A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion - part four

Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God.

The Third Way: Possibility and Necessity.

'We find some things that are possible both of existing and not existing since some things are found to be generated and corrupted, and therefore to be possible both of existing and of not existing. But it is impossible for everything of this kind to exist always since what is possible of not existing at some time does not exist. Therefore, if all things were capable of not existing, at some time no thing would exist. But if this were true, even now nothing would exist since what does not exist does not begin to exist except through something else which exists; so that if no being existed, it would be impossible for anything to begin to exist, and thus nothing would now exist, which is plainly false. Therefore, not all beings are contingent or possible; there must exist some thing which is necessary. But every necessary being either has a cause of its necessity from elsewhere, or it does not. But it is not possible to proceed ad infinitum in necessary beings which have a cause of their necessity, just as this was not possible in efficient causes, as was proved [in the Second Way]. Therefore, it is necessary to posit something which is necessary through itself, not having the cause of its necessity from elsewhere, but is the cause of necessity to other things, which is what everyone calls 'God'.'

- Thomas Aquinas, (1225–1274), 'Summa Theologica' 

Thomas' third way develops an argument that has its roots in Aristotle, (384–322 BC), first proceeding from contingent beings to a necessary being and then from there to a causeless necessary being. Thomas begins with what is taken to be a a common sensical premise, that contingent or possible beings exist. (Is this common sense? See below). It is assumed that we will grant the existence of some contingent beings and in fact take this belief to be a rightly or properly basic belief given that our senses seem to tell us this and our senses should be generally trusted to give us accurate knowledge of the world around us. Hindus however would deny the real existence of contingent beings since all apparent contingency is maya or illusion, and all that is is the eternal or everlasting being Atman. But putting this to one side, it is only proper that we begin by asking what a contingent or possible being is according to Thomas and it appears a being is contingent if at some point in time (past, present, or future) that being would not exist due to material corruption, which is to say, a contingent being is materially corruptible.

Aquinas follows Aristotle in implicitly understanding that all sublunary beings, (the sublunary sphere in Aristotle is the region of the geocentric cosmos below the Moon, consisting of the four classical elements: earth, water, air, and fire, it is the realm of changing nature), are of such a sort and hence all sublunary beings are contingent. For instance, rocks, trees, animals and humans, they have a material aspect and so are contingent, yet because the heavenly bodies beyond the moon were understood by Aristotelians not to possess matter they were understood to be incapable of coming to be and ceasing to be materially, and so were for Aristotle or could be for Aquinas eternal, incorruptible or necessary. But because the heavenly bodies moved as any astronomer was aware their movement needed an explanation and cause, such necessary beings needed a cause of their motion, as per the second way, meaning that they needed some uncaused necessary being standing further behind them, and given that this cause standing further behind them cannot itself be caused by anything else or else we would have an infinite regress we need an uncaused necessary being and part of our understanding of God is that He is an uncaused necessary being.

'The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Earth', c.1508-1512, Michelangelo

Richard Dawkins answers that:

'The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress - the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.

....................

3. The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God'.

- Richard Dawkins, (1942 - ), 'The God Delusion'

Edward Feser answers that:

Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, (1968 - ), points out that in the third way Thomas is arguing from contingency and necessity, generation and corruption, things come into existence and they pass out of existence, showing they are contingent, they could fail to exist, and depend upon other things for their existence, there couldn't be anything like that unless there was something not like that, something that exists in a necessary way. Dawkins makes a gross error in asserting that it rests upon the premise that there must have been a time when no physical things existed, for not only is that not there in the third way but Thomas purposively avoids making such a claim. Whenever he argues for God's existence Dawkins 'like many atheists' (Feser's words), thinks that Thomas is tracing the universe back to a beginning point, a big bang say, and then asking what caused the big bang? And Dawkins characterises it as Thomas saying that there must have been a time when no physical things existed, but Thomas denied you could show that. In the Middle Ages this was up for debate. Catholic theologian Bonaventure, (1221 – 1274), thought that you could argue for God's existence by way of a beginning of the universe and then arguing that God is the cause of the beginning. Thomas responded that you cannot show that philosophically, we only know the world had a beginning through the book of 'Genesis', we do not know it through philosophical analysis. Indeed, Bonaventure and modern Christian apologists like William Lane Craig, (1949 -), presenting philosophical arguments as they do from the beginning of the universe can make the Christian faith look ridiculous through the use of bad arguments in defence of religion because doing so only gives the infidel an occasion to scoff.

The Kalam cosmological argument, for instance, championed by Christian apologist William Lane Craig, (I like to refer to him as Christian apologist rather than philosopher because I know it annoys him ... well there is nothing in the philosopher's handbook about the necessity of emotional maturity), and traceable back to Al-Ghazali, (c. 1058 -1111):

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

4. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

5. Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

Convinced?

'Vitruvian Man', c. 1690, Leonardo da Vinci ('Oh! marvellous, O stupendous Necessity — by thy laws thou dost compel every effect to be the direct result of its cause, by the shortest path. These are miracles...'. Leonardo da Vinci, (1452 – 1519), 'Notebooks').

Feser was once asked is there an atheist who has done good work in understanding Thomas' five ways in trying to refute them (asked by Matt Fradd a Thomist YouTuber, there are just so many presuppositions behind that loaded question), to which he responded that the short answer is no (he's read them all then) but he concedes that there are serious atheist writers who make comments about Thomas, J. L. Mackie, (1917 – 1981), for instance, in 'The Miracle of Theism'. (My note: a rather more subtle title than 'The God Delusion' but equally giving the game away about where the author is coming from). Mackie, according to Feser, is one of the most prominent and important philosophers in the philosophy of religion who focuses on the third way and it is 'not bad', serious and not polemical nor ill-informed but nonetheless getting some really important things wrong, for instance discussing only the third way because he believes the first two to be made obsolete by modern science, but he is 'as good as atheists get in Aquinas but still falls far short'.

And so:

J. L. Mackie answers that:

Thomas' argument is in two stages which can be condensed thus: First stage: If everything were able-not-to-be, then at some time  there would have been nothing because what is able-not-to-be at some time is not, and then since what does not exist cannot begin to be except through something which is even now there would be nothing. It is evident enough that there is not nothing now (though see my article On Plato's 'Gorgias' - The Art of Persuasion), hence it cannot be true that everything is able-not-to-be so there must be at least one thing which is necessary. Second stage: Everything that is necessary either has a cause of its necessity outside itself, or it does not, but it is not possible to go to infinity in a series of necessary things each of which has a cause of its necessity outside itself, this is like what has been proved about efficient causes, hence we must assume something which is necessary through itself, which does not have a cause of its necessity outside itself, but which is the cause of the  necessity of the other things; and this men all call God. 

Mackie contends that the argument differs from from Gottfried Leibniz's, (1646 – 1716), argument from contingency which may be formulated thus:

1. Every contingent fact has an explanation. (The principle of sufficient reason).

2. There is a contingent fact that includes all other contingent facts. (The conjunction of contingent facts).

3. Therefore, there is an explanation of this fact. (The conjunction of contingent facts has an explanation by the principle of sufficient reason).

4. This explanation must involve a necessary being. (That is, non-contingent, no contingency can explain the conjunction of contingent facts because it is part of the conjunction of contingent facts).

5. This necessary being is God. (A necessary being to explain the totality of contingent facts).

Thomas' argument uses the contrast between things which are able-not-to-be and therefore contingent and those which are necessary and it is not satisfied with the conclusion that there is something necessary for it grants that there may be many necessary things, and reaches God only at the end of the second stage, as what has its necessity 'through itself' (per se). It is clear enough that necessary does not mean the same thing for Thomas as it does for Leibniz, (herein lies the problem for this kind of argument, see below). In the first stage, the premise 'what is able-not-to-be, at some time is not' is up for debate given that something that is able not to be nonetheless may just happen to exist always, though maybe Thomas means by ‘things that are able-not-to-be’ (possibilia non esse) something like impermanent things thereby making the premise analytic though even then the statement that if everything were such at some time there would have been nothing does not follow given that some impermanent things might have lasted through all past time and be going to manifest their impermanence by perishing only at some time in the future.

Perhaps Thomas' thought can be better understood were we to compare it to the proof of Maimonides, (1138 – 1204), whereby it is assumed that past time has been finite, reasonably enough given that if past time has been finite there would seem to be an easier argument for a divine creator. (My note: modern Christian apologists like William Lane Craig seize on the fact that current cosmological theory seems to suggest the universe had a beginning .. well it is expanding .. what it is expanding into is beyond me but my raising that issue probably demonstrates nothing but my ignorance of the matter and in any case appealing to the sciences to prove or disprove a philosophical theory is such a gross error to have infected much, particularly modern, philosophy).

Maimonides rejected the Kalam argument whereby one demonstrates that the universe must have been created and then reasons that if it was created it must have a creator, he agrees with Thomas that it is impossible to show by logical considerations alone either that the universe was created or that it is eternal but he believes in creation albeit admitting one can do no more than tip the scales in this direction. One of his proofs may be formulated thus:

1. The heavenly bodies are engaged in eternal motion. (Assumption).

2. It is impossible for there to be an infinite body or an infinite number of finite bodies.

3. So every corporeal thing is finite.

4. If it is finite, it can only contain a finite amount of power.

5. If it can only contain a finite amount of power, it can only explain motion over a finite period of time.

6. The heavenly bodies are always moving, (premise 1), the only thing that can explain that motion is an infinite power.

7. Because an infinite power cannot be contained in a finite thing, it cannot be corporeal.

8. If it is not corporeal, it is not subject to division or change.

9. Seeing that its power is infinite, it cannot derive that power from something else.

10. Therefore the only way to explain the motion of the heavenly bodies is to posit the existence of a being that is neither a body nor a force in a body.

The suggestion is that it would not have been possible for impermanent things to have lasted throughout an infinite time and hence they would have perished already but another objection is that there might be a series of things, each of which was impermanent and perished after a finite period, but whose periods of existence overlapped so that there never was a time when there was nothing. Thomas may seem vulnerable to the objection of having committed a logical fallacy in inferring 'at some time everything is not' from 'each thing at some time is not', but then if each thing were impermanent it would seem to require good fortune of the most improbable kind for the interconnected sequence to have been sustained through infinite time, and furthermore, were such unlikely fortune to hold the interconnected series of things may itself be regarded as a thing that had already lasted through infinite time, and so could not be impermanent. Indeed were there such a series which never failed this may well indicate that there was some permanent resource of material of which the corruptible things were composed and into which they disintegrated thereby contributing to the composition of other things.

But what of the premise that 'what does not exist cannot begin to be except through something that is'? Ex nihilo nihil fit. Nothing comes from nothing. So if the series of impermanent things had broken off it could never have started again after a gap. But is this an a priori truth? According to David Hume, (1711 – 1776), we can conceive an uncaused beginning-to-be of an object, if what we can thus conceive is nevertheless in some way impossible, this still requires to be demonstrated. (My note: Hume is not a good authority to appeal to in such matters. 'Whatever we conceive is possible, at least in a metaphysical sense', he said, and thereby he constructs an argument that the possible existence of one thing or event can be inferred from the mere conceivability of its existence. A gross philosophical error if I may say so, (there seem to be a lot of gross errors in philosophy), for I can conceive of all sorts of things that are not possible, going into a shop and buying the number six for instance).

['There's no use trying', [Alice] said; 'one can't believe impossible things'.

'I daresay you haven't had much practice', said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast'.

- 'Alice Through the Looking Glass'

Do we have the capability to imagine the impossible? I say yes].

The principle has some plausibility says Mackie in that it is constantly confirmed in our experience and also used reasonably in interpreting our experience and therefore the first stage of Thomas' argument falls short of foolproof demonstration but it gives some lower level support to the conclusion that there is at least one thing that is necessary in the sense that it is permanent, that for some reason it is not able-not-to-be. The second stage takes this conclusion as its starting-point whereby one permanent thing, it grants, may be caused to be permanent, sustained always in existence, by another, but, it holds, there cannot be an infinite regress of such things. And why is that? Thomas refers us to his earlier proof about efficient causes in the second way. (See my article A Bellowing Ox and a Roaring Lion part three). It is not possible to go to infinity in a series of efficient causes for in all ordered efficient causes the first item is the cause of the intermediate one and the intermediate is the cause of the last whether there is only one intermediate or more than one, and if the cause is removed, so is the effect, hence if there has not been a first item among efficient causes there will not be a last or an intermediate but if one goes to infinity in a series of efficient causes, there will not be a first efficient cause and so there will not be a last effect or intermediate efficient causes. Mackie argues this argument is unsound for albeit in a finite ordered series of causes the intermediate or the earliest intermediate is caused by the first item this would not be so if there were an infinite series and in an infinite series,every item is caused by an earlier item, the way in which the first item is removed if we go from a finite to an infinite series does not entail the removal of the later items.

Indeed in the first and second ways Thomas has begged the question against an infinite regress of causes. A gross error, or is there behind it some coherent thought? Some instance many of which would not themselves have been available to Thomas though analogues of them would have been may suggest that there is. If we were told that there was a watch without a mainspring we would hardly be reassured by the further information that it had nonetheless an infinite train of gear-wheels, nor would we expect a railway train consisting of an infinite number of carriages the last pulled along by the second last the second last by the third last, and so on to get along minus an engine.

Man Ray, 'Lee Miller', in 'New York Dada', 1920.

'Reality is fabricated out of desire' - Man Ray

Again we have a chain consisting of a series of links suspended from a hook and we would be somewhat taken aback to discover that there was a similar but infinite chain with no hook but links supported by links above them for ever, the point being with these instances and in the series of efficient causes or of necessary things it is presupposed that there is a relation of dependence or equivalently one in the reverse direction of support and if the series were infinite there would in the end be nothing for the effects to depend upon, nothing to support them, the same being true if the regress were not infinite but circular. There is here an implicit appeal to a general principle: where items are ordered by a relation of dependence the regress must end somewhere, it cannot be either infinite or circular. Mackie suggests that such a principle was intended by al Farabi, (c. 872 – 950), in his dictum: 'But a series of contingent beings which would produce one another cannot proceed to infinity or move in a circle'. As the given instances demonstrate the principle is at the very least highly plausible though the problem that presents itself is in deciding when we have such a relation of dependence.

In the second stage of Thomas' argument the principle notion is that any necessary, which is to say, permanent thing either depends for its permanence upon something else or is per se necessarium in a sense which can apply only to God. It is unclear from what Thomas says about the third way what his thoughts on the matter are, but comparison of it with other passages in his writings and with Maimonides' proof indicates that the implicit assumption is that anything whose essence does not involve existence must even if it is permanent depend for its existence upon something else. Such an assumption would give the dependence which would call for an end to the regress and also ensure that nothing could end it but a being whose essence involved existence, which would explain the assertion that what is per se necessarium is what men all call God.

Alas, says Mackie (well he didn't say alas, that is just how I like to write), the final objection to the argument is that we have no reason, (my note: how can you ever know that you have no reason for anything just because you can't think of a reason?), for accepting this implicit assumption, for why, for instance, may there not be a permanent resource of matter whose essence did not involve existence but that did not derive its existence from anything else? It is evident enough that Thomas' third way is very different from Leibniz’s cosmological proof and yet there has been a tendency to assimilate the former to the latter, and this is understandable in that Thomas would need something like the principle of sufficient reason to support the implicit assumption against another objection, for instance, there being a permanent resource of matter would be just a brute fact that had no sufficient reason, whereas something whose essence involved existence would seem to have, in itself, per se, (I don't know why Percy keeps popping into the discussion), a sufficient reason for its permanence.

But in view of the critique of Leibniz’s argument no borrowing from it can save that of Thomas, but what about the rather well favoured first cause argument? For what reason must the regress of causes in time terminate? Because things, states of affairs, and occurrences depend upon their antecedent causes. Why must the regress lead to one first cause rather than to many uncaused causes, and why must that one cause be God? Because anything other than God would need something else causally to depend upon. And the assumption needed for this argument is more plausible than that needed for Leibniz's proof, or for Thomas' proof. The notion that everything must have a sufficient reason is a metaphysician's demand, as is the notion that anything permanent must depend for its permanence upon something else unless its essence involves existence, but the notion that an effect depends upon a temporally earlier cause is part of one's ordinary understanding of causation, everyone of us has some grasp of this asymmetry between cause and effect, however hard it may be to give an exact analysis of it. (Needless to say when Mackie says 'everyone of us' I do not know if he has read Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770 - 1831), but in this instance Hegel does not belong to 'everyone of us', see my previous article).

Nonetheless the argument is not demonstratively cogent albeit we understand that where something has a temporally antecedent cause it depends somehow (?) upon it and it does not follow that everything other than God needs something else to depend upon in this way. In addition al Farabi’s principle whereby if items are ordered by a relation of dependence the regress must terminate somewhere and cannot be either infinite or circular though plausible, may not be really sound. And yet the grossest error this otherwise appealing argument (appealing to Mackie that is) is that some reason is needed for making God the one exception to the supposed need for something else to depend upon, why should God, rather than anything else, be taken as the only satisfactory termination of the regress? (Dawkins's representation of the argument albeit more sophisticatedly expressed, and which triggers Feser). If we do not simply accept this as a sheer mystery which would be to abandon rational theology (?) and take refuge in faith (define faith!) we must needs defend it in something like the manner that the metaphysicians have suggested, but then this oh so favoured argument takes on board the burdens that have sunk its more elaborate philosophical counterparts

'Surface of constant width', 1911-1914, Man Ray 

I answer that:

I completed my previous article with the observation: 'However plausible a theory or doctrine might appear, keep digging, to unearth the prejudices, the presuppositions, the poorly defined concepts, the flaws of reasoning. Once you have read Hegel everything else in philosophy seems merely to be scratching at the surface'. And here we are again. What in God's name is contingency in any case, or necessity for that matter? Consider this argument from Alvin Plantinga, a modal version (modal logic: study of the deductive behavior of the expressions 'it is necessary that' and 'it is possible that'), of the ontological argument (argument from premises which are supposedly derived from some source other than observation of the world):

1.    To say that there is possibly a God is to say that there is a possible world in which God exists.

2.    To say that God necessarily exists is to say that God exists in every possible world.

3.    God is necessarily perfect (i.e. maximally excellent)

4.    Since God is necessarily perfect, he is perfect in every possible world.

5.    If God is perfect in every possible world, he must exist in every possible world, therefore God exists.

6.    God is also maximally great. To be maximally great is to be perfect in every possible world.

7.    Therefore: 'it is possible that there is a God', means that there is a possible which contains God, that God is maximally great, and the God exists in every possible world and is consequently necessary. 

8.    God’s existence is at least possible.

9.    Therefore: as per item seven, God exists.

Convinced?

Philosophers are allowed to play fast and loose with continency or possibility and necessity because who knows what they mean and where do serious philosophers draw the line between the contingent and the non-contingent? And if they do draw the line at some point then why draw it there rather than at some other place? Is my being here a contingent fact? And worst of all for the theist, like Thomas, like Feser, like Craig, like Plantinga, how is the existence of contingencies at all compatible with theism? If all proceeds from a necessary being, God, then all is necessary, there are no contingencies, there are no accidents. Contingency makes no sense in the theist's world view. I have run through how an atheist philosopher, (as Feser categorises Mackie the implication being he is a victim of an unwarranted presupposition, that is, that supernatural entities don't exist), tackles the argument from necessity and contingency as I have run through how a theist confronts the same topic and they all seem oblivious to this basic point. I have no idea what necessity means outside of logic, whereby a conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. Do you? Ironically a valid argument to prove necessity may demonstrate necessity without proving necessity (in the real world).

Necessity is however a key concept in Hegel's philosophy but he does inform us of his precise understanding of the term, (Notwendigkeit), and it is a rather intriguing one. Necessity, a term from modal logic, differs from possibility or actuality, there is a narrow logical sense of necessity, a sense in Hegel's use of the term but he not only uses it in this narrow sense but in a wider sense too. In the 'Phenomenology of Spirit' he writes very engagingly of the metaphor of the bud:

'The more conventional opinion gets fixated on the antithesis of truth and falsity, the more it tends to expect a given philosophical system to be either accepted or contradicted; and hence it finds only acceptance or rejection. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive unfolding of truth, but rather sees in it simple disagreements. The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible'.

And furthermore:

'Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole'.

There are three stages of the plant, the blossom and the fruit are necessary elements in terms of the life of the whole, to understand the development of the Spirit is to to understand why all of the the different moments or stages of this development are equally necessary, this is a scientific system presented here but it is not a description of something static but rather dynamic and organic, a living process, and necessity is related here to the stages or moments that constitute this living process, and even in this context necessity is distinct from contingency albeit Hegel's quest for necessity is unlike anything from an analytic perspective in that it is not to sort out or eliminate anything that is contingent to finish up with only that which is necessary. Rather, by understanding the necessity of each moment of the living whole by understanding the necessity that constitutes the life of the whole what we have to do more precisely, in a scientific system, is to transform that which seems to be contingent into something we understand as being actually necessary, to transform what seems to be merely coincidental to something of which we recognise its necessity 'The rational and the rhythm of the organic whole', as Hegel characterises it. Philosophy performs this feat in hindsight, transforming what was contingent that now because of the actualisation of reality we understand as necessary. For instance, falling in love. We encounter our partner to be by chance, maybe by posting romantic poetry on the internet that then captures unexpected attention, love begins with totally contingent encounters of this kind, but then having fallen in love with what is to be the love of your life such falling in love is grounded in total contingency and yet once falling in love has transpired we perceive our entire past life as leading up to this moment, I was waiting all my life for you, I transform what is contingent into something necessary, like a conclusion to a logical argument.

'Fleurs', 1948, Salvador Dali

The necessity of progression and interrelation ... we can make sense of an event by understanding the dynamic necessity in the context of an organic whole the life, of the whole of the rhythm of a certain progress, and apart from its dynamic meaning Notwendigkeit has an existential meaning, it is linguistically composed of three elements, not with the same etymological root as need, as in in need of help a moment of crisis or an emergency, Notruf is an emergency call. And wendig, to turn around, to change. Keit is a suffix like ity in necessity. Put the three elements together and it is like an existential state of being in need of something that brings about a crucial or critical turnaround so that you are no longer in need, the emergency is resolved, so Notwendigkeit means a critical understanding, necessity rather than contingency is to understand why something was critical in a given situation, and understanding what is critical is understanding how every moment of the whole is an equally critical element of the life of the whole. In reconstructing the history of the Spirit of humankind is to isolate the critical significance of every critical moment in history, and understood for an individual this would mean to understand the critical significance of every moment in your own individual development that necessarily contributed to the person you are right now. It is critical that I studied philosophy though I could have studied something else, all contingencies are open at the moment of your reading this article, but your reading this article is critical in making you who you are, it will complete your self building in a specific way. Hegel wrote:

'Even when the specific determinateness - say one like Magnetism, for example, - is in itself concrete or real, the Understanding degrades it into something lifeless, merely predicating it of another existent thing, rather than cognizing it as the immanent life of the thing, or cognizing its native and unique way of generating and expressing itself in that thing. The formal Understanding leaves it to others to add this principal feature. Instead of entering into the immanent content of the thing, it is forever surveying the whole and standing above the particular existence of which it is speaking, i.e. it does not see it at all. Scientific cognition, on the contrary, demands surrender to the life of the object, of, what amounts to the same thing, confronting and expressing its inner necessity. Thus, absorbed in its object, scientific cognition forgets about that general survey, which is merely the reflection of the cognitive process away from the content and back into itself. Yet, immersed in the material, and advancing with its movement, scientific cognition does come back to itself, but not before its filling or content is taken back into itself, is simplified into a determinateness, and has reduced itself to one aspect of its own existence and passed over into its higher truth. Through this process the simple, self-surveying whole itself emerges from the wealth in which its reflection seemed to be lost'.

Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844 - 1900), that predecessor of postmodernism sought to transform all of this albeit taking from Hegel an historical approach. Without Hegel no Darwin he said, in 'The Gay Science' (rather an odd claim given that Hegel, in his 'Philosophy of Nature', describes natural evolution as an 'inept conception'):

'Let us take, thirdly, Hegel's astonishing move, with which he struck through all logical habits and indulgences when he dared to teach that species concepts develop out of each other: with this proposition the minds of Europe were preformed for the last great scientific movement, Darwinism - for without Hegel there could be no Darwin. Is there anything German in this Hegelian innovation which first introduced the decisive concept of 'development' into science? Yes, without any doubt: in all three cases we feel that something in ourselves has been 'uncovered' and figured out, and we are grateful and at the same time surprised. Each of these three propositions is a thoughtful piece of German self-knowledge, self-experience, and self-conception. 'Our inner world is much richer, more comprehensive, more hidden', we feel with Leibniz'.

'The Gay Science', a translation of 'Die fröhliche Wissenschaft'. We could with justification translate it as 'The Frolicking Science'. Nietzsche focusses upon history, development, evolution in formulating his own genealogical approach, there is a scientific genealogical aspect to Nietzsche but at the same time his notion of science is different from Hegel's, the latter being a modern notion of science while Nietzsche's notion is of a postmodern ironic science:

'Life - to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame, and also all that wounds us; we simply can do no other. And as for illness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every U into an X, 4 a real, proper X, that is, the penultimate one before the final one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain that takes its time and in which we are burned, as it were, over green wood, forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and put aside all trust, everything good-natured, veiling, mild, average - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity'.

['to make a U out to be an X' is a standard German expression for trying to pretend that one thing is something completely different].

This great suspicion underlies or forms Nietzsche's approach:

'Alas, it is not only the poets and their beautiful 'lyrical sentiments' on whom this resurrected author has to vent his malice: who knows what kind of victim he is looking for, what kind of monster will stimulate him to pardon it? Incipit tragoedia, we read at the end of this suspiciously innocent hook. Beware! Something utterly wicked and mischievous is being announced here: incipit parodia, no doubt'

[Incipit tragoedia: the tragedy begins. Incipit parodia: the parody begins] The parody begins, an ironic transformation of modern science as we find it in Hegel is turned into a frolicking science consisting precisely in the transformation of the central task which for Hegel was science transforming contingency into necessity. Nietzsche turns it around, his frolicking ironic science transforms necessity into contingency:

'Every philosophy that ranks peace above war, every ethic with a negative definition of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows some finale, a final state of some sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious craving for some Apart, Beyond, Outside, Above, permits the question whether it was not illness that inspired the philosopher. The unconscious disguise of physiological needs under the cloaks of the objective, ideal, purely spiritual goes frighteningly far - and I have asked myself often enough whether, on a grand scale, philosophy has been no more than an interpretation of the body and a misunderstanding of the body'.

Purely spiritual alludes to Hegel, the objective and ideal alludes to a modern notion of science. These are just disguises, the objective the ideal and so on, and what they disguise are certain elements that are unconscious, are physiological, that we cover up with a pseudo objectivity:

'I am still waiting for a philosophical physician in the exceptional sense of the term - someone who has set himself the task of pursuing the problem of the total health of a people, time, race or of humanity - to summon the courage at last to push my suspicion to its limit and risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophizing hitherto was not at all 'truth' but rather something else - let us say health, future, growth, power, life ... '

The scientific focus on truth as that which was necessarily true is replaced by Nietzsche, truth only reveals certain drives, certain instincts, certain forms of looking for health, of growth, of expressing power, of living:

'No, we have grown sick of this bad taste, this will to truth, to 'truth at any price', this youthful madness in the love of truth: we are too experienced, too serious, too jovial, too burned, too deep for that. . . We no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the veil; we have lived too much to believe this. Today we consider it a matter of decency not to wish to see everything naked, to be present everywhere, to understand and 'know' everything. 'Is it true that God is everywhere?' a little girl asked her mother; 'I find that indecent!' - a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties. Perhaps truth is a woman who has grounds for not showing her grounds? Perhaps her name is - to speak Greek- Baubo?'

[Baubo: When the goddess Demeter was grieving for the abduction of her daughter by Hades, god of the underworld, the witch Baubo made her laugh again for the first time by lifting her skirts and exposing herself].

The modern scientific desire for truth is somehow regarded as bad taste, we are too experienced to take this old form of experience as sufficient, we are serious about the things that inform the desire for truth but we are also too joyful to regard this insipid objective truth search as the whole truth. Nietzsche reveals the historical or cultural, the bodily or physiological, the mental or psychological, the linguistic, the ideological or religious contingencies that philosophy covers up or disguises as objective truth. Objective truth that is contingent upon historical events, on bodily desires, on particular mental or psychological needs, on the language we use, on the ideologies that have taken hold of us, on religious dreaming that we succumb to, these are contingencies that lead us to construct something akin to objective truth to cover up those contingencies. And Nietzschean postmodern science, apparently, discovers the covered up contingencies. Objective truth is a construct hiding something much more complex underneath. In 'Twilight of the Idols' he wrote:

'Error of a false causality.- In every age we have believed that we know what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge, or more precisely, our belief that we have knowledge about this? From the realm of the famous 'internal facts', none of which has up to now proved to be factual ... Of these ... 'internal facts which seemed to vouch for causality, the first and most convincing is the 'fact' of will as cause; the conception of a consciousness ('mind' ['Geist']) as cause, and still later of the 'I' (the 'subject') as cause were merely born later, after causality had been firmly established by the will as given, as an empirical fact In the meantime, we have thought better of this. Today we don't believe a word of all that anymore. The 'internal world' is full of optical illusions and mirages: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, so it no longer explains anything either - it just accompanies events, and it can even be absent. ... And even your atom, my dear mechanists and physicists - how much error, how much rudimentary psychology is left over in your atom! - Not to mention the 'thing in itself', the metaphysicians' horrendum pudendum [horrible, shameful thing]! The error of mind as cause confused with reality! And made into the measure of reality! And called God! - '

All of this language of the Spirit alludes to Hegel. The concepts Spirit and subjectivity do not indicate causes, they have no necessity. Au contraire, they are contingent upon physiological, psychological, historical, linguistic circumstances that could have been otherwise and that which is deemed to be necessary is not necessary but contingent, the error of false causality implies an error of false necessity because of a double meaning of contingency, contingent upon, but if Spirit and subject are not causes they are effects and thereby contingent upon something else. So other options are and would have been possible, nothing is necessary, everything is coincidental.

'Design in Nature', 1947, Max Ernst

Well, no one likes a good frolic more than me but I will stick with Hegel on this one, Nietzsche like Plantinga et al is playing fast and loose with necessity and contingency whereas with Hegel we know what he means by the terms. If something is possible it may or may not be actual and if it is not actual it is merely possible if it is actual it may be contingent that is such that it is possible for it not to be actual as well as to be actual or necessary that is such that it is not possible for it not to be actual but what is necessary is not always actual something may be a necessary that is an indispensable condition of something else for instance of the truth of a theorem or of the actuality of a state of affairs but not be realized in which case what it is a condition of cannot be actual, or true, either. And what of the actual and the potential in terms of formal or logical possibility whereby something is formally possible if it involves no contradiction but what is possible is regularly equated with what is thinkable for instance it is possible that the moon will fall to the earth tonight.

Unlike orthodox logicians who hold for instance that the sentence 'This is both square and circular' expresses an impossibility, Hegel affirms that everything is formally possible, the reasons being first, the claim that something is formally possible involves abstracting an entity from its present circumstances, for instance ignoring facts about the moon which are logically incompatible with its falling to the earth). Those who claim that it is impossible for something to be both square and circular are not abstracting sufficiently, for even if it is actually square it is possible for it to be circular. Second, Hegel is concerned with the possibility of events or states of affairs rather than of propositions, and third, his concern is with future possibilities, as his examples indicate, it is possible for this, which is now square, to become round. Not only is everything possible but conversely since anything concrete involves opposition and contradiction, for instance matter involves both attraction and repulsion, everything is formally impossible. Formal possibility is thereby a singularly vacuous notion. Orthodox logicians like Immanuel Kant, (1724 - 18040, had a notion of formal necessity co-ordinate with that of formal possibility, the formally necessary is that which cannot possibly not be, or whose negation is formally impossible, but for Hegel everything is formally possible and hence he proceeds to the notion of formal actuality, of actuality not in Hegel's preferred sense but in the sense of simply being or existing in contrast to being merely possible.

The formally actual is the contingent, it is possible for it not to be, as well as to be, and that it is actual is thus a matter of chance, but the concept of chance is complex contrasting as it does with what is essential, necessary or intended, but it also suggests dependence on, or being contingent upon, something else. Chance or coincidence in general is that which has its ground not in itself, but in an other, from whence we can infer that the contingent is not simply an immediate actuality but also serves as the possibility or condition of a new actuality. To pre-suppose is to posit in advance, pre-posit, the contingent is posited by something else, but it is posited in advance or presupposed, and the conditions of something and their interaction are the real and not simply the formal possibility of it. It is a formal possibility that there should be a statue, that this block of unshaped marble should be or become a statue but when the sculptor sets to work on the marble with his chisel, this is the real possibility of a statue. But the real possibility of something is also its real actuality, since if all conditions are present, the thing must become actual. But it is not only actual it is necessary and this is relative or hypothetical necessity, that is, necessity in relation to certain conditions, but since the emergence of the thing from its conditions involves the sublation (overcoming and preseerving) of those conditions, the sublation of mediation into immediacy, it is also absolute or unconditioned necessity. Kant had denied the possibility of anything absolutely necessary in the phenomenal world, but Hegel reinterprets the notion of unconditional necessity so that it is exemplified by any relatively self-contained and self-sustaining entity that absorbs the conditions of its emergence, a work of art, an organisn, a person, a state, and so on.

Such an account applies not only to the emergence of entities in the world but also to human cognition whereby the world presents us with a mass of empirical contingencies which form the conditions of the work of the natural scientist but he or she does not simply accept them as they are, by observation and experiment he or she extracts their common features or essence and expresses it in universal laws that do not contain low-level empirical terms such as 'stone' but only more general terms such as 'body', 'attraction', 'repulsion' and at a higher level still Hegelian logic albeit conditioned by empirical contingencies as well as by the results of the natural and other sciences abstracts from these conditions and operates at the level of pure thought. At this level many of the results of the sciences that were originally arrived at empirically can be shown to be necessary, for logic involves no contingency, any given category has a unique successor, nonetheless there is an ineliminable element of contingency in the world, not only in nature where for instance the number of species of parrot is contingent and has to be simply accepted, not derived or explained, but in history, in Art, in Right. It may be objected that the concept of contingency remains unclear, if something is contingent does that mean that it is a matter of sheer chance, so that there is no reason for it? Or there is a reason for it since, after all, the contingent has its ground in an other but this reason is inaccessible to us. Or the reason for it is accessible to the natural sciences but the phenomenon cannot be shown to be necessary and a priori by philosophy? And what of the notion of overcoming' contingency? If the contingency of the number of species of parrot cannot be overcome then overcoming must mean explaining either in the sense of showing that, given certain other, non-contingent, facts the number can be neither more nor less than, say, 193, or in the sense of showing that 193 parrot-species serve some purpose that no other number would, and yet in other senses of overcoming contingency such as abstracting from the parrot-species and doing logic instead, or making them serve some higher purpose by, for instance, eating them (not recommended by me as a vegetarian), or stuffing them and placing them in a museum, (a gross practice), their contingency can be overcome. However, contingency, like other categories, must be exemplified in the world and an account has to be forthcoming of where the line is to be drawn between the contingent and the non-contingent and why it is to be drawn at that rather than some other point but the existence of sheer contingencies rests uncomfortably with a thoroughgoing theism and the denial of any distinct, formless matter or content so that any appeal to necessity and contingency in proving the existence of God is a non-starter unless such a mare's nest can be sorted out and forthcoming is some clarification as to the sum of all being in terms of the actual and the potential, that is, the Absolute.

'Necessity'

by Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866)

MY steps have pressed the flowers,

That to the Muses bowers

The eternal dews of Helicon have given:

And trod the mountain height,

Where Science, young and bright,

Scans with poetic gaze the midnight-heaven;

Yet have I found no power to vie

With thine, severe Necessity!

No counteracting spell sublime,

By Orpheus, breathed in elder time,

The tablets of initiate Thrace contain:

No drug imbued with strength divine,

To sons of Æsculapian line,

By pitying Phoebus taught, to soothe the stings of pain..

Thee, goddess, thee alone

None seek with suppliant moan:

No votive wreaths thine iron altars dress:

Immutably severe,

The song thou dost not hear,

That speaks the plaint of mortal wretchedness.

Oh, may I ne’er more keenly feel

Thy power, that breaks the strength of steel,

With whose dread course concordant still

Jove executes his sovereign will:

Vain were his might, unseconded by thee.

Regret or shame thou canst not know;

Nor pity for terrestrial woe

Can check thy onward course, or change thy stern decree.

And thou, in patience bear thy doom,

Beneath her heaviest bonds opprest:

Tears cannot hurst the marble tomb,

Where e’en the sons of gods must rest.

In life, in death, most loved, most blest,

Was she for whom our fruitless tears are shed;

And round her cold sepulchral bed,

Unlike the tombs of the promiscuous dead,

Wreaths of eternal fame shall spread,

By matchless virtue merited.

There oft the traveller from his path shall turn,

To grace with holy rites her funeral urn,

And muse beneath the lonely cypress shade,

That waves, in silent gloom, where her remains are laid.

'La Sainte Vierge' ('The Blessed Virgin'), 1920, Francis Picabia