Logical Necessity

“Logical” necessity is necessity deprived of its essential ingredient: its “sharp pinch” (Shakespeare). Necessity is pinchy. It is the pinch-nosed huswife pinching household pennies. It is a hobgoblin, pictured jabbing a pitchfork in a naked burgermeister’s buttock. Logical necessity is homogenized necessity and therefore ultimately indistinguishable, by dint of sheer indifference, from the other logical “modalities”: possibility, actuality or chance (i.e. luck: nota bene). Logic: the bromide pantomime. Original creation’s colliding stars and suns turned into harmless banners in a guild pageant of organized trade unions—the logical functions. Logic sets itself the problem: how can we acknowledge the pressure of necessity in all its bitterness, reverse its flow and turn its prickly commandments into the effusions of our own arbitrary will? Herd them in the form of electrons around the printed circuits of a silicon chip? How can we subdue necessity to our own sweet ends? Necessity, the dragon, the goddess, unfathomable, wild destiny. Greek Ananké, a dinosaur, lumbering, ankylosaurus, a looming monster bristling with spiked armor plates, primordial but extinct. Ankylose: rigid, unbending, the decrees of fate, the will of Zeus. Rigor, constraint, anguish.

6/29/2014