But enough of Hegel’s Logic. Since I’m a historical materialist, I’m not inclined to disappear down the rabbit hole of ontological speculation. Instead, I’m more interested in those moments in Hegel where the concept of necessity, though still steeped in the speculative categories of the Logic, move closer to non-mystified articulation. The Philosophy of Right is where Hegel lays out a doctrine of freedom-as-necessity which simultaneously contains an understanding of freedom-as-contingency: the former is a positive freedom, a freedom to; the latter is a negative freedom, a freedom from. Here necessity is also understood as essential to science––since the content of science has to do with “the necessity of the thing“––though when Hegel writes “science” he means his Logic.6 Even still, if we are to step outside of his speculative system, a mystified and totalizing metaphysics misconceived as the ultimate science, there may be something about necessity that we can ascribe to a materialist and modern definition of science––but I will discuss this later. For the moment, I’m simply interested in how he connects necessity to freedom.
Since necessity is understood according to its inverse, contingency, Hegel’s first articulation of freedom is one that exists in the continuum of the finite and bad infinite: the negative freedom of “arbitrariness” where “the content is not determined as mine by the nature of my will, but by contingency.“7 While this is some sort of freedom, it remains a pseudo-freedom: it is the freedom of the child who arbitrarily rejects all boundaries. It is not about willing what is rational but instead a focus on one’s own particularity, to do whatever one might wish without thought to anyone else or rationality. The “free” act of a child devouring buckets full of Halloween candy just because they can––Hegel refers to this as a “perverse” freedom.8 Here, one is not properly free because one is ultimately at the mercy of one’s drives, failing to apprehend the contingent nature of these drives.
Following the Logic, Hegel’s understanding of necessity in the Philosophy of Right, while “totalizing” (for it is indeed part of a total speculative system), is not entirely teleological: it is not that pseudo-necessity where what is necessary is that which is predestined, i.e. necessity is not that which will necessarily come about because of a mystic argument of history. For Hegel, “the only thing that is necessary is to live now; the future is not absolute, and it remains exposed to contingency.”9 Since the future can take multiple paths we can only speak of what is necessary to try and secure one particular path in the present as a possible (formal) necessity, and that which did secure a particular path in retrospect as an actual (real) necessity. This immanence of necessity contains some interesting corollaries, especially if necessity is intrinsic to a proper understanding of freedom. In the realm of practical action in which freedom operates, then, it is indeed quite possible that the necessity glimpsed in “the immediate present can justify a wrong action.”10 I recognize, for example, the need to eat in order to survive but, lacking the means, I commit the “wrong” (meaning, according to Hegel’s category of abstract right, simply a violation of the premoral and pre-ethical right of property) of stealing food. Despite violating the right of property and acting “wrongly” I have still, according to Hegel, acted in line with the law of necessity and exercised my freedom. Indeed, refusing to recognize the moral necessity of acting according to such a visceral necessity would, for Hegel, be an “omission” that “would in turn involve committing a wrong… namely the total negation of the existence of freedom.”11 In this sense, necessity reveals the contingency of simplistic laws banning theft, which may in fact––without a broader understanding of what freedom means––function to inhibit freedom. Only by grasping necessity can we understand freedom in a fuller sense.
Here we can realize how a conception of freedom based on contingency can cannibalize the idea of freedom itself: when it annihilates necessity. In one sense I am free to reject any law of necessity but to do so would in fact turn against my freedom. For example, it is necessary for me to drink water in order to live, and yet it is quite possible for me to embrace an irrational freedom that denies myself water. Am I freer for doing so? In one sense this is an act of free will, since I am making the conscious choice of denial simply because I can; in another sense, though, this is a massive denial of freedom since I am ultimately choosing to prevent myself from being free in the future––by destroying the organic basis upon which I can be a free agent. In a less visceral sense, similar rejections of freedom are made in the terrain of the sciences: on the one hand I am free to reject modern biology in favour of phrenology, but such a choice does not imply a larger sense of freedom––that is, a freedom that is open to the future––for either myself or humanity as a whole when it locks me into the confines of racist physiognomy.
Since Hegel’s conception of necessity in his examination of right is intrinsically bound to freedom, we should be able to understand, beyond Hegel, his conception of contingency-necessity in the Logic. The possible or relative necessities are thus understood as necessity because they are glimpsed in accordance with freedom… and, in this sense, absolute necessity can mean only one thing: the establishment of freedom. While Hegel himself was singularly unable to declare the meaning of this freedom beyond his doctrine of right, based on an idealist conception of his own time and place, there is something that slips beyond the boundaries of his system, a conception of freedom in relation to a larger and more materialist understanding of reality, that speaks to a richer understanding of necessity.
For example, we understand the possible necessity of the Spartacist Revolt, and celebrate the absolute necessity of the defeat of fascism, because we know that fascism is a moment of unfreedom. Hegel can tell us nothing convincing about why we would think this way, let alone why it is a necessity, because this requires a more materialist understanding of necessity. It is interesting to note that Hegel made the same charge of Kant, arguing that there was something missing in his philosophy of morality: duty was claimed as the basis of moral action but what, Hegel wondered, was the basis of duty? Without an ethical ground, he concluded, Kant’s moral philosophy was an “empty formalism… an empty rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake.“12 Indeed, the necessities undertaken by Lussadh in That Rough-Hewn Sun while not “duty for duty’s sake” are duty for the sake of her empire––but why should she care about the duties necessitated by this empire beyond an appeal to the empire itself and her role therein? Only because necessity is mystified, conceived as destiny. Despite the fact that Hegel dialectically pairs necessity with contingency there is still something of the predestined and teleological in his philosophy: Lussadh is a Hegelian agent until her last encounter with necessity.
Hegel’s understanding of necessity is thus bound up in a doctrine that, as aforementioned, Marx and Engels characterized as a “colossal miscarriage”. His claims about the property basis of abstract right are far from convincing: only ideologues of imperial capitalism imagine that “the absolute right of appropriation which human beings have over things”13 is intrinsic to freedom. Marx and Engels would soon critique the right of appropriation’s inherent relation to the capitalist order where exploitation through waged labour, a visceral manifestation of unfreedom, was not at all a violation of contract.
In the Philosophy of Right Hegel is consistently stymied by the problem of value, by an inability to grasp the movement of society and history outside of his categories of the Absolute and Spirit. The doctrine of necessity is hence the science of the spirit grasped in its total movement of working itself out according to the Absolute. The multiple determinations of necessity, if comprehended in accordance with objective existence, permit universal Idealizations that speak to this Absolute: this is an idealist definition of necessity, a speculative scaffolding of political right, that despite its resistance to teleology still runs close to the problem of predestination––where the ethical life, enshrined in the state, becomes a historical destiny for those societies that wish to be truly free. If we were to tal
k about materialist determinations of necessity, of the way in which the concept of necessity appears in a real and profane history that rejects all attempts at mystification, we require a different theoretical terrain. Indeed, such a terrain is necessitated by a materialist worldview: class struggle.
For Hegel, and in a notorious passage of the Philosophy of Right, “[t]he state consists of the march of God in the world,”14 the space of ultimate necessity where freedom is actualized. That is, the state is necessitated by the idea of freedom, the culmination of the free will promised in abstract right and morality. But if the state, as the Marxist tradition would proclaim most coherently with Lenin, is in fact a machine of class domination then necessity in this particular sense loses its claim to a totality beyond classes: a given state is defined by the domination of a specific social class. In this sense it might be a necessity for the class in power to retain its autonomy, but it should be recognized as contingent for those who are dominated by this class. In fact, it is a necessity that the dominated recognize the contingency of their domination! But in order to get to this understanding of necessity, where the mystical shell is stripped from the rational kernel, we must wrench this talk of necessity away from Hegel’s speculative theology.
Demystified necessity
If we strip the concept of necessity from Hegel’s mystified categories––while retaining what Marx called “the rational kernel”––it is possible to understand its significance according to an entirely profane content. It is not as if such a reading is completely in contradiction with what Hegel established, but it does encourage us to step outside of his system. That is, if we transform necessity into a conceptual category that finds its content in historically encountered need, we begin to approach a far more material understanding of the concept.
Take, for example, this very simple (and yet simultaneously visceral) conditional that was noted in the previous sections: if I do not drink water then I cannot live. Such a conditional forms part of the material ground of necessity; it does not require Hegel’s logical categories in order to be understood. That is, you do not have to read either the Logic or Philosophy of Right to recognize that there are bare necessities upon which life is contingent, and that these necessities are not a matter of philosophical speculation but contain materialist stakes. Before we even begin speaking of the ways in which these unconditioned necessities are mediated by the larger realm of necessity (class struggle as the motor of history) it should be quite simple to grasp why freedom is bound up with necessity when the latter is understood in its crudest materialist sense.
To persist as a living being I require a variety of things that necessitate this existence: water, food, shelter––the material ground of organic life. What necessitates the human being, and thus human freedom? At the very least this profane material foundation of organic need; at the most, if we want to go down the path of locating something unique to the human species (which may be a philosophical labyrinth due to the debates over the meaning of the subject that still hamper philosophy), we might be able to conceptualize more core needs that contribute to the conceptualization of necessity as material existence––but I’m not interested, here, in entering into that argument. Rather, my point is that the immanence of necessity should be recognized as something that is wholly material: if we decide that living is necessary, then there are very clear and material things that are required for life to be life. Existence without food and water is not a bare contingency (anyone who chooses such a life will eventually cease to exist) but is rather contingent upon the necessity of consuming food and water.
In order to live I must at least necessarily perform very particular actions. But how, then, is freedom implicated by this non-speculative understanding of necessity? On the level of individual needs satisfaction, the answer is actually quite simple: any limits that prevent the fulfilment of these needs is oppressive and freedom is indeed realized in acting on the necessity to transgress these limits. For instance, in the most extreme example of slavery (which is, by definition, the antithesis of freedom) the individual slave’s needs are circumscribed by the slaver––for the latter controls the entire existence, and holds the right of even life, over the former––and so freedom for the slave is the necessity of overthrowing slavery. In less extreme examples, then, we should be able to recognize the same pattern: if something limits someone’s ability to flourish as a someone, to live a life where the very needs of living are not relations of domination and exploitation, then it becomes a necessity to transgress these limits if freedom is to be actualized. If someone or some structure is preventing my access to food, water, or shelter, then my freedom can only exist in securing this access. In this sense, being forced to pay for what is necessary for the bare subsistence of my species’ life––the fact that my existence is contingent upon commodity relations––ought to be understood as oppressive; the overcoming of this facticity is necessary in order to pursue freedom. Hence, understanding necessity is the basis of freedom.
Things become more complex, however, when we try to understand the relationship of necessity and freedom in a larger, historical sense: that is, when we are dealing with social classes and political movements. Class positions impose their own necessities outside of bare human life and such necessities are part of the march of history––keeping in mind, of course, the qualifications made about this “march of history” in the fourth chapter. In this social sense freedom is discovered through understanding the limits imposed by historically mediated necessity and the transgression these limits.
Let us return, briefly, to Sriduangkaew’s That Rough-Hewn Sun. The necessities encountered by Lussadh are not the necessities of eating and drinking (though she would encounter those) but the determinations of her social class: if she is to persist as a prince within her empire then she must perform certain acts, some of which are quite brutal, to ensure her position as a princely subject. In one sense if she is to have a free life as a prince she has to pursue her duty according to the necessities inherent in this social role, the most brutal of which are the execution of enemies and traitors regardless of her personal feelings. And yet, at the same time, she encounters the necessity, outside of her class position, of being a free subject: the rejection of princely destiny, the possible supersession of the very particular necessity of her class that might in fact represent a deeper human necessity. It is Lussadh’s last consummation of her class necessity that opens the possibility of freedom.
The kingdom of necessity
The fact that necessity is historically/socially mediated indicates a deeper sense of the concept of necessity: limits imposed by moments of necessity can necessarily be overcome and, in this since, barriers presented by necessity themselves necessitate transgression. In Anti-Duhring Engels defines freedom as, “the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.”15 For Engels (and Marx), necessity is meant to indicate human need on a scale that is larger than the individual level. If we want to prevent the environmental devastation of this world, for example, then we as humans need to do something about the pollution we generate. We understand the necessity to do something about pollution (and have the freedom not to do anything about it), and we should also understand that we will be freer by engaging with this problem. An environmentally devastated world, one can argue, results in a state of less freedom: if the entire world were to revert into another ice age, which is now becoming more and more possible, people would be living with less autonomy––we would not have the same freedom to enjoy existence. By the same logic, those who live in areas of the world where bare necessity forces them to work for longer hours at higher rates of exploitation are less free than those of us who live privileged lives in the centre of capitalism. Due to this understanding of necessity Engels claims “if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution mu
st take place, a revolution which will put an end to all class distinctions.”16 Since these class distinctions limit human freedom, if we want to be free then we need to abolish such distinctions altogether.
The deprivation of food, or even the deprivation of freedom of mobility (whether this mobility is realized in a car or a train), is indeed a situation where freedom is recognized in the necessity to overcome this deprivation. On the historical stage, then, any society that places such limits is a society that hampers freedom. A society (our society) that sequesters our freedom in the arbitrary world of market choices, imposing alienating necessities, is simultaneously a society that, by forcing us to pay for needs satisfaction, must necessarily be transgressed in order for freedom to be realized.
In a much larger sense, though, our understanding of freedom develops historically due to our engagement with necessity. Take, for example, the Saint-Domingue Slave Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture at the end of the eighteenth century: an understanding of the need for liberty and equality, expropriated from the French Revolution of the motherland that was simultaneously the prime colonizing force in Haiti, was bound up with the necessity for revolution. If this revolution was not pursued, then the values of liberty and equality proclaimed by the French Revolution would not be experienced by the enslaved population of Haiti. So here we have a chain of historical necessity: in one moment the French masses encounter the limits of their society and proclaim the necessity of their freedom in the slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity; in the following moment, the masses oppressed by a French colony take up the same slogan to necessitate anti-colonial freedom. The pursuit of freedom is indeed, to use Engels’ terminology, “necessarily a product of historical development.” This is not to say that the Saint-Domingue Revolution was simply contingent upon the French Revolution (we can imagine an alternate history where it erupted before the French masses were mobilized by the Jacobins) but only that, in retrospect, it did accord to established necessity.
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