a brief note on contingency

The blog Profanation and Things has a post from a few days ago called “Contingency and Harman,” which says this:

“Most references to contingency that I can find in his blog are in relation to Meillassoux, how the latter espouses it whereas he, Harman, remains more skeptical. Meillassoux advances that only absolute contingency should be necessary. My understanding thus far is that for Harman contingency remains at the core of correlational processes. I am not entirely sure about the validity of this last sentence. I may have to come back to edit this.”

As far as I can see, no editing is necessary here.

Contingency is certainly the heart of Meillassoux’s philosophy, and is what ultimately leads him to his fascinating theology of the God who does not exist now but might exist in the future. As long as you accept his metaphysics of contingency, that theology follows pretty implacably.

But the blogger is right. I do see the metaphysics of contingency and the rejection of the principle of sufficient reason as too tied up with correlationism, and also as too tied up with the notion of cause as a serial unfolding across time rather than as also containing part-whole relations within any given instant. The case against sufficient reason is a bit harder to make when it turns from “anything can happen” into “anything can be made of anything right now.” Meillassoux is perhaps too focused on temporally sudden changes in the laws of nature. But I guess I already mentioned that in the book.

But this is a good example of why (as Whitehead shows) philosophy shouldn’t be viewed as a deductive system from indubitable first principles. If you think, as I do, that the metaphysics of contingency is wrong, it doesn’t follow that everything Meillassoux does from here on out is simply a tissue of lamentable errors. Far from it. Contingency has led him to interesting places, and presumably will lead him to additional interesting places in the future, some of which might be extracted from their context and used elsewhere. There is a certain modularity of philosophical insights that doesn’t hold for geometrical or arithmetical proofs, where any antecedent errors spoil everything else that comes later. Philosophy doesn’t work like that. You can think that the metaphysical underpinnings of Aristotle or Spinoza are rubbish, but still profit greatly from all that emanates from the supposed rubbish.