Alain Badiou:

“Because, having learned from Spinoza, [Jean] Cavaillès wanted to de-subjectify knowledge and because he also regarded resistance as an unavoidable necessity that no reference to the Ego could circumvent. In 1943, he [Cavaillès] therefore declared: ‘I am a follower of Spinoza, and I think that we can see necessity everywhere. The logical deductions of mathematicians are necessary. The stages of mathematical science are necessary. And the struggle we are waging is necessary’.”

Upon reading these declarations and the text by Badiou they were cited in, I was struck, and this statement of allegiance, claim about the ubiquity of necessity and assertion about the nature of the action Cavaillès was undertaking have stayed with me and shaped the direction of my interest in theory and philosophy.

Badiou writes these words and presents this quotation in the context of an intellectual portrait of both Jean Cavaillès and Georges Canguilhem, where his appreciation of the latter becomes an avenue to celebrate the former.

Cavaillès, a philosopher and mathematician, devoted himself to the French Resistance and ultimately gave his life for the sake of the cause. At base, reading Badiou’s text, I was stirred by Cavaillès’ virtues: the courage and devotion that lead him to put his life at risk for a purpose. But what I maintained an unabated curiosity about is the idea that we can take what we do to be necessary and now to a lesser degree the idea that no self needs to underpin that action. Let me put that first idea again: that how a purpose we believe in determines the actions we take to realize this purpose is necessity.

I wanted to explore the philosophy I imagined grounded these ideas, and that purpose guided me to ethics, which I was mostly ignorant of at the time (I’m only slightly less so now).

One place my interest took me, predictably, is Kant, namely the second critique. I kind of stalled on or abandoned this route of inquiry, but in this book ideas like the following stuck out: Rational beings can see maxims with a particular shape as laws because they have wills, and with wills “they are capable of actions in accordance with principles and consequently also in accordance with a priori practical principles (for these alone have that necessity which reason requires for a principle). Said again and putting aside the role of will, there is a kind of principle, Kant argues, namely one determined solely and authorized by reason, that governs actions by necessity.

In brief, why I haven’t explored the salience of Cavaillès’ reference to Spinoza’s metaphysics is straightforwardly that in this reference Cavaillès is making an analogy to an integral feature of being for Spinoza. And I’m not sure how the notion that, as Steven Nadler puts it, “Everything is necessitated by causes to be such as it is” pertains to the ethical content of Cavaillès’ words (beyond its use as an analogy, obviously).

The core of this piece of writing, though, is my impression that in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel’s presentation of one shape of self-consciousness models Cavaillès’ ethics insofar as it weaves together three of its features, namely necessity, the negation of the self, and, a feature that Hegel’s analysis especially drew out, the singularity of a being as it acts by necessity. Now before I go on, I should make clear that my understanding of Hegel’s book is meager at best. One result of this is that I almost exclusively rely on his idiom.

The bit of the Phenomenology I’ve invoked comes after Hegel’s having arrived at a shape of self-consciousness that sees itself as all reality. The pertinent shape of self-consciousness is one of several instantiations of this shape that Hegel sees as having gone wrong in how it makes itself all reality.

This shape of self-consciousness, Hegel diagnoses, grasps itself as all reality in this way: it subsumes its object, but this object is not actual. At the same time, it apprehends its other as being independent of it and so real. Owing to this experience, self-consciousness aims to consume its other to realize its only conceptual object.

The way it does this is to exit Spirit and grasp itself as a singularity, not beholden to Spirit’s laws. However, much to its misfortune, when self-consciousness satisfies its desire by taking the self-sufficient other into itself, self-consciousness, by doing so, negates itself as a pure individual. Now, it sees its objectified essence as necessity. It experiences its objectivity as a necessity that drives it as if it were nothing.

How this transformation from a singular to an annihilated individuality happens I find exceedingly difficult to understand, even as I feel that it encapsulates Cavaillès’ ethics. What I want to present in more detail in Hegel’s portrait is the concept of necessity he has in mind. He writes,

“Furthermore, the object, which individuality experiences as its essence, has no content. It is what is called necessity, since necessity, fate, and the like, is just this: That we do not know how to say what it is doing or what its determinate laws and its positive content are supposed to be because it is the absolute pure concept itself intuited as being, the simple and empty but nonetheless inexorable and impassive relation whose work is only the nothingness of singular individuality.”

For self-consciousness, necessity is an opaque, unintelligible power that unstoppably actualizes it without its input and that it faces off against.

Let me take a stab at summing things up: the subject of Cavaillès’ ethics finds itself in a position where its aim requires it to leave behind the prevailing rules of its society. As a result, this subject sees itself as entirely self-sufficient. But owing to the truth of the dynamic between what a subject is and what it does, it grasps what it does as necessary, which is to say, how it acts as it does is alien to it. Without spirit, the subject sees that it’s not responsible for its actuality. In his diagnosis, Hegel explains a place the shape of self-consciousness cannot reach because it took the route of singularity. In this place this self-consciousness would find “its purpose and its doing in its fate and its fate in its purpose and its doing, or recognize its own essence in this necessity.” The failure to see this interpenetration is a salutary quality of Cavaillès’ ethics.