Nature’s introduction Hegel speaks of the endless repetition of finite space and time which by its very concept can never terminate at a finite absolute beginning nor end, for the finite is always in the middle of other finites. All that Hegel can derive is necessary concepts on the ontological level, but nowhere can he derive the existential empirical world. The method, then, can not be used positively on anything empirical without ascertaining it to be at least a contingent self-necessity. The event of war as an empirical event, for example, has no such inner necessity when it is caught in a myriad of external triggers, events, and personalities. Though Hegel does the derive the necessity of war as a derivation from the logical reality of states, he cannot derive the necessity of any particular war.