Historical necessity is a feeling produced by dialectical understanding, not an ontological determinism.
Evidence
I am tempted to say that the feeling of necessity or historical inevitability is simply the emotion characteristic of historical understanding as such, that feeling which accompanies the mental process by which, through that movement of specification or rectification which we have described, we now as for the first time suddenly comprehend a historical event, which is to say that we understand for the first time how it had to happen that way and no other. The notion of historical necessity is therefore something like a historical trope, the very temporal figure of the process of historical understanding, and presupposes an ever closer approximation of the concrete, an ever greater enlargement of the context of the historical meditation, such that the alternative feeling of chance is not so much disproven as it is rendered inconceivable and meaningless. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 709
Categorization
- QUESTION: Jameson’s reframing of necessity as the ‘emotion of comprehension’ risks collapsing historical causality into phenomenology — worth probing against the orthodox-Marxist critique in 710.
- XREF: connects to: History is neither purely objective nor purely subjective, being pervaded by a dialectical anti-dialectic — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 420; Historical laws are constituted regularities, not metaphysical or causal determinants — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1464; Dialectical insight transmutes contingency into necessity in a fleeting unified glimpse. (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Economic laws of tendency operate historicistly, not as naturalistic determinisms.
#corroborates(0.88) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1422 - Historical laws are constituted regularities, not metaphysical or causal determinants
#corroborates(0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1464 - Dialectical critique exposes ontology as disguised history
#corroborates(0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 694 - Dialectical insight transmutes contingency into necessity in a fleeting unified glimpse.
#qualifies(0.82)