Vichara 7: Contingency
... and thus only it must be a fundamental break.
It is apodictic that whatever is good in-itself and objectively is what should be in and of the world. But what is the criterion of that which we find to have intrinsic, objective value? We know that it can't be directly defined in terms of some concept or concepts that break it down. So then, what could be a sufficient basis for being able to say correctly that the Good is present? Is there a basis on which it could be said, "Well, there is this thing that goes along with the Good every time the latter occurs, and it is here, so there is Good right now". What could be such a thing?
An answer to this can at least be intuited by approaching it front-on, i.e., phenomenologically, or in terms of our experiences of intrinsic value. Let's go back to our prior examples of when we find something to be good for its own sake, whether it's art or technology or a person. When one drives a splendidly designed and engineered vehicle, as described in the previous dispatch, or is out for a walk in a beautiful place, say through a landscape of a wonderful composition of nonhuman and human forms and substances, or some quarter of a city with a vibrant, vital and flourishing human and nonhuman ecology, one may find these to be amazing to the point of finding them good for their own sake.
Now, our experiences of finding slices of reality to be ends-unto-themselves may be represented by or taken to mean that we are having the sense that "This is so good" or some variant of that. However, we can intuit things further. The substance of our experience in such cases is actually cognized more closely as, or the sense that "This is so good" itself occurs when we find, something to the effect of: "How can this even be?" or "How crazy is that?" That is, when we find things to be Good, what's going on is that we are amazed by how things actually are the way they are.
This is true for all such experiences of ultimate value. Whether it's a full starry night sans photopollution, a glorious sporting performance, an act of courageous virtue or honesty, or the pure, beatific radiance of a baby's eyes, we find such things to have intrinsic or non-instrumental value; we are glad they exist for their own sake. But there are more phenomenologically authentic ways of expressing this sense that we find them to be intrinsic or non-instrumentally valuable. We never think "Wow, that is just non-instrumentally valuable!" or "How glad I am about the existence of this for its own sake!" What we do think for instances such as the above, rather, is "How beautiful/amazing/marvelous/in-credible!" And what we actually mean or what we’re actually seeing about reality when we think the latter is that there appears to be something beyond or not in keeping with reality as we are accustomed to it being. That is, when we find things to be Good aesthetically, as we had seen previously is how we find things to be Good, this aesthetic experience is of finding one's sense of reality to be broken.
This isn't the meaning of what it is for there to be Good; as we saw, that may be undefinable or unconveyable in-itself in the way that you can't meaningfully explain what "yellow" is to someone who has never seen it. But is there a way of specifying that we have yellow at hand? Yes, since objectively, yellow is the part of the visible spectrum of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 575-585 nm. Similarly, it seems that there being genuine value is marked by (the perception of a) radical departure with reality that we find unbelievable or wondrous.
This is so at least phenomenologically. Just because this is how we feel it or find it to be doesn't mean that is how it is, though. As it is, the front-on phenomenological approach to the problem cannot show that this thing we sense when we find something to be Good—some meaningful break with "status quo reality" that we are amazed by and that pleases us—is necessarily what there is when there is intrinsic, non-instrumental value, for what the latter innately is. We can only "get at" this being the case through deeper observation of our experience, i.e., through attacking the problem front-on. To demonstrate that it necessarily would be the case, though—to show this isn't an extraneous, let alone illusory feature of the experience of the Good—a flanking maneuver must be undertaken.
We are trying to figure out what is the Good. Rather than look straight at our experience of it to discern through to its depth, let us now come at the problem obliquely, by stating the question in a different way: See how asking "What is the Good?" or "What should there ultimately, objectively be?" is equivalent to asking "For what ultimately, objectively should there be things?"
Think about it. To ask what there should ultimately, objectively be is to directly ask what that is. But if—whatever it specifically is—it is indeed what ultimately, objectively should be, then it is what it would be good for things at large, or reality in general, to instrumentally be for. Think about it again. The sorts of things which are of such value that they are what there should objectively be for their own sake, or are ends-in-themselves, must thus necessarily have the quality of being the telos or point for which it would be worthwhile to optimize things in general—which is to say, such things are what would be answered if one were to ask, "What should there be things for?"
This framing perhaps gives off a crude, utilitarian, maybe even totalitarian, vibe, I'm aware, maybe suggesting that everything should be put to work or distorted from its innate tendencies to serve that which there should be, but that isn't going to be the prescription in the end; we'll rather end up seeing how the "things at large" (the means) isn't grossly separate from the ultimate end.1 Still, the framing remains equivalent; when we ask "What is of value as an end-in-itself," we are also asking "What is valuable as an end-in-itself/what entities are valuable as ends-in-themselves such that the totality of things in general—or reality as such—is valuable because it has served as the ground or stage for the emergence the former?"
So what is the answer to that? To answer "the Good" does no good; it is true, of course, but only begs the question. But the question cannot be answered directly, in terms of simple, analytic definition, as we saw. It can, however, be itself analyzed or understood so well that its necessary answer becomes apparent as innately contained within it and shines forth to the surface.
How would that be done? By conducting another oblique maneuver: When we ask "Why or for what should there be things in general" or "For what good ultimately is reality as such?" we are necessarily asking, "For what apart from things in general, i.e., apart from reality as such, should there be things?" This is entailed by the question itself; that which 'things in general'/'reality as such' is for or could or should be for cannot be that itself; it must necessarily be something not that. This is not just true for reality at large; the purpose or point of anything, if it is indeed something that has a purpose or point, must be something that is "not it" (otherwise that thing would be an end-in-itself, and it wouldn't really be meaningful to ask what its point is; the answer to such a question would be 'N/A').
So what is the answer to "For what apart from things in general, i.e., apart from reality as such, should there be things?" Now, what is apart from reality as such cannot be concretely specified, or pointed to as "that!" We can just speak of the general features of such being that inherent to how it has emerged in definition. That is, we cannot say what is that "something" that is external to things at large, but only flesh out what it is for something to be external to things at large, or describe it ways that cast in relief its significance. Which is to say, the only possible answer to "For what apart from things in general, i.e., apart from reality as such, should there be things?" is indeed just that which is apart from, external to, or simply not default, given reality. It is simply that which breaks with reality.2 3
This is tautological—yet profound. For what could be apart from reality? It appears to be a paradox; reality is, after all, everything there is. But if there were to be an answer to the question of "For what good should there be things in general?", this is the only possibility: To posit such being as makes for a fundamental break, rupture or discontinuity with reality as it is—to posit, in other words, a contingency, or something that need not have existed, but does exist. For if there exists such being that marks a fundamental rupture with reality, then it could be said that it need not have existed, because something that marks such a fundamental rupture breaks the script, as it were, of how things are in standard deterministic reality, or per normal causality; there is thus nothing about how things and their workings are that could have by themselves led to it (otherwise it would not be a fundamental break with how things are). Such being is therefore a proper contingency, as opposed to a necessity woven into the fabric of the deterministic status quo that cannot thus be properly seen as fundamentally discontinuous with given reality.
And that is what we can say about what ultimately, objectively should be: That it is a contingency, that it makes for an absolute departure from status-quo reality. As it happens, this account or rendition of the ultimate Good, arrived at through sheer conceptual analysis, accords with our experiences when we find entities to be ends-in-themselves as well. When we like something so much that we think it should exist for its own sake, this always involves finding it beyond the expectations we had or the normalcy we had known of reality. In other words, we are perceiving contingency when we find something to be Good—or it might be said, we find things Good when4 we perceive contingency.
That the Good must be something radically unlike and breaking with reality as we know it is one of the only things we can say to further specify what the Good is. It isn't necessarily a sufficient criterion for what should be, but based on the very meaning of an end-in-itself, or what is good in-itself, we can say it is at least a necessary feature of the Good. Furthermore, we can't say concretely what those entities may be that have contingency, and which may thus be of intrinsic and non-instrumental value, just as given only the information that yellow is the thing experienced visually corresponding to electromagnetic radiation of between 575 and 585 nm in wavelength, one cannot infer what sorts of actual things would be yellow.
Yet the understanding we have arrived at is nothing to be scoffed at. It may be possible to derive through simple analysis the idea that what we find intrinsic, ultimate value is related to some kind of a metaphysical break, i.e., to utter, absolute contingency in and of the fabric of reality. But taken as a connection in one sweep of consciousness, it is dazzling and mysterious enough to break open new vectors of inquiry and linkage. Just as those wavelengths of 575-585 nm make for the correct physical criterion for when there is (an experience of) yellow, here we have a definitive metaphysical criterion for what is necessary to make for the Good.5 That has great implications—though not without perhaps greater complications—and might enable inferences that are even greater still. I will close today by articulating a few such vectors that stand out, especially those related to questions that may naturally have risen at this point.
A big question is: Does contingency really exist? Or is everything that exists necessarily and very simply a part of deterministic reality, and we only perceive what we take to be contingency as an illusion? Can anything exist outside of deterministic causality, which is ultimately what contingency must be per our definition, that of something that need not have existed, but does exist? From a mechanistic, scientific point-of-view, one would think it is impossible for there to be a true, fundamental break with reality. Is that so?
A core part of the stated purpose of this project is to find a basis for objective value. If contingency can be shown to exist, and if there can be a way of formalizing or testing it (which may be necessary in any case to show it exists), contingency could be such a basis for demonstrating the objectivity of the good.
In the course of determining if and how contingency exists, or even simply explicating it further without formalizing it, we must think through how it differs from randomness. Will any kind of break with reality do? When we think of a proper, fundamental break with reality, can that be random? Is not even randomness, fundamentally speaking, still deterministic (even if we perceive it as random)? If so, then how is it different from contingency? Must a proper break with reality in fact have a component of order? When we find something amazing, in a way that we feel glad about its existence for its own sake, is that a perception of some kind of ordered break with reality? But how can it be a break with reality if it is ordered in some way—after all, order implies ordered with respect to something, and all there is with respect which there can be order is reality, thereby making that ordered product not a fundamental break with reality, right? Yes, but at the same time, it will all work out. It cannot be a fundamental break without order, and thus only it must be a fundamental break. We will see.
Why is there a relation between contingency and the Good? It may be that a common feature of our experience of ultimate value is the perception of contingency, but why? What is good about contingency?6 This is a very fair question, and the answer lies in the nature the Subject, i.e., it will be understood when we have explored the existence of and for beings such as us.
What about bad things? Aren't there also tragedies, horrors of colossal proportions, that also have the characteristic of appearing to be completed uncalled for by the necessary proceedings of reality yet are existent? If contingency is a criterion of the Good, does that make cataclysmically bad things that also constitute breaks with reality to be Good? A few brief remarks can be made about this right now:
This isn't necessarily the case at the very least because contingency hasn't at least yet been shown to be a sufficient criterion of the Good; only if it were so would any terrible thing that many people may find to be "contingent", per our definition, also be Good.
It may be the case that such negative things, no matter how extreme or unprecedented they appear, don't and can't actually make for genuine ruptures with hitherto reality, and that only the ones we see as positive can. We shall see about this later.
It is also worth noting that a lot of things that in contemporary culture we consider bad—mainly, sadness, pain, or in general things that "feel bad"—aren't actually bad. I haven't quite thought through if there are extreme cases of this—things that produce extremely unpleasant sensations at a wide scale—that also aren't actually bad, but it is at least worth not starting from the bias that everything that feels bad is in fact bad; that is a historically peculiar way of looking at good and bad that we shouldn't take for granted.
If contingency truly exists, and can be formalized in some way, does this mean that we are arriving at an account of what sorts of things are Good such that we can prescribe in advance what there should be? That doesn't sound very fun; in fact it sounds sort of scary—a recipe for dictatorships (perhaps AI dictatorships) where we are told and directed how to live so that it all comes together to maximize contingency. I very strongly doubt it is possible for this system to lead in this direction, and that is for a few reasons:
While it may be possible to formalize and with that theoretically demonstrate that contingency exists, to practically be able to tell for each haecceity within reality what seems least or not at all causally necessary (again, if at all this is possible) may require an omnipresent and pure awareness of things as they are combined with a mathematical omnipotence that may be overall computationally impossible.
Not only is specification very unlikely, I doubt that even with formalization of what in theory contingency may be, there could be a template of what sorts of things are Good. In fact, it may shown a priori that prescribing what would make for contingency at large may be impossible:
It may be that contingency can only come to be manifested by subjective agents, of any and all scales, tapping into a higher intelligence that only they can be privy to. As noted also in 4. above, we will be exploring in not too long how the conception of contingency developed today does in fact dovetail with an understanding of ourselves as subject(s) that also seems accurate. In any case, all I will say for now is that contingency may require some degree of liberated existence7 that cannot be prescribed or controlled—in other words, it may be impossible for an external agent to specify what contingency could be actualized by any given agent.
That is related to another way of looking at the matter: By its very nature, contingency cannot be spelled out, even as a potential, prior to (the process of) its actualization. If it were spelled out, then it wouldn't then be contingent; it would be part of necessary, given reality. Through its very completion, even in thought, it is thereby integrated into what exists, into the fabric of deterministic, causally explainable reality. Now, how does this square up with the possibility of there being something that can stand outside the fabric of deterministic, causally explainable reality? It may be that contingency can only exist as something akin to a limit, in the mathematical sense. If the limit is “breached”, as it were, or once contingency is actually realized, then it is, as of that very moment, no longer contingent. This need not repudiate the theoretical existence of contingencies; rather, the fact may be that contingency becomes drawn into causality in immediate retrospect upon its attainment. Contingency may be such a being that can only exist in the becoming toward its being.
This last is one of the most important and interesting points about this whole framework, and will merit further extraction and expansion. I will right now just say that this idea—that the Good, while objectively realizable, must be undefined in advance, and once realized would have reset the standard for what is Good beyond itself—has prodigious civilizational or political-economic implications regarding the progression of culture and the dynamism of society.
I want to emphasize here, despite appearances to the contrary, that this isn't going to turn into an argument for autocracy or paperclip-optimization, where all things that aren't ends-in-themselves are only meant then to serve the purpose, or serve as means, for the ends. While this is logically what means do, we will see ahead that pretty much all entities have some spark of pure value in a way existing for a higher good isn't different from each entity flourishing in-itself and actualizing itself in the most honorable and joyous fashion. Or to put it differently, to refer back to a breadcrumb I'd put forth last time, the subject of the Good is no different from the object of the Good.
This makes for a way of substantiating Moore’s point about how the good cannot be defined for someone who doesn’t know it, i.e., cannot be broken down into further simple terms. He was correct in his intuition, but could not explain why due to his unease with a metaphysical basis to value. But we can see now that it would indeed be impossible to speak of what has ultimate, objective value insofar as it resides in or as that which is fundamentally discontinuous with or external to the totality of reality, which by definition cannot be pointed to and specified, otherwise it would be part of reality. (Note: Point 6.b.ii. in the last section of this essay expresses a different facet of this same idea.)
The same can also be seen this way. Suppose that for the single entity or the general attribute of all the entities that should objectively, ultimately be, one would say, "This is why there should be things". For that to be a meaningful answer, "This" must be fundamentally, radically apart, different from, or unlike "things" (in general).
Though not necessarily only when.
There is a difference though, at least at this stage: While it can be said that electromagnetic radiation of that wavelength is a sufficient condition for deeming something "yellow", we haven't, at least yet, shown that contingency is a sufficient condition for the Good.
Note how this question "Is contingency good?" is meaningful, showing, as per G.E. Moore's open question argument, that "Good" is not equivalent to "contingency"—clearly, we mean or are trying to get at different things when we speak of the two.
I will warn that this kind of liberated existence may not resonate as well as may be desired with political ideas of liberty or personal autonomy that the pseudo-religion of liberal humanism considers quasi-sacred.