Back to Contingency

For Plato, human reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary, whereas concrete objects and appearances of objects, as long as their existence is not explained through reason, are contingent. Real is only what can be rationally explained. Laplace's determinism continued to build upon these convictions. But despite the popularity of this powerful paradigm, science and philosophy never entirely neglected the idea of contingency. On the contrary, it remained a relevant philosophical topic during a time span ranging from Aristotle to Descartes. As mentioned, Aristotle was opposed to any deterministic denial of contingency: coincidences were not just subjective perceptions but real. Aristotle even created an ontology of contingency in which an aggregative totality called “the world” was composed of both necessary essences and contingent beings. For centuries, contingency would be discussed along these lines, and most of the time, this happened in theological contexts. It is only after Descartes that contingency would disappear from major philosophical debates—though not because it had been scientifically solved, but, paradoxically, because science and philosophy had abolished divine determinism. Contingency was worth targeting only as long as it represented the opposite of providentialism. Once philosophy was de-theologized, the modern world was freed from contingency much as it would later be freed from God. For the historians of philosophy Graevenitz and Marquard (1998), the intellectual history of contingency is therefore a major philosophical episode that ends with Descartes. In the aftermath of this long episode, contingency could still be seen as an antidote against scientific determinism. However, compared to earlier theological projects, these new discussions remained relatively marginal. It would only be with the rise of Darwinism and other important scientific theories such as atomic theory in the nineteenth century (which put forward the coincidence) that discussions of contingency once again became more prominent. In the twentieth century, relativity theory and chaos theory theorized contingency in their own ways. None of these sciences ever claimed to have solved the problem of contingency; they merely reformulated it in different fashions.

The Greeks did not accept cosmological contingency and believed that the universe had always existed as an eternal and unchangeable being. As has been shown above, in the Middle Ages, the theory of contingentia held that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was still sustained by a divine will.