by incantations that, on the one hand, Necessity is omnipotent and to fight it serves no purpose; on the other hand, that Necessity is of divine origin (that is why the semel jussit is preserved) and that it is impious and immoral to refuse it obedience. This same Seneca is inexhaustible in his praise of God who has forgotten how to command and of men who manifest a boundless submission. “I do not obey God, I agree with Him; I follow Him with all my soul, but not because it is necessary.” Or again, in the famous translation of the words of the Stoic Cleanthes which Cicero so admired: “the fates lead the willing, but the unwilling they drag.” One could cite hundreds of pages from Seneca or Cicero filled with reflections of this kind.
It will be said that Seneca, as well as Cleanthes on whom Seneca relied, expresses the ideas of the Stoic school, and that we have no right, in speaking of Aristotle, to refer to the Stoics whose narrowness of mind was already well known to the ancients. But I believe that Dilthey was right when he frankly admitted that the modern age received the philosophy of antiquity through Cicero and Seneca, and that it is with their eyes that we see the ancients. It is even more exact to say that the narrow philosophy of the Stoics and the overly simple logic of the Cynics at times reveal to us the essence of ancient thought (and of our own) better than the works of Plato and Aristotle. The Stoics are regarded with scornful condescension, but it cannot even be imagined what would have become of European thought if the ideas sown in the world by the Stoics had not produced so abundant a harvest. The Stoics at times were only too frank. Now, many ideas are admitted only if they agree not to show their true face and, when necessary, to deny it. Ham, who turned around to look at his father’s nakedness, has been nailed to the pillory by history. But how many have turned around without anyone thinking of blaming them? To turn around, to reflect, besinnen, is considered one of the most honorable of things; Hegel’s entire philosophy reduces itself finally to a looking around. It will be said that the “nakedness of the father” did not interest Hegel. I would answer that he looked at nakednesses that are even more criminal to contemplate than one’s father’s. But Hegel knew what one can say and what must be passed over in silence. This knowledge was foreign to the Stoics, and even more so to the Cynics. The Cynics’ whole error derives from the fact that they had an absolute confidence in reflective human reason. Other men, almost all, especially the philosophers, have committed the same mistake. Who does not trust reason? But others knew how to keep to themselves the greatest part of what they had received in payment for their absolute confidence in reason, and they are praised as sages while the Cynics are called “dogs.” Noah’s third son, the Cynics and, to some extent, the Stoics are not reproached for turning around and looking at the completely “naked” truth; this is permitted and even encouraged. What is not forgiven them is only their calling things by their right names, their saying that they are looking around when they are looking around and that nakedness is nakedness. Blessed are those who look around and are silent, blessed are those who see but hide what they see. Why is this so? No one can answer. It seems that every man, like Socrates, has at his side a demon who, in decisive moments, demands of him judgments and acts whose meaning remains incomprehensible to him and forever hidden. But if such a demon exists in nature and if even the most courageous of men dare not disobey him, how can one not ask whence, from what worlds, this mysterious being has come to us? But no one greatly desires to ask this. People know that there is someone (or perhaps even something: it is not known in advance how the demon should be spoken of, whether as a thing or as a being) that has received or has arrogated the right to present to men completely unmotivated demands, and they are satisfied with that. The demon prescribes, men obey. And all are happy that a power should finally be found which binds and decides, which delivers us from freedom of the will, and that one can, one should, one must stop—“cry halt before Necessity.”
Again it will be said that I have exceeded the limits, that I began by speaking in the name of “all” and ended with the words of a famous philosopher. For the phrase, “cry halt before Necessity,” that I have just quoted belongs to Aristotle. But the average person is not so far removed from the philosopher. Somewhere, at the beginning or at the end, in the depths or at the surface, the average man and the philosopher meet. Seneca, who proclaimed his paret semper, jussit semel as the last word of the philosophers’ wisdom, was only paraphrasing Aristotle. Quite like the average man, Aristotle wishes to know nothing of commanding (jubere); he needs only to obey (parere) in order to accomplish, in obeying, what he believes, what all men believe, to be the destiny of man. It does not matter to him at all whence the commandment comes—all the more so since, as Seneca has frankly admitted to us, the sources of jubere are now forever dried up. No one in the world will ever again command, all will forever obey—the great and the small, the righteous and the sinners, men and gods. “Truth” does not make any distinctions; it constrains all alike, the great Parmenides as well as the humblest day laborer.
“Parmenides is constrained” and the day laborer is constrained. The gods themselves are in the power of Necessity: “Not even the gods fight against Necessity.”8 It is impossible to investigate whence Necessity derives this power of constraining all living beings. One cannot even ask what the nature of this Necessity is and why it must constrain living beings. Not only will it not reply, but it will not even hear the questions that are addressed to it. And still less is it capable of allowing itself to be persuaded or convinced. Aristotle himself, like no one else, knew how to look around and investigate what was before him and behind him; he tells us that “Necessity does not allow itself to be persuaded.”
Whatever field of philosophical thought we approach, we always run up against this blind, deaf and dumb Necessity. And we are convinced that philosophy begins only where the kingdom of strict Necessity discloses itself. Our thought, in the final analysis, is only the search for this strict Necessity. And still more, it is not for nothing that Parmenides affirmed “being and thought are one and the same.” To think is necessarily to take cognizance of the necessity of everything that forms the content of being. Whence comes Necessity? Does it come from being and end in thought? Or does it come from thought and end in being? We do not know. We do not even raise this question, knowing—doubtless instinctively—that such questions not only would not reconcile the theory of Knowledge which is concerned with “thought” (noein) with the ontology which is concerned with “being” (einai) but would forever separate them and set them at enmity with each other. No one wishes to take upon himself the responsibility for the results to which so ancient and universally recognized an idea as that of Necessity may lead. Thought would have preferred to consider Necessity a creation of being, that being, which by its very nature is more turbulent, might easily repudiate Necessity and declare it to be the child of pure thought. Being, despite what Parmenides says, is not the same as thought. But, on the other hand, being, at least within the bounds of philosophical systems, has not been able to find any adequate expression outside of thought. Even though it is not always submissive to Necessity, its attempts at struggle do not reach the domain of philosophy. We have said that philosophy has always meant and wished to mean reflection, Besinnung, looking backward. Now it is necessary to add that “looking backward,” by its very nature, excludes the possibility and even the thought of struggle. “Looking backward” paralyses man. He who turns around, who looks backward, must see what already exists, that is to say, the head of Medusa; and he who sees Medusa’s head is inevitably petrified, as the ancients already knew. And his thought, a petrified thought, will naturally correspond to his petrified being. Spinoza was in error when he said that if the stone were endowed with consciousness it would imagine that it falls to the ground freely. If someone had endowed the stone with consciousness, at the same time preserving for it its nature as a stone (this is obviously possible—the authority of the sober-headed Spinoza is sufficient guarantee for it), it would not for a single moment have doubted that Necessity is the primordial principle upon which all being in its totality—not only the real, but also the possible—is based. Is not the idea of Necessity the most adequate expression of petrification? And would not the thought and being of a stone endowed with consciousness be completely exhausted by the content that we find in the idea of Necessity?
But let us go further. Philosophy—we have seen—was, is, and wishes to be, a looking backward. To look backward does not at all mean, and we know this well, merely
