Ananke, Victor Hugo 1866
Channel: Craig Campbell
Date: 2013-10-11

Victor Hugo wrote "Toilers of the Sea" in 1866. This book was the last of a three part series on the word Ananke, (necessity). The first two of the three were "Notre Dame de Paris" (1831) and "Les Mise'rables" (1862).  He probably expected that the three books would be taken as a whole. 

This short reading is from the Preface to his book "Toilers of the Sea". 

Soren Kierkegaard mentions necessity along with the idea of freedom in his 1842 book, Either/Or.  

"The ethical individual knows himself, but this knowing is not simply contemplation, for then the individual comes to be defined according to his necessity. It is a collecting of oneself; which itself is an action, and this is why I have aforethought used the expression "to choose oneself" instead of "to know oneself." The self the individual knows is simultaneously the actual self and the ideal self, which the individual has outside himself as the image in whose likeness he is to form himself, and which on the other hand he has within himself, since it is he himself. Only within himself does the individual have the objective toward which he is to strive, and yet he has this objective outside himself as he strives toward it. That is, if the individual believes that the universal human being lies outside him, so that it will come to him from the outside, then he is disoriented, then he has an abstract conception, and his method will always be an abstract annihilating of the original self. Only within himself can the individual become enlightened about himself." Either/Or Part II, p. 258-260 (Hong)

There is the external forces that are necessary but there is also an internal call to the single individual. Homer had to have a guide in the external world since he was blind but he needed nothing of that sort in his internal world of the spirit.