who was indifferent to all and to whom everything was the same, or that he would have been able to say of himself, like Hamlet, “I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter.” For Aristotle oppression is bitter. In another passage of the same Metaphysics he says that it is hard to bow down before Necessity: “everything which constrains is called necessary and that is why the necessary is bitter, as Evenus says: ‘every necessary thing is always painful and bitter.’ And constraint is a form of necessity—as Sophocles also says: ‘But an invincible force necessitates me to act thus.’”3 Aristotle, we see, feels pain and bitterness at ineluctable Necessity, but, as he himself adds immediately, he distinctly knows that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And since it does not listen to persuasion and is not to be overcome, one must submit to it—be this bitter or not, painful or not—submit and henceforth renounce useless struggle: anankê stênai, “cry halt before Necessity.”
Whence comes this “cry halt before Necessity”? Here is a question of capital importance which contains, if you wish, the alpha and omega of philosophy. Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, it does not even listen. The injustice cries to heaven, if there is no longer anyone here to whom one can cry. It is true that in certain cases and even very often, almost always, the injustice will cry and protest only to end up by becoming silent; men forget both their sorrows and their cruel losses. But there are injustices that one cannot forget. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem . . . let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”4 For two thousand years we have all repeated the Psalmist’s oath. But did the Psalmist not “know” that Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded, that it does not listen to oaths or prayers, that it hears nothing and fears nothing? Did he not know that his voice was and could be only the voice of one crying in the wilderness? Of course he knew it, he knew it quite as well as Aristotle. But, doubtless he had something more than this knowledge. Doubtless when a man feels the injustice as deeply as did the Psalmist, his thought undergoes, in a way that is completely unexpected, incomprehensible and mysterious transformations in its very essence. He cannot forget Jerusalem, but he forgets the power of Necessity, the omnipotence of this enemy so terribly armed—one does not know by whom or when or why; and, without thinking of the future, he begins a terrible and final, battle against this enemy. This is surely the meaning of Plotinus’ words: “A great and final battle awaits human souls.” And these words of Plato have the same meaning: “If it is necessary to dare everything, should we not dare to defy all shame?”5 Man decides to take up the struggle against all-powerful Necessity only when there awakens in him the readiness to dare everything, to stop before nothing. Nothing can justify this boundless audacity; it is the extreme expression of shamelessness. One has only to look at Aristotle’s Ethics to be convinced of this. All the virtues are placed by him in the middle zone of being, and everything which passes beyond the limits of “the mean” is an indication of depravity and vice. “Cry halt before Necessity” rules his Ethics as well as his Metaphysics. His final word is the blessing of Necessity and the glorification of the spirit which has submitted to Necessity.
Not only the good but the truth as well wishes man to bow down before it. All who have read the famous Twelfth Book, especially the last chapter, of the Metaphysics and the Ninth and Tenth Books of the Ethics know with what fervor Aristotle supplicated Necessity which does not allow itself to be persuaded and which he had not the power to overcome. What irritated him or, perhaps, disturbed him most in Plato was the latter’s courage or rather, to use his own expressions, Plato’s audacity and shamelessness, which suggested to him that those who adore Necessity only dream of reality but are powerless to see it in the waking state. Plato’s words seemed to Aristotle unnatural, fantastic, deliberately provoking. But how to silence Plato, how to constrain him not only to submit to Necessity in the visible and empirical world but also to render to it in thought the honors to which, Aristotle was convinced, it is entitled? Necessity is Necessity, not for those who sleep but for those who are awake. And the waking who see Necessity see real being, while Plato, with his audacity and shamelessness, turns us away from real being and leads us into the domain of the fantastic, the unreal, the illusory, and—by that very fact—the false. One must stop at nothing in order finally to extinguish in man that thirst for freedom which found expression in Plato’s work. “Necessity” is invincible. The truth is, in its essence and by its very nature, a truth that constrains; and it is in submission to the constraining truth that the source of all human virtues lies. “Constrained by the truth itself,” Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaxagoras accomplished their work. It has always been so, it will always be so, it must be so. It is not the great Parmenides who rules over the truth but the truth that is the master of Parmenides. And to refuse obedience to the truth that constrains is impossible. Still more: to do other than bless it, whatever be the thing to which it constrains, is impossible. Herein lies the supreme wisdom, human and divine; and the task of philosophy consists in teaching men to submit joyously to Necessity which hears nothing and is indifferent to all.
II
Let us stop and ask ourselves: why does the truth that constrains need men’s blessing? Why does Aristotle put himself to so much trouble to obtain for his Necessity men’s blessing? Can it not get along without this blessing? If Necessity does not listen to reason, is it more receptive to praises? There is no doubt that constraining Necessity listens no more to praises than to prayers or curses. The stones of the desert have never replied “Amen” to the inspired sermons of the saints. But this is not necessary. What is necessary is that to the silence of the stones—is not Necessity, like the stones, indifferent to everything?—the saints should sing hosannas.
I would recall in this connection the chapters already mentioned of the Metaphysics and Ethics of Aristotle, the high priest of the visible and the invisible church of “thinking” men. We are asked not only to submit to Necessity but to adore it: such always has been, and such is still, the fundamental task of philosophy. It is not enough that philosophy should recognize the force and power, in fact, of such or such an order of things. It knows and it fears (the beginning of all knowledge is fear) that empirical force, that is, the force that manifests itself in constraining man only once, may be replaced by another force that will act in a different way. Even the scientist, who refuses to philosophize, has, finally, no need of facts; the facts by themselves give us nothing and tell us nothing. There has never been a genuine empiricism among men of science, as there has never been a genuine materialism. What scientist would study facts merely for the sake of facts? Who would wish to observe this drop of water suspended from a telegraphic wire, or this other drop that glides over the window-pane after a rain? There are millions of such drops and these, in and of themselves, have never concerned the scientists and could not concern them. The scientist wishes to know what a water-drop in general is or what water in general is. If, in his laboratory, he decomposes into its constituent elements some water drawn from a brook, it is not in order to study and know what he has at this moment in his hands and under his eyes but in order to acquire the right to make judgments about all the water that he will ever have occasion to see or never will see, about that which no one has ever seen and no one ever will see, about even that which existed when there was not a single conscious being or even any living being on earth. The man of science, whether he knows it or not (most often, obviously, he does know it), whether he wishes it or not (ordinarily he does not wish it), cannot help but be a realist in the medieval sense of the term. He is distinguished from the philosopher only by the fact that the philosopher must, in addition, explain and justify the realism practiced by science. In a general way, since empiricism is only an unsuccessful attempt at philosophical justification of the scientific, i.e., realistic, methods of seeking the truth, its work has, in fact, always led to the destruction of the principles on which it was based. It is necessary to choose: if you wish to be an empiricist, you must abandon the hope of founding scientific knowledge on a solid and certain basis; if you wish to have a solidly established science, you must place it under the protection of the idea of Necessity and, in addition, recognize this idea as primordial, original, having no beginning and consequently no end—that is to say, you must endow it with the superiorities and qualities that men generally accord to the Supreme Being. As we have seen, that is what was done by
