What is necessity?

Simone Weil, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Simone Weil answers

Necessity is not, first of all, a constraint imposed upon us from outside, as though the world were a prison and its laws the bars. That is how the self that says I experiences it — as enemy, as brutal master, as the force that crushes the will when affliction arrives and the will discovers it was always, in some sense, an inert thing.1 But this is only one face of necessity, the face that confronts the ego precisely because the ego has not yet consented to look at it directly.

The deeper account is this: necessity is the ensemble of laws of variation determined by fixed and invariant ratios — it is what gives the sensible universe its mathematical structure, its reality.2 In this sense necessity is not opposed to God but is, in a precise sense, the obedience of matter to God.3 What seems from our standpoint to be blind mechanical compulsion appears, when we transport our hearts beyond ourselves to where the Father dwells, as something else entirely: not necessity as domination but necessity as obedience, and matter becomes in this light a perfect model for the soul.4

There is a further movement. Necessity is the mediator — between the natural part of us and the supernatural consent, between matter and God, between thing and thing.5 This is the Pythagorean and Platonic inheritance I take seriously: λόγος, the name of necessity, is also the name given to the Beloved.6 Number, ratio, proportion — these are not merely mathematical abstractions but the form in which divine mediation is present in the world.

God thinks necessity; it has being because he thinks it.7 And necessity is also the screen. Without it, we could not exist at all as creatures capable of love. If we were exposed to the direct radiance of divine love without the protection of space, time, and matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough I in us to make it possible to surrender the I for love's sake.8

Necessity is therefore not an obstacle to God but the very condition under which love between God and the creature becomes possible. It is the distance put by Love between God and God — and we are a point in that distance.9 The practical consequence is this: when necessity is approached not as master to slave, not as an equal power to be wrestled with, but as a picture which is looked at — contemplated rather than fought — something shifts.10

It is in this looking that the supernatural faculty of consent comes to birth.11 One consents to necessity before knowing that this consent is what pierces the shell of the ego's confinement; and when the shell is pierced, what appeared as domination reveals itself as obedience, and we pass from the inside of the egg to the other side.12

Sources

  1. Necessity, enemy for the man who says 'I'. A slave in our day-dreams (or by the effect of social domination), it becomes a brutal master in affliction.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 103–104
  2. Necessity: ensemble of laws of variation which are determined by fixed and invariant ratios.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 103–104
  3. Matter is entirely passive and in consequence entirely obedient to God's will.
    Waiting for God, pp. 141–143
  4. What seemed to be necessity becomes obedience... In the beauty of the world brute necessity becomes an object of love.
    Waiting for God, pp. 141–143
  5. Necessity, mediator between the natural part of us and the supernatural consent. Conceived, by analogy, as mediator between matter and God.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 104–105
  6. Aéyos, name of Necessity, given to the Beloved—Light and rain in the Gospel, stoicism.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 103–104
  7. God thinks necessity. It has being because he thinks it. The thought of God is his Son.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 104–105
  8. For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, of time and of matter, we should be evaporated like water in the sun; there would not be enough 'I' in us to make it possible to surrender the 'I' for love's sake.
    Gravity and Grace, pp. 32–33
  9. This universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God.
    Waiting for God, pp. 141–143
  10. necessity becomes related to man, not as master to slave, or as an equal, but as a picture which is looked at.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 103–104
  11. It is in this looking that the supernatural faculty of consent comes to birth.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 103–104
  12. We see that face of it which represents brutal domination. By renouncing the 'I' we pass to the other side, from within the egg of the world we pierce the shell. Then we see the face of necessity which represents obedience.
    First and Last Notebooks, pp. 104–105