Different Necessities in Sorrow-Acre

Adrian Liu

On a plot of land in Denmark a lord has lost a barn to arson. When a boy is hauled in by two putative eyewitnesses and accused of the crime, it is only the boy’s testimony against the eyewitnesses. The lord thus cannot judge if the boy is innocent. “If I did believe the one thing or the other,” he says, “it would be merely a matter of chance, or maybe of sympathy.” When the boy’s mother appears and pleads with the lord to save her boy, the lord is standing in one of his rye fields and has an idea. He says to her: “If in one day, between sunrise and sunset, with your own hands you can mow this field, and it be well done, I will let the case drop and you shall keep your son. But if you cannot do it, he must go, and it is not likely that you will then ever see him again.”¹

The field would take a day to mow for three men, or three days for one man. There is no reason to think an ordinary person would be able to take on the task. It is likely the mother, Anne-Marie, will die in her attempt. Is the lord justified in this act? His nephew Adam, visiting after a stint in Enlightenment Europe, does not think so, and in the story’s climactic moment he confronts the lord:

“In the name of God,” cried the young man in French, “force not this woman to continue.” There was a short pause. “But I force her not, my friend,” said his uncle in the same language. “She is free to finish at any moment.” “At the cost of her child only,” again cried Adam. “Do you not see that she is dying? You know not what you are doing, or what it may bring upon you.”²

The lord is correct that Anne-Marie is free to finish at any moment, but in the more important sense with which Adam counters, she is not free: she will lose her child if she does not mow the entire field. As the lord must realize when he hears Adam’s reply, he has provided no real answer to Adam’s challenge: in the sense that matters, it is necessary for Anne-Marie that she mows the entire field. And so, during a minute of silence the argument moves from the question of whether the burden of necessity has been placed upon Anne-Marie (the lord concedes that argument) to the question of what justifies or vindicates that necessity. After the minute: “‘In this very place where we now stand,’ said the old lord, then, with hauteur, ‘I gave Anne-Marie my word.‘”³

This statement serves as the ultimate justification of the lord’s actions. In this essay I ask how this justification is supposed to work. In what senses can the lord justify the necessity he puts upon Anne-Marie? From the standpoint of Anne-Marie, I shall argue, it is hard to make sense of this question: the necessity must be its own justification, and nothing further can be offered. From the standpoint of the lord, however, the question whether the necessity justifies itself is sharply intelligible, and the answer is “no, it does not.” If the lord’s actions in putting a necessity upon Anne-Marie cannot be justified to himself by appeal to the necessity itself, we must seek some other explanation for why the lord sees himself as justified in his actions. I shall suggest that the explanation is to be found in the meaningful activity that the necessity makes possible for Anne-Marie. This explanation will have two features: first, it cannot be presented to Anne-Marie. Second, and more significantly, it reveals a limitation in the lord’s own understanding of necessity, as well as Adam’s (differently) limited understanding of necessity. These two incomplete understandings, taken in conjunction, help us better understand a certain type of necessity that ties together coercion and meaning making. I shall call this type of necessity theistic necessity and contrast it with other understandings of necessity: a supernatural understanding and an enlightenment understanding (the latter will not yield “true necessity” in the same way as the others). One upshot of this interpretation is the following: we see that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the value of meaning making under theistic necessity and the enlightenment value of freedom.

§ 1. The First Justification: Necessity justifies itself

Immediately following the lord’s statement “I gave Anne-Marie my word,” the lord and the young man argue about the significance of the word, the former concerned with the regulative powers of the word, the latter its creative powers. Adam focuses on the word at and before its point of utterance, in its ability to bring things into being. “The word,” he says, “is creative—it is imagination, daring and passion. By it the world was made.”⁴ That Adam sees the significance of the word in its powers of creation explains why he argues that the lord’s word be overturned. Life, too, is a creative force, and by putting Anne-Marie’s life in danger the lord banishes “these powers which bring into being.”⁵ The importance of the word is its role in creative power, not its irrevocability. Indeed, the lord’s word has no reason behind it, and thus no weight or authority in the face of the great creative power of life: “Recall that word, I beseech you,” says Adam, “which was given in caprice, as a whim.”⁶

For the lord, however, it is irrelevant whether his word is arbitrary or has some independent justification. He quotes Scripture: “in the beginning was the word. It may have been pronounced in caprice, as a whim, the Scripture tells us nothing about it. It is still the principle of our world, its law of gravitation.”⁷ For the lord, the word is not to be justified at all. It is a principle: it must be taken as given. To understand what it means for the word to be a “principle of our world,” let us consider the lord’s gravitation analogy. Gravitation is unavoidable and necessary for the world to be as it is. We can coherently ask what our world, in theory, would be like without gravity, but given that gravitation is a necessary property of our world, our world without gravity would not be our world. This means, then, that there is a problem with asking why our world has gravitation. It is constitutive of our world that its physics is determined by gravitation: asking why it must be the case that our world has gravitation does not properly appreciate this fact.

In addition to being necessary, there is another reason why we cannot ask for justification for gravity. Gravity has always been an active force in the universe: there was no “time before gravity.” If there were, we could ask about the time before gravity and ask why gravity had to come into play when it did, and in the way it did. Perhaps, like with gravitation, we cannot look to any point before the biblical word was uttered and seek justification or explanation there. The lord quotes from John, but the creation of the world in Genesis is a clearer referent: with his word, God creates our world and thus the principle of our world. Scripture tells us nothing about what happens before the word, because the word was in the beginning: there is no “before” at all. The question, then, of what happened before the word, or how the word was pronounced, is incoherent.

This, however, is not the lord’s argument. For in saying that the word may have been pronounced in caprice or on a whim, the lord concedes that there may have been a “before the word”: indeed, caprice and whim are the moods of the moment, decisions that do not rely on reason, and that requires a time before the decision was made in which reasons and moods of the moment could have come into play. The lord concedes the possibility and argues that nonetheless it doesn’t matter. And so, his argument goes, for the lord of Sorrow-Acre and the Lord of Genesis it is both the case that they could have pronounced the word for some reason or for no reason and the case that this reason or lack of reason will have no bearing on the fact that the word serves as principle. It is the necessity of the word that makes it a principle, not the fact that there was no space for reason behind it. That there might have been reason, and there might not have been, and that this doesn’t matter—these concessions put the justificatory weight squarely on necessity.

Anne-Marie understands well the logic of such an argument, even though the lord never presents it explicitly to her. When the lord utters the word—when he presents the ordeal that Anne-Marie must undergo—he reports her reaction thus: “She stood up then and gazed over the field. She kissed my riding boot in gratitude for the favour shown to her.” Anne-Marie understands that what the lord says will necessarily happen, and she cannot do anything about it. Her understanding of the necessity she is under is remarkable, and the other villagers do not achieve it:

There was not in [the expression of Anne-Marie’s face] the slightest trace of fear or pain. Indeed amongst all the grave and concerned faces of the field hers was the only one perfectly calm, peaceful and mild.⁸

The lord’s argument, Anne-Marie understands, is strikingly coherent: if it is necessary that certain circumstances obtain, then the question why things are the way they are loses force: for that question assumes that there could be some other state of affairs. The question argues against the necessary reality and is nonsensical to that extent. The word’s necessity justifies itself, but it justifies itself not so much by providing a justification as by rendering attempts to seek justification for it incoherent.

If the necessity of the word is supposed to justify itself, however, we must now ask: to whom is the necessity actually a necessity? Gravitation is a necessity to all, and the Lord’s word a necessity to all humans. But there is a disanalogy. The argument from necessity works only when addressed to Anne-Marie, who has no power to avoid the word of the lord. The lord himself is not subject to his word: he has the power to recall it at any moment. And from Adam’s perspective, Adam too has the power to change the word, by convincing his uncle to recall it. For Adam and the lord, then, the justification of the word cannot be understood in its necessity.⁹

§ 2. The Second Justification: Necessity makes possible meaningful activity

How could the word be legitimately justified rather than merely accepted as inescapable? This question brings us to the lord’s second answer to Adam’s plea. The second answer: his word makes possible an activity of deep meaning, and recalling the word would destroy this meaning. For Anne-Marie, the activity is this: “That with your own life you may buy the life of your son.”¹⁰ To recall the word would wrench away the opportunity, would desiccate the meaning from the activity. If the lord freed the boy at the eleventh hour, Anne-Marie’s work would have no bearing on her child’s life. If she kept working, it would be, says the lord, “a shocking, a horrible sight, a figure of unseemly fun, like a small planet running wild in the sky, when the law of gravitation had been done away with.”¹¹

This understanding of necessity justifies the word on the grounds that it makes possible activities of deep meaning. However, like the former justification on the basis of necessity, this justification only works for certain audiences. And where the justification on the basis of necessity works for Anne-Marie but not the lord or the nephew, the justification on the basis of meaningful activity may conversely be convincing for the lord and the nephew but cannot be addressed to Anne-Marie. From Anne-Marie’s perspective, the word cannot be justified in virtue of the fact that it allows her to buy her son’s life with her own. For the only reason that this ordeal of hers is meaningful is that it is a necessity. If there were a way out of the ordeal, it would lose its meaning. To Anne-Marie, the necessity of the ordeal—the binding nature of the lord’s word—cannot be justified in terms of its meaning-making powers, because its meaning-making powers are only there if the ordeal is already necessary.

Saying that the word cannot be justified to Anne-Marie on the basis of its meaning-making and identity-constituting abilities is not to say that she does not see the meaning-making power of the word. By all indications, she does see it and is in agreement with the lord about the meaning of her actions. In her understanding, she is not performing a trial by ordeal on behalf of her son or indulging the cruel caprices of the lord. She is making the decision to sacrifice her life and save that of her son. But there can be no justification of the meaning-making necessity from the lord, for if the lord were to justify the word to her he would be recognizing that (from his perspective) the word can be recalled—he would not be appreciating the fact that, from her perspective, the word cannot be recalled by anything in her power. The very attempt at justification would jeopardize the meaning of the activity. The meaningfulness of the activity, then, requires that it be performed under a necessity that precludes justification—in particular, the necessity cannot be justified in terms of making possible the meaningful activity.

But there is a further condition that makes it possible that Anne-Marie can understand her activity as meaningful, as the activity of sacrificing her own life for that of her son rather than moving a field for no particular reason: the necessity must be comprehensible—it must take the form of an intelligible principle. This is why it is so important that the necessity have its source in the word of the lord. That the lord must be the source of the necessity upon Anne-Marie brings us to question what authority the lord has to create such necessity, to decide to bring certain possibilities of meaning into Anne-Marie’s life. The answer, if it is to be spoken by the lord and to the lord, must implicate his self-understanding. And because the lord’s views on the Greek gods, the Norse gods, and the Christian god tell much about how he views himself and his power, we turn now to these views.

In the first conversation of the lord and Adam, Adam celebrates the Norse gods for their righteousness, trustworthiness, benevolence, and chivalry in comparison to the Greek gods, and the lord counters that the Norse gods had it easier because they were not as powerful. Darker powers, the Jotuns, were responsible for suffering, disaster, and ruin of the world. In contrast, there is no power greater than the Greek gods. In their omnipotence, the Greek gods “have no facilitation. With their omnipotence they take over the woe of the universe.”¹² The lord, I shall argue, sees himself as a Greek god rather than a Norse god on the bounds of his lands.

The central difference between the Greek gods and the Norse gods, as the lord understands it, lies in their relationships to necessity. The Norse gods, less powerful than the Greek, are not responsible for the suffering wrought upon humans, but neither are they exempt from suffering and destruction: they do not have the power to forestall Ragnarök, for instance; only to prepare for it. The Greek gods, in contrast, are omnipotent and immune to necessity. At the same time, being omnipotent, they are responsible for all the suffering and destruction of the world: they are the source of necessity for humans. The lord, in conceiving of his word as the principle of the land and thus its source of necessity, identifies with the Greek gods rather than the Norse. On his land, there is no greater power than he.

The lord identifies with the Greek gods also because he believes—or at least claims—that he has himself transcended necessity. This comes out most clearly in the second conversation of the lord and Adam: the discussion of tragedy. Tragedy, for the lord, is closely associated with necessity, and necessity with the human rather than the godly realm—though the godly realm here is implicitly the realm of the Greek gods and the realm of the Christian god. Tragedy is never divine: it should “remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity.” The gods cannot comprehend necessity, and thus cannot comprehend the tragic. The lord, too, as an aristocrat, has been freed from necessity, and now stands in the place of the gods: “we, who stand in lieu of the gods and have emancipated ourselves from the tyranny of necessity, should leave to our vassals their monopoly of tragedy, and for ourselves accept the comic with grace.”

It is a dubious claim of the lord’s, that he has emancipated himself from the tyranny of necessity. The lord, we learn before hearing a single word from him, has suffered the death of his wife and two of his children in infancy. His remaining son was sickly, and despite losing favor with the court while spending his time caring for his son, the boy died shortly before marriage. In an aristocratic world where worldly immortality through continuance and lineage is paramount, the lord’s attempts at an heir have failed. Nor will his new marriage to the bride-to-be of his deceased son finally be the answer, for there is a strong implication throughout the piece that the lord will be cuckolded by Adam and will never see a son of his own to adulthood. This is certainly a necessity upon the lord; for it is not just that he will have no heir: the undercurrent of the story is that whatever he does, he will never have an heir, as surely as Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, whatever anybody does.

The lord is not emancipated from necessity. Is he then laboring under a blindness, willful or not, to this fact? I suggest a different conclusion: we must understand two kinds of the necessity in play: a theistic necessity and a supernatural necessity. Anne-Marie is under the former, and the lord is responsible for this. But the lord, emancipated from the former, is under the latter. It is this that he does not recognize.

§ 3. Theistic and Supernatural Necessity

The necessity upon Anne-Marie has a source that is in a power above her: the lord. The lord’s word may be pronounced in caprice, but it is nonetheless intelligible to her, having come from a source she can understand. The lord having spoken, she can rely on the fact that if she finishes harvesting the field, she will save her son, and if she fails, she will lose him, and that this will not change. The lord, in contrast, had no such assurances in his losses, most notably of his son. He lives no longer in the age of the gods, and instead stands in lieu of them, with no human power above him. Since there is no higher power to enact intelligible necessity upon him, the necessity upon him must instead be understood only as what Bernard Williams calls supernatural necessity, for which “there is no particular way in which it comes about.”¹³ Williams’ discussion of supernatural necessity in Shame and Necessity will be useful to us here. The thought that supernatural necessity is at play comes in, he suggests, “when we are told that a certain thing will happen whatever we do, although it is just the kind of thing we might hope to avoid by action.” This is contrasted to a divine necessity, “where a god gives an agent a reason for action he did not have before.”¹⁴ What Williams calls divine necessity is close to the necessity that is upon Anne-Marie—here I will call it “theistic” because, although the lord assumes the role of a god and has commensurate power, he makes no claims to being literally divine.

To introduce Williams’ distinction between divine and supernatural necessity, we must take a detour into Greek tragedy, and in particular a famous scene in which the king Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter Iphegenia in order to appease the goddess Artemis. The role of supernatural necessity in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia is presented differently in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Sophocles’ Electra in a way that, as Williams demonstrates, illustrates the significance of supernatural necessity and its difference from theistic necessity. For Sophocles, it is chiefly the divine intervention of Artemis in calming the winds that is responsible for the necessity upon Agamemnon. As far as this goes, Agamemnon can understand his necessity as Anne-Marie understands hers: “he understands only too well that Artemis has brought it about that if he sacrifices Iphigeneia, the fleet can sail, and if not, not.” Aeschylus, however, suppresses the role of Artemis in his rendition: what is chiefly responsible for the necessity upon Agamemnon is not Artemis’ demand itself, but a string of “more complex and obscure forces … in which Artemis plays one part in a long history.”¹⁵ In Sophocles, the necessity Artemis enacts can be understood as a demand for action from Agamemnon: that he sacrifice his daughter so that the ships can sail. In Aeschylus, the more obscure nature of the forces as a whole mean that they cannot intelligibly produce a demand—instead, writes Williams, “the idea of supernatural necessity involves something else, an idea that the structure of things is purposive: that it is, so to speak, playing against you.”¹⁶ What is necessary in Aeschylus is not that Agamemnon must perform a certain action: what is necessary is that the circumstances will lead to a situation—the situation where the ships are stalled and a goddess is demanding sacrifice.

In this light, the necessity upon the lord is supernatural because it cannot be understood as theistic—as making certain intelligible demands upon him. It is simply purposive: the structure of things is arranged such that whatever he does, he will fail to produce an heir. And without the intelligible demand for action that would be possible if there were a power above the lord who could make such a demand, supernatural necessity does not open up possibilities for meaningful activity in the way that theistic necessity does. At best, it seems, the lord can recognize the necessity and make it his own, as Agamemnon does in Aeschylus when he “put[s] on the harness of necessity” (218).¹⁷ Agamemnon “takes something that is a necessity and makes it his own,”¹⁸ and this act of commanding agency over what must happen, though significant in itself, is distinct from the meaningful activity made possible by theistic necessity—distinct, in particular, from the situation of the Sophoclean Agamemnon, who can more easily find meaning in the trade of a daughter for naval success. The Aeschylean Agamemnon can derive no special meaning from supernatural necessity: he can only recognize the necessity and decide that even if his reasons for action be constrained by necessity, they can still be his reasons for action. Read this way, the lord’s understanding of necessity is incomplete: he thinks himself emancipated from necessity because he recognizes only theistic necessity and does not recognize the supernatural necessity upon him.

§ 4. Coercion and Intelligibility

I have focused on the lord’s justification of the word and thus on the lord’s understanding of necessity. This leaves me space to only briefly discuss Adam’s understanding of necessity. If we accept my reading that the lord is under supernatural necessity, then Adam also misreads the lord’s predicament. In fact, Adam thinks the lord is indeed under a theistic necessity of sorts. However, his understanding of theistic necessity is not the lord’s: for Adam, theistic necessity does not involve any god or pantheon of gods. Adam’s understanding is an enlightenment one: there may still be a “god” giving an agent a reason for action he did not have before, but this god is a “new god” of rationality. Because of Adam’s understanding of necessity, the relation between enlightenment understanding and retributive justice is a consistent point of perturbation for the nephew. At one point, reflecting on the lord’s actions:

[the lord] feared of no retributive justice. Did he not know, the young man thought, that there were powers in the world, different from and more formidable than the short-lived might of a despot?¹⁹

What are these powers? We might think they are divine, but then they would not be so different from the might of a despot. That these powers are supposed to be different and more formidable suggests that they are rather supposed to be the powers of the “great new ideas of the age: of nature, of the right and freedom of man, of justice and beauty.”²⁰ In their rational force, these ideas are more formidable than any coercion, for those who accept it. But the nephew has trouble reasoning why the lord should heed this kind of rational authority if he does not already accept it. When Adam insists the lord will suffer the consequences for his actions and the lord asks what the consequence could be, Adam can only cry, in despair, “I cannot tell.”²¹ The problem with an enlightenment god is that it enforces its necessity only on pain of rationality, not (as for Anne-Marie) on pain of death or the loss of a child. Adam can point to no definite punishment that will come upon the lord’s head. The force is only that of rationality, the punishment only the fact of placing oneself in opposition to the rationally compelling ideas of justice, freedom, or the value of life. Certainly, from Adam’s perspective, ideas of justice, the right and freedom of man, and so forth should hold power over the lord’s actions. They should give the lord a reason to act that he did not have before and should make it necessary that he perform a certain action—in this case, letting Anne-Marie’s son free without the ordeal. Yet unlike the lord’s power, the force of these ideas is not physical: the lord is under no physical necessity to free Anne-Marie’s son, because there is no intelligible power over him that would punish him. There is, from Adam’s perspective, an intelligible power over him—that of enlightenment rationality. But Adam cannot explain how this power over the lord is supposed to be a power if it cannot force or punish him for not abiding it. It is unclear how an enlightenment power creates necessity at all.²²

Much more could be said about Adam’s understanding of enlightenment rationality and necessity. For our purposes it suffices to notice that enlightenment “necessity” involves intelligibility but no real necessity that applies to those not already thinking in an enlightenment framework. Enlightenment “necessity” is intelligibility without necessity, in contrast to the theistic necessity that Anne-Marie is under—necessity with intelligibility—and the supernatural necessity that the lord is under—necessity without intelligibility. We already saw how intelligibility is necessary for the meaningful activity that theistic necessity can possible. Now we see why intelligibility is also insufficient: we need (as we might have expected) the necessity as well. We need specifically intelligible necessity: one must be under necessity and understand that necessity as a demand coming from a source one can understand.

I will not have space to thoroughly examine the implications of such a conclusion, but I will outline one important consequence. If the value of theistic necessity is, as I have argued, its ability to make possible forms of meaningful activity like Anne-Marie’s sacrifice of her own life for her son, then this conclusion that intelligible necessity is required for proper theistic necessity suggests the following conclusion: that the value of meaningful activity arising from theistic necessity is fundamentally incompatible with an enlightenment idea of freedom.

Indeed, the power inherent in theistic necessity is an egregious breach of enlightenment freedom, for it is completely unjustified. The enlightenment theorist can accept scenarios in which one reasonably gives up some of their freedom in order to secure greater safety or benefit, or can be expected to sacrifice their freedom for some greater good, but freedom is to be the default, and each encroachment upon freedom must be justifiable to the one encroached upon. This means that the lack of freedom inherent in theistic necessity has no place in an enlightenment ideal: for not only is it completely unjustifiable to the person it binds, but it must be completely unjustifiable to the person it binds, or else, as we saw with Anne-Marie, the meaning would be lost. The two simple facts—that meaningful activity from theistic necessity requires unjustifiable power, and enlightenment freedom cannot allow unjustifiable power—imply the following: an enlightenment worldview cannot appreciate the value of theistic necessity, and conversely a worldview that holds theistic necessity as a central value cannot appreciate the categorical value of enlightenment freedom. When it comes to the value of freedom and the value of necessity, the worldviews of the lord and the nephew are thus, to this extent, incommensurable.

Bibliography

Cohen, G. A. Rescuing Justice and Equality. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008.
Dinesen, Isak. “Sorrow-Acre.” In Winter’s Tales, 27—68. New York: Random House, 1942.
Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.