NECESSITY AND CONTINGENCY
We said earlier that every possibility of manifestation must be manifested for the very reason that it is what it is, namely, a possibility of manifestation, so that manifestation is necessarily implied in principle by the very nature of particular possibilities. Thus manifestation, which as such is purely contingent, is nonetheless necessary in its principle, just as, although transitory in itself, it nevertheless possesses an absolutely permanent root in universal Possibility, this moreover being what constitutes all its reality. If it were otherwise, manifestation could only have an altogether illusory existence, which could even be regarded as strictly non-existent, since, being without principle, it would retain only an essentially 'privative' character, like that of a negation or a limitation considered in itself; and envisaged in this way, manifestation would in effect be nothing more than the totality of all possible limiting conditions. However, from the moment these conditions are possible, they are metaphysically real, and this reality, which was only negative when the conditions were conceived as simple limitations, becomes in a way positive when they are envisaged as possibilities. It is thus because manifestation is implied in the order of possibilities that it has its proper reality, though without this reality being in any way capable of existence independent of the universal order, for it is there, and there alone, that it has its true 'sufficient reason': to say that manifestation is necessary in principle is basically nothing else than to say that it is contained in universal Possibility.
There is no difficulty in conceiving that manifestation may thus be at once necessary and contingent from different points of view, provided one pays careful attention to the fundamental point that
the principle cannot be affected by any determination whatsoever, since it is essentially independent of them all, as the cause is independent of its effects, so that manifestation, necessitated by its principle, cannot inversely necessitate the latter in any way. It is therefore the 'irreversibility' or 'irreciprocity' of the relationship as here envisaged that resolves the entire difficulty usually supposed to vex this question, [1] a difficulty that really only exists when this 'irreciprocity' is lost sight of; and if one loses sight of it (supposing one has ever had it in view to any degree), it is because, being situated currently in manifestation, one is naturally led to attribute to this an importance that it could never have from the universal point of view. To make this more comprehensible, let us again take a spatial symbol, and say that in its integrality manifestation is truly nil with respect to the Infinite, just as, allowing for the reservations that the imperfection of such comparisons always requires, a point situated in space is equal to zero with respect to that space. [2] This does not mean that the point is absolutely nothing, the more so as it necessarily exists by the very fact that space exists, but rather that it is nothing in relation to extension, as it is strictly a zero of extension; and in relation to the universal All, manifestation is nothing more than what this point is in relation to space envisaged in all the indefinitude of its extension, but with the difference that space is something limited by its own nature, whereas the universal All is the Infinite.
Here we should mention another difficulty, but one that consists much more in the expression than in the conception itself: all that exists in a transitory mode in manifestation must be transposed into a permanent mode in the non-manifested; manifestation itself thus acquires the permanence that constitutes all its principial reality, but it is then no longer manifestation as such, but rather the ensemble of the possibilities of manifestation insofar as they are not manifested, while nonetheless still implying manifestation in their own
nature (without which they would be other than what they are). The difficulty of this transposition or this passage from the manifested to the non-manifested, and the apparent obscurity that results, is the same as is encountered in trying to express, in the measure that they are expressible, the relations between time (or more generally duration in all its modes, that is to say, the whole condition of successive existence) and eternity. This is essentially the same question envisaged under two scarcely distinguishable aspects, of which the second is simply more particular than the first since it refers only to one determined condition among all those comprised in the manifested. All of this, we repeat, is perfectly conceivable, but one must be able to take the inexpressible into consideration, as is required in all that pertains to the metaphysical domain; as concerns the means of realization of an effective, as opposed to a merely theoretical, conception that extends even to the inexpressible, we obviously cannot speak of it in this study, considerations of this order not entering into the framework of the task we have set ourselves at present.
Returning to contingency, we may define it in a general way as that which does not contain in itself its own sufficient reason; but even so it is evident that every contingent thing is nonetheless necessary in the sense that it is necessitated by its sufficient reason, which it must have in order to exist, even if it does not lie within it, at least when envisaged under the special conditions in which it has precisely this character of contingency; and it would no longer have this character if envisaged in its principle, since it would then be identified with its sufficient reason itself. Such is the case of manifestation, which as such is contingent because its principle or its sufficient reason is to be found in the non-manifested insofar as the latter includes what we may call the 'manifestable', that is to say the possibilities of manifestation as pure possibilities, and not, it goes without saying, insofar as it includes the 'non-manifestable', or the possibilities of non-manifestation. Principle and sufficient reason are thus fundamentally the same thing, but if one wishes to understand the idea of contingency in its metaphysical sense, it is particularly important to consider the principle under this aspect of sufficient reason; and to avoid all confusion it should again be made clear that the sufficient reason is exclusively the final raison d'être
of
a thing (final if one leaves the consideration of the thing in order to ascend to the principle, but in reality, primary in the order of sequence, logical as well as ontological, which leads from the principle to its consequences) and not simply its immediate raison d'être, for everything that is in any mode whatsoever, even a contingent one, must have in itself its immediate raison d'être, understood in the sense employed previously when we said that consciousness constitutes a raison d'être for certain states of manifested existence.
A most important consequence of this is that one can say that every being bears its destiny within itself, whether in a relative fashion (individual destiny), if it is merely a case of the being envisaged within a certain conditioned state, or in an absolute fashion, if it is a case of the being in its totality, since 'the word "destiny" designates the true reason of things. [3] The conditioned or relative being can only bear in itself an equally relative destiny, however, relating exclusively to its special conditions of existence; if, considering a being in this way, one wished to speak of its final or absolute destiny, this latter would no longer be within it, but that is because it is in truth no longer the destiny of this contingent being as such, since it refers in reality to the total being. This observation should suffice to demonstrate the inanity of all discussion on the topic of 'determinism, [4] this being another of those questions so numerous in modern Western philosophy that only exist because they are wrongly posed; moreover there are so many different conceptions of determinism, and just as many of freedom, most of which have nothing at all metaphysical about them, that it is important to define the true metaphysical notion of freedom, the subject with which we propose to conclude this study.