There is a recurring mistake in metaphysics: treating explanation as one theoretical option among others, rather than as a pressure that any theory must answer to. Views are compared, virtues tallied, intuitions balanced. But explanation is not a preference. It is a constraint. And over time, it always asserts itself.
This is why explanation “wins.” Not because it settles every dispute, but because anything that refuses to answer to it gradually loses its grip on intelligibility.
From the beginning, philosophy has been animated by a simple demand: Why this rather than that? Once that question is taken seriously, it does not stay politely confined. It propagates. Each explanation invites another. Each stopping point calls attention to itself. And every attempt to halt the process leaves a residue that demands justification.
That residue is where contingency lives.
Contingency as unfinished business
Contingency is often presented as the natural state of affairs. The world could have been otherwise; some things just happen to be the way they are. Necessity, by contrast, is treated as an imposition: something that needs special argument, theological backing, or modal machinery.
This picture reverses the actual dialectic.
Contingency is not what remains when explanation is complete. It is what remains when explanation is interrupted. To say that something could have been otherwise is not to explain why it is as it is. It is to gesture at an absence of explanation and treat that absence as a feature of reality rather than as a task left undone.
This is why contingency so often travels with words like brute, primitive, or basic. These are not explanations. They are labels we attach to places where explanation has been asked to stop.
The persistence of explanatory pressure
The pressure to explain does not disappear when it is resisted. It goes underground.
When metaphysical systems install stopping points—whether in the form of brute facts, domain restrictions, grounding termini, or weakened modal principles—they do not dissolve the explanatory demand. They defer it. The question “why this rather than that?” is not answered; it is declared inadmissible.
Declaring a question inadmissible is not the same as making it irrelevant.
This is why philosophical debates keep returning to the same fault lines. Why these laws? Why this structure? Why this fundamental base rather than another? Each time, the temptation is to say: because that is where explanation ends. And each time, the reply is the same: why there?
Explanation keeps pushing. Not because philosophers are obstinate, but because intelligibility is unstable. Once it is introduced, it spreads.
Firewalls and their fate
Modal firewalls are the devices by which this spread is managed. They are not mistakes. They are coping strategies.
Ancient metaphysics built firewalls out of levels, substances, and emanations. Modern metaphysics builds them out of methods, domains, and formal distinctions. In both cases, the goal is the same: to preserve intelligibility without allowing it to collapse into necessity.
The reason these devices proliferate is not that explanation is weak, but that it is strong. If explanation were harmless, it would not need to be disciplined. Firewalls are installed precisely because explanation threatens to do too much.
And yet, firewalls are always temporary. They require constant maintenance. They generate boundary disputes. They invite exceptions, refinements, and ever more careful statements of scope. Over time, the structure becomes baroque—not because philosophers enjoy complexity, but because the pressure they are resisting does not go away.
Explanation keeps finding ways around the barriers.
Why necessity keeps returning
This is why necessity has such a stubborn afterlife in metaphysics. It is not smuggled in by theologians or rationalists. It reappears whenever explanation is allowed to run without restraint.
If something is fully explained—if nothing about it is left hanging—then no intelligible reason remains for it to be otherwise. Necessity is not added at the end; it is what explanation leaves behind when it finishes.
This does not mean that necessity is obvious or comforting. On the contrary, it is often unsettling. It threatens freedom, variety, and the sense that things might have gone differently. That threat is real. But it is not a refutation. It is a consequence.
And consequences do not disappear because we dislike them.
The real choice
Once this is clear, the landscape shifts.
The fundamental choice in metaphysics is not between necessity and contingency. It is between two attitudes toward explanation:
- Allow it to finish, and accept where it leads.
- Stop it deliberately, and explain why stopping there is justified.
The first path leads, again and again, toward necessity. The second leads to firewalls, pluralisms, and a carefully managed ignorance.
They are not on equal footing.
Explanation does not need permission to continue. It needs a reason to stop.
Until such reasons are given—rather than assumed—necessity will continue to reassert itself, not as a dogma, but as the shadow cast by intelligibility taken seriously.
Explanation always wins because it never gives up. It can be delayed, redirected, or constrained, but not neutralized. Every attempt to contain it testifies to its force. And every generation that rediscovers that force finds itself facing the same uncomfortable realization:
If explanation is allowed to finish its work, contingency does not survive.
That is not a failure of metaphysics.
It is its oldest result.
Papers defending modal firewalls, the modal ontological argument for necessitarianism (MOAN), the dilemma of contingency, and a transcendental argument for necessitarianism are under review.
Petronius Jablonski 