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Permit me to begin with an autobiographical note. Early in my philosophical studies in Göttingen, Nicolai Hartmann brought home to me the importance of studying the modalities, and also the need for unraveling the many different senses in which the modal categories are used without adequately keeping them apart. In his modal theory, Hartmann returned as much to Stoic logic as to Hegel.¹ Much later in life, when I began to read and teach Hegel's Phenomenology, I was struck by the fact that while Hegel intends the series of "shapes" of spirit he portrays to be a necessary sequence, the precise sense of that necessity remains unthematised. I felt certain that the necessity of the sequence could not be logical, for other sequences, slight deviations in that sequence, for example, were quite possible and easily conceivable. And yet I was willing to concede that there must be some sense of "necessity' in which Hegel was right. The third remark is this: one hears ad nauseam that, on Hegel's view, world and history are determined by the "bloodless categories" of his logic, that in this necessary framework there is no room for freedom, for the accidental, the contingent and the unpredictable (the only freedom that is possible being recognition of necessity). And yet I felt certain that this could not be Hegel's view — not only in the Phenomenology but also in the Logic. (Much later, this conviction was confirmed by Dieter Henrich's essay on the place of Zufall in Hegel's thought², in which Henrich shows not only that Hegel's system makes room for Zufall, but that only Hegel's system can do that.) In the following I make an attempt arising from these concerns to think through Hegel's concept of necessity.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2113-4_14

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