Abstract
The thesis of this essay is that there is a primordial apprehension of the contingency of nature in civilized experience.1 The expressions of this apprehension of contingency have taken many forms, from the mythic to the philosophical and theological. The expressions have different motifs in different cultures, and there is no preferred cultural starting point. My intent here is to explore the truth about this apprehension of contigency, however, and so I shall be arguing for a preferable contemporary way of understanding it, framed in the discourse of Western intellectual traditions as informed by the East and South Asian. In particular, I shall argue that there are two dimensions to the contingency of nature, namely the contingency of natural things within nature, and the contingency of nature as such, and that the apprehension of both is one of the founding definitions of human culture. The first can be called cosmological contingency, characteristic of cosmological processes, and the second ontological contingency, the contingency of being as such, from ontos, one of the Greek words for being. These two senses of contingency are closely related. From a cross-cultural perspective, the notions of both nature and its apprehension are problematic, and some of the discussion to follow treats these problems.
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Notes
Indeed perhaps in all human experience although the discussion here is limited to its civilized expressions.
The extended defense of this thesis is complicated, but I have attempted it in print. Part of the defense is to show how symbolic representation is itself a part of nature. For this we need not only a theory of signs, such as that provided by Peirce, but a theory of nature as well. Then we need an analysis of some important kinds of symbols, such as religious ones, that purport to engage “ontological” dimensions of reality as well as garden variety things. My trilogy, Axiology of Thinking, attempts the theory of signs and nature; it consists in Reconstruction of Thinking (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981 ), Recovery of the Measure (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), and Normative Cultures (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). For a theory of religious symbols and their ontological reach, see my The Truth of Broken Symbols ( Albany: SUNY Press, 1996 ).
By “West” here I mean Western Asia with its European appendage and American colonies, and include the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, each of which has been called a civilization in its own right.
The criticism of the idea of totality in nature in Kant’s Antinomies (Critique of Pure Reason,B 455–462). I have discussed it at some length regarding Hegel and Whitehead’s approach to nature in The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), chapter 5.
This was the nub of Kant’s argument about totality.
Many of the elements of nature discussed here, in the ancient conceptions, are discussed compendiously by Richard Sorabji in Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993 ).
See the book of Judges in the Bible.
See 1 Samuel in the Bible.
See Isaiah 40–66; Ezekiel; Job.
On the secularizing of God’s creation, see Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New York: Free Press, 1992).
See Karl Jaspers’ Way to Wisdom,translated by Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).
The ideal of early modern science was to quantify measurement, as in Descartes’ analytical geometry. See my discussion in Reconstruction of Thinking,chapter 1.
The discussion to follow summarizes in part my analysis of determinateness in God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968; reprint with a new preface, Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
See Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (Second edition; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897).
There might be many things with respect to which it is only partially determinate, or indeterminate. It might be, for instance, that the determinate character of the present is such that several different responses to future possibilities can be made; with respect to the future, the present is somewhat open or indeterminate, awaiting subsequent deciding events.
This analysis summarizes that in Recovery of the Measure,chapters 9–10.
Our late modern age has more difficulty than the ancient Western world in imagining dynamic eternity as the context for emersion in the temporality of life. But that is because of an impoverishment in the conception of time as much as it is a collapse of eternalistic religious sensibilities.
See the analysis of perception and appearance in Reconstruction of Thinking,part 2.
See Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time ( New York: Bantam, 1988 ), p. 174.
The argument above urged that things are determinate only by being related to other things, and that they and the other things must have essential features that are together on a more basic level than their conditioning relations. Thus even the laws of logic and mathematics are ontologically contingent even if we cannot imagine alternatives — indeed, imagination itself is contingent.
Translated by Wing-tsit Chan in his edited Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 139.
Chan, p. 463.
Translated by A.A. Macdonell in A Source Book in Indian Philosophy edited by Sarvepalli Radhakrishna and Charles A. Moore ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957 ), pp. 23–24.
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Neville, R.C. (1998). The Contingency of Nature. In: Cohen, R.S., Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_9
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