Necessitarianism: does everything that exists exist by absolute necessity, with contingency a mere illusion of finite intellects, or does the system leave room for genuine contingency in nature?

Baruch Spinoza, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

In nature there is nothing contingent (E1p29).1 Everything that exists, exists by absolute necessity. The strongest formulation: things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order, than they have been produced (E1p33). The two senses in which a thing is ordinarily called contingent — that we do not see anything in its essence that necessarily posits its existence, or that we do not see anything in the chain of causes that necessarily produces it — both reduce to inadequacy of knowledge.23

From the standpoint of God or Nature, of which adequate knowledge is in principle possible, nothing is contingent. The appearance of contingency is the appearance generated by finitude: the human intellect cannot trace the determinations through which the actual is fixed and misnames its own ignorance with the word "possibility." The libertarian freedom that pictures the will as undetermined is, in the Ethics, an empty word: the will is not a separate faculty over and above the modes of intellect, and it has no power to escape the determinations under which every mode operates.

What is properly called freedom (E2def7) is something else entirely: a thing is free which exists from the necessity of its own nature alone and is determined to action by itself.4 God is free in this sense; finite things are free to the extent that their actions follow from their own essence — that is, to the extent that they act through adequate ideas — and unfree to the extent that their actions follow from external causes through inadequate ideas.5

Sources

  1. For, by a remote cause, we understand a cause which is in no way conjoined to the effect. But all things which are, are in God, and so depend on God, that without him they can neither be nor be conceived. PROP. XXIX. Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature. Proof.--Whatsoever is, is in God (Prop. xv.).
    Ethics
  2. Produced by Tom Sharpe. HTML version by Al Haines. The Ethics (Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata) by Benedict de Spinoza Translated from the Latin by R. H. M. Elwes PART I. CONCERNING GOD. DEFINITIONS. I. By that which is self--caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent. II.
    Ethics
  3. A thing of which we do not know whether the essence does or does not involve a contradiction, or of which, knowing that it does not involve a contradiction, we are still in doubt concerning the existence, because the order of causes escapes us,--such a thing, I say, cannot appear to us either necessary or impossible. Wherefore we call it contingent or possible.
    Ethics
  4. Wherefore will no more appertains to God than does anything else in nature, but stands in the same relation to him as motion, rest, and the like, which we have shown to follow from the necessity of the divine nature, and to be conditioned by it to exist and act in a particular manner. PROP. XXXIII.
    Ethics
  5. As these things could not have been brought into being by God in any but the actual way and order which has obtained; and as the truth of this proposition follows from the supreme perfection of God; we can have no sound reason for persuading ourselves to believe that God did not wish to create all the things which were in his intellect, and to create them in the same perfection as he had understood them.
    Ethics

Where the argument is made

  • Ethics E1p29 ('In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way')
  • E1p33 (the strongest formulation: 'Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no other order, than they have been produced')
  • E1p33s1-s2 (the scholia distinguishing the two senses in which a thing is called contingent and explaining why both reduce to inadequacy of knowledge)
  • E2def7 (the definition of freedom as determination by one's own essence)
  • the Letters 56 to Boxel and 58 to Schuller on freedom and necessity

How the argument was received

One of the most-contested positions in Spinoza scholarship and the central point at which the system meets seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical-theological orthodoxy. Leibniz's distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity in the Theodicy was constructed in part to preserve contingency against the Spinozist threat. The contemporary scholarly debate runs between strict necessitarians (Don Garrett's Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy 2018; Della Rocca's Spinoza 2008) who read the texts as committed to the absolute necessity of everything actual, and moderate necessitarians (Edwin Curley with Gregory Walski) who argue that some passages allow for possible worlds in which the same laws of nature hold but different things exist. The strict-necessitarian reading is now the dominant scholarly position, but the moderate reading remains live and turns on the precise interpretation of E1p33 and the scholia.