Classical Western (Platonic-Aristotelian) philosophies tend to split the world and everything that exists in it into two sections. According to Rorty, Kant “splits us into two parts, one called ‘reason,’ which is identical in us all, and another (empirical sensation and desire), which is a matter of blind, contingent, idiosyncratic impressions” (1989: 32). Reason reveals necessary structures whereas contingency is ignorance and blindness. It has been mentioned that already Epicurus tried to overcome this opposition by seeing coincidence as a rational explanation. The division of the world into necessity and contingency became one of the most inveterate principles of Western thought, and the last chapter demonstrated how the French “science of the coincidence” acted against it.

Contingency and Creativity

The necessary-contingent opposition is related to the Platonic opposition of the real versus the appearance. In the Republic (6: 509d–511c), especially in the Allegory of the Cave (Book VII: 514a–517a), Plato differentiates between perceptible and intelligible phenomena and explains how the ever-changing realm of physical objects (particulars) is separate from the invisible and eternal universals, that is, from ideas or “forms.” The latter we perceive through reason (noesis) or—with regard to mathematical objects and abstract ideas—through intellect (dianoia). Physical objects, which are more random than reason-based ideas, can only be cognized through opinion (doxa), practical reason (phronesis) or trust (pistis). Images and appearances of objects occupy an even lower level of cognition than physical objects. Reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary whereas concrete objects and the appearances of objects remain more contingent. When it comes to images in art, we can even judge them by using taste rather than reason.

The light of reason illuminates the world of objects and appearances and shows necessary ideas; thus, and only thus, randomness disappears. Causal determinists like Laplace would merely reformulate this same idea at the end of the eighteenth century. The coincidence is not real but only a dream or an appearance that we perceive because we are scientifically incompetent. As sciences progress, the unreal world of coincidences will be replaced with the real world of necessity.