Vichara 8: Necessity
"... because it is therefore simply right, simply right in the purest, most immaculate form of being simply right."
In the previous essay, we saw that when we perceive Good, we are seeing something that marks a fundamental break or rupture with hitherto existent reality, with all that we know as causally related reality—i.e., absolute, radical contingency.
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 in its generality—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 to be 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.
(The connection from intrinsic, ultimate value to contingency, as explained above, is justified through phenomenological as well as metaphysical analysis in the previous essay. It is highly suggested to read it before this.)
So is that all there is to the story? Is contingency the metaphysical correlate of the Good, in the way that the physical correlate of the color yellow is electromagnetic radiation of the wavelengths between 575 and 585 nm? We saw that whatever the Good is, it must manifest as something that is apart from the general workings of reality, because that which is what the general workings of reality should be for must be something fundamentally, in some way, apart from the latter. So is such apart-ness or rupture with reality in general all that is needed? Is contingency a sufficient condition for the Good? To answer this, let us look more closely at what it is for something to be so fundamentally apart from or breaking with things in general.
It may be tempting, at first purview, to think that if something breaks with how things “naturally” tend to be or work, it is random. After all, when we think of randomness, we think of it as something that follows no pattern relating it with whatever it is random with respect to. That, however, is not the kind of break with the generality of things that we are interested in. Indeed, if it is truly a random addition to the sequence of all there is, that does not even qualify as a “break” as we mean it.
Think of it this way. Suppose you had Shakespeare on a typewriter, typing away. And then you suddenly dragged him off and replaced him with a monkey, who then proceeded to strike away at the typewriter. Now, what would be produced would be “random,” but there’s a near-negligible chance there would be anything coming up that would blow our minds, that we would find splendid enough to want to exist for its own sake.
Let us make the thought experiment more precise still. Let us suppose this is a special kind of typewriter where words only show up on the paper when a string of keys is pressed that does add up to a real word in the language we’re working in. So the monkey is still typing things that have at least some semiotic standing, though even that will be largely compromised due to unceasingly erroneous syntax or grammatical structure. We may consider the monkey then to be producing some kind of ungrammatical Jabberwocky. Still, while this would be random, it could only with near-negligible odds happen to be something that is of intrinsic value, something that delights for its very existence.
So the kind of break we are talking about, which constitutes the kind of fundamental rupture with the generality of reality that delights us, whose very existence makes us go, “How amazing, how wonderful, s/he/it exists”, marking that as being of intrinsic value, isn’t where there is a random deviation from reality. It needs to have some kind of order, it has to be a meaningful break in some way.
Now this leads us to a peculiar feature of the metaphysics of value. If an entity is truly something that breaks with things in general, i.e., if an entity makes for a contingency, then it must still occur with respect to, or be based on, how things actually are. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a true break or rupture—a genuine surpassing of what is—but just randomness: sparkles and confetti around what already is, a mere addition to it. Randomness is still part of the same process, thus it isn’t something that has broken with given reality; it’s just that we don’t see randomness as part of the same process. Randomness is thus an epistemological phenomenon, not an ontological phenomenon.1 A true break must be more than that—not just apparent distinctness from things at large, but an actual rupture with what happens through deterministic normalcy, and thus the becoming of a new or different essence, or whatness, of or to existence, changing the very nature of all that there is.
So what makes for that? A radical rupture with reality may perhaps be sufficient for the Good, but that itself, conceptualized in such a way, is not exhaustively described as such. We now see that we need to account for—far from randomness—some aspect of order to the break.2 The discontinuity with which arises something (i.e., something essentially else) that need not have been, that was fundamentally uncalled for by how things were, must be meaningful in some way—it must have a dimension or moment of order, or dare we even say, paradoxically, of continuity. To be of intrinsic value, a fundamental break with the generalized totality of reality—contingency—must be a structured break.
What order is there in the becoming of total difference from things at large? What is the structure a rupture must take to be a true contingency—one that bears value?
As we did in the previous essay, let us go back to phenomenological awareness. There we had looked at the wondrous, “how-can-such-a-thing-be” aspect of what we find intrinsically valuable as such:
[O]ur 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!"
This, however, is not the only cognition that lies underneath the surface of our experience of being struck by something or someone superb. It is true that we may be amazed, i.e., we may find it to simply break with the probabilistic scheme of reality as we know it; this we looked at last time. But we are also delighted, pleased that what we are realizing to be good for its own sake, through this (somatic+cognitive) experience, is just as it is.
Today, we will only look at the (near-)ideal case of this aspect of (the experience of) value, viz. in its occurrence through art. Note that this being the ideal case doesn’t already mean that art is “more good” than everything else, or necessarily more worthy of higher priority if a situation of triage confronts us (though it might be!). It means simply that the metaphysical workings we are trying to discern exist in a more pure and much more pronounced way here, and through them we can get a sense of what the Good is, or would be like, in its formally perfect, immaculate existence, if there ever could be such a thing in phenomenal reality.
Let us start with the way in which art historian Ernst Gombrich described the quality an artist goes for:
What an artist worries about as he plans his pictures, makes his sketches, or wonders whether he has completed his canvas, is something much more difficult to put into words. Perhaps he would say he worries about whether he has got it ‘right’. Now it is only when we understand what he means by that modest little word ‘right’ that we begin to understand what artists are really after.
I think we can only hope to understand this if we draw on our own experience. Of course we are no artists, we may never have tried to paint a picture and may have no intention of ever doing so. But this need not mean that we are never confronted with problems similar to those which make up the artist’s life. In fact, I am anxious to prove that there is hardly any person who has not got at least an inkling of this type of problem, be it in ever so modest away. Anybody who has ever tried to arrange a bunch of flowers, to shuffle and shift the colours, to add a little here and take away there, has experienced this strange sensation of balancing forms and colours without being able to tell exactly what kind of harmony it is he is trying to achieve. We just feel a patch of red here may make all the difference, or this blue is all right by itself but it does not ‘go" with the others, and suddenly a little stem of green leaves may seem to make it come ‘right’. ‘Don’t touch it any more,’ we exclaim, ‘now it is perfect.’ Not everybody, I admit, is quite so careful over the arrangement of flowers, but nearly everybody has something he wants to get ‘right’. It may just be a matter of finding the right belt to match a certain dress, or nothing more impressive than the worry over the right proportion of, say, pudding and cream on one’s plate. In every such case, however trivial, we may feel that a shade too much or too little upsets the balance and that there is only one relationship which is as it should be.
The same can also be experienced in the case of music. It can definitely be seen in works that are grand and intricate, but it is perhaps even more striking in works that are minimal and stark. Consider ‘Stone in Focus’ by Aphex Twin (Track 19 in the vinyl release of Selected Ambient Works Volume II). To say that it has a melody is pushing the sense of what we take to be a melody, though technically it is that. It is elemental in its simplicity: the track consists of three chords on a synth against a metronome, repeated without any alteration for ten minutes.
But in this simplicity—perhaps only through this simplicity, it is nothing short of majesterial. It is the sound, as it were, of time in infinitude, and indeed, if something were to be the sound of temporality without beginning or end (for the very mindbreakingly, radically contingent idea of such boundless temporality), what Aphex Twin composed seems just perfect. There is also to it a sense of coming home, of deliverance or release—to a state where, again, there is no time, no schedule, no ticking clock—despite the metronome, perhaps through confrontation with the metronome in its inexorable presence in the track. But this deliverance is nonetheless not to heaven, or some higher realm, but wherever you are, whatever your state is. The situation of struggle, the suffering is not necessarily gone—but you, as the struggling, atomized person, maybe are. It is poignant, melancholic, bittersweet and blissful—the soundtrack accompanying one’s discharge from the duty of existence, for whatever particular existential weight it may hold, letting you dissolve from individuated, sentient being into pure being. Indeed, ‘Stone in Focus’ is what pure being is like—pure being, not what being as a sentient entity is, not what any other specific, colored or marked being is like, but being as such. And again, while listening to it, you feel, how else would that have been realized? It must have been through just this—this unlikely edifice emergent from near-silence, never spilling over beyond dignified, even if pulsating, restraint, and yet weighty and centered; so saturated texturally while in such plain garb; so devoid of drama, yet so encompassing of all of it—this seems like just the right way, with just the right degrees of the attributes that there are, to thereby depict this transcendence—not spatial, but ontological: from being whoever you are whilst going through life, to the immanent, infinite Absolute.
The same truth is apprehended in musical works more exoteric, which likely more people would have heard. Take Lata Mangeshkar singing ‘Lag Ja Gale’, from the 1964 film Woh Kaun Thi? I usually hesitate to put things in such absolute terms, but I cannot see that there is one thing that she does not do right. The song is not easy—though she makes it look so.3 It is at the surface a song for a sad occasion—lovers parting for good (and not because they want to leave one another). There is undeniable melancholy in the occasion. However, there is also joy that must be conveyed, for being in the moment and enjoying it one last time, and a grace and strength that is to be transmitted to the lover that is being sung to. I cannot imagine how it would be possible to get right the balance between all the emotions and tone any better than she does. Every enunciation could have veered in an excess of any vector of affect, but she delivers it right as it should be. Even at a technical level, each one of the many instances of gamak could be leaned into a bit too much or a bit too little, either too pronounced, tending toward the gaudy and the crude, or too subtle, tending toward the prostrate and unevocative—but she errs on neither side.4
Moreover, through the video for this song (linked above), one can also see another kind of (near-)perfection: the possible excellence of the being of a person, as demonstrated through Sadhana’s performance. If seen in a person in the context of imminent separation, the conjunction of poise, dignity, graciousness and just the right modicum of unembarrassed sorrow that she brings forth could well make one think they are also… just right, a superb, appropriately multi-faceted person, tuned to perfection in each proportion of every facet of being-human appropriate to a given circumstance. We get through her performance, thus, a model of a truly beautiful being, from surface to essence, which is not only something of sheer contingency that we are in wonder of, but is also something that requires, for this magic to have the power and meaning it does, that it spews forth beyond the range of normal possibilities of being in a precise, ordered way.
So where are we now in characterizing the order or structure that is needed for there to be a proper, value-bearing contingency? Let us start by analyzing the phrase “getting it right” or being “just right” which shows up above, elucidating it in a very obvious, even tautological way, for deeper implications that will become apparent this way. For something to be “just right” means that if it were different, it wouldn’t be right. This is the exact version, among the field of all possibilities that it could have turned out to be, that it should be.
That is to say, when we find an entity non-instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, if finding it so also involves finding it to be ordered or structured in a specific way, as we have seen today, then finding something to amaze and delight is to see it as something that had to be that way. We have already seen that if something is of intrinsic value, it must amaze us, have us stunned in wonder and appreciation that something like it even exists—a sense that amounts to, as we saw last time, seeing it as constituting a radical departure with reality for its normal workings and yieldings of cause-and-effect. However, we now see, that departure must be “just so”—we find that the entity whose existence we affirm for its own sake could not have been otherwise. In other words, when we encounter pure, objective value, we see that it not just breaks with our sense of the possibilities of all that can be, but that it breaks in a way that is precisely how it must break. The Good is that which need not have existed, yet which, if it does exist, must exist exactly as it does. When the Good rises forth, therefore, it does so in the swell of absolute contingency—but such contingency must bear the necessity of being just what is needed to make for contingency.
This is a paradox, but I urge you to stick with it. We will see one day that paradox is probably central to the fundamental nature of things in general—perhaps indeed through being central to value, as we are currently seeing, and with that central also to the procession of subjectivity through space and time—but I am getting ahead of things. For now, I want to look as deeply as possible into this specific paradox, to see how, despite this paradoxical nature, it must necessarily be the case, i.e., that the paradox is made of truth—we will explore how truth is made of paradox on a different day.5
So see this. I partly repeat myself, but it is imperative that there is no epistemological turbidity to our immersion in this emulsion of ontology. If something is a fundamental break with how things are, it has to be a break with respect to how things indeed are. Thus, some nature or logic of what is already there has to inform, as it were, how that break specifically manifests. The prior will have its trace or even essence carried forth in what is absolutely unlike it, or, as it were, the break from the Real will bear the negative of the Real—and that is the only way an entity can make for an absolute break. Otherwise, as we saw above, it is just randomness, and thus not a break—i.e., a becoming of something-else from everything—but mere dilly-dallying on what already is. For something to be of intrinsic value, it must constitute a meaningful break with the default deterministic workings that we think of as basic reality, and for it to constitute a meaningful break with that, there must be to it necessity, based on—or more precisely, based off—the total being of this standard, general reality. By basing itself off what already exists, it thus isn’t a genuine, absolute rupture with reality, it thus doesn’t depart from reality in a way that nothing about its being follows from how things are—which is the only way it is a genuine, absolute rupture.
As matters stand, we have seen that the order inherent to contingency can be understood as necessity. Let us now see further how this necessity itself can be understood and fleshed out.
First, notice that there are in two “necessities” that we have brought to this equation. When we say that necessity is necessary for contingency to be contingency, those two words in the prior phrase—“necessity” and “necessary”—at first glance are doing different things. But are they really doing different things? Is to say “Necessity is necessary for contingency” just saying “There is something necessary for contingency,” and instead of calling that “something” what it specifically is, are we just focusing on the fact that it is the necessity for contingency?
Consider this. To take a simple ontological framework about objects, for something to be X, it must have certain essential, defining features a, b, c.6 For example, we may say that a “bull” is defined by being an a) uncastrated, b) male c) bovine animal. Of course, these components themselves beg definition, and there may be a certain point where such an approach to ontology breaks down—this fact will become very important three essays from now—but this often tends to be how we intuitively think about things. For any X, then, we can say that there are necessary attributes that make up its defining essence. As such, there is some necessary condition or conditions to the being of anything being what it is. Are we saying that there is some necessity beyond that necessary condition to contingency, such that what is necessary for there to be contingency is a) necessity as such, parallel to the a), b) and c) above in the case of a bull?
Yes. This comes from the fact that contingency, as we’ve understood it, cannot be defined but as the sheer negative of the positive (that which there is) in general. As such, while we know that it requires some attributes that make it what it is—i.e., it can’t just be anything; to be X, it must have the features that define being X—the X in this case is the being, as it happens, that breaks from ordinary causal determination, and which thus cannot be defined from within the analytic apparatus prior to its being. So all we can say about the attribute(s) necessary to it is that they are the attributes of being what is precisely necessary. But what is it for something to be precisely necessary, as in, have to it necessity as such? Phenomenologically, that is exactly what would be regarded as being just right, or what can be affirmed in its being.
So we can see that the necessity we are considering can be seen as distinct from functional or conditional necessity. It as one thing that there is some (necessary) condition for X (contingency) to be X, and another thing that the necessary condition, for this and only this X, is necessity qua necessity, viz. rightness. This isn’t entirely removed from conditional necessity; it emerges in and out of conditional necessity, but while conditional necessity pertains to a modal relation or fact regarding the reality at hand, this necessity, as it were, is of reality itself. It makes for a dialectical reification of logic into what appears to be thicker ontology; rather than a modal relation or fact about reality, it seems to be more so of reality itself. After all, when X = ‘Bull’, we can say “A bull must be a, b, c….” But when X = ‘Contingency’, we cannot concretely finish that sentence, we can only say “A contingency must be… just what it must be.” And it is this “just what it must be-ness” that is, while emergent of conditional necessity, beyond just a fact. When we find that something that breaks with the script of the status quo “had to be just that,” to phrase the same point differently, it is this “having to be just that (to be such a break)” that we are regarding not just as a modal relation or fact, which does exist—if there is a fact, then it is, indeed, something that there is—but as an existent closer to substantiveness (as will be specified further two essays from now).
Second, the above also leads us to see that this necessity isn’t causal or inferential necessity, as is a common mode in which necessity exists. That is to say, the right shape of necessary for a rupture to be a rupture is not caused by events leading up to it—after all, it is the right shape of a rupture that is uncalled for by all prior causality. Likewise, the rightness also cannot be deduced from what has so far happened. The necessity is rather a constitutive or internal necessity—constitutive of or internal to the break itself. Its being is not mandated by external law or structure outside the thing. It does not come after the contingency; it is not that there takes place a break or rupture, and that is then given shape or form in some necessary structure. Rather, in order for there to be a rupture, there must be the coherence that comes through rightness emergent in and through that rupture itself. The value-bearing, reality-expanding rupture upon the fabric of the status quo has necessity to it, but necessity is not imposed from without, not deduced from first principles; it does not arise from, or rest grounded in, any extrinsic law or logic. It erupts immanent to the ontological structure of breakage itself, within the very event that seems simultaneously to have no necessary reason for existing. It is internal to and emergent with the very event of rupture; it must be what it is for the ordering condition of contingency to be fulfilled—once it comes into being, it carries the force of “It could not have been otherwise.”
So if it is not conditional, causal or inferential necessity, how may we summarize this necessity? We have seen that this necessity has a meta-ontic quality: That is, it’s not that there are specific qualities that are necessary conditions for contingency to be. Rather, contingency is the one thing for which it can be said that what is necessary for it is necessity in-itself. But recall what contingency itself is: That for which it could be valid to say that it is what the general workings of reality ought to be for. So, in the becoming of the contingency which is of this necessity, there is the sense that this necessity is not just what must be for contingency to be such, but that in being such, this necessity is of value. As necessity, it is what must be; as the specific kind of necessity required for value-bearing rupture, is it what must be for there to be that which should be, i.e., which is of value—and as such, it also has the sense that it should be. As we noted, this is also the phenomenological thrust of what necessity qua necessity is: That which just should be, or which is simply right—the affirmativeness to this is inherent to the ontology. Thus, we find axiological quality to necessity at its abstracted purest.
The axiological aspect can also be arrived at through the contrast with causal or inferential necessity: The order necessary for breakage with the default workings of reality is not causally mandated in that breakage, i.e., it is not what the break needs post facto to fulfill having some value—it is what the break must bear in its very becoming. When the break does bear this exactitude, it is manifested as that amazing entity or event that need not have been at all, yet if it were to be, must be just that—not by deduction, but by the glowing inner coherence that must have been for the break to be. This break, in being that which is radically unlike reality at large, and that which thereby reality at large could theoretically be for, can conjure that “Yes!” from the subject—because it is therefore simply right, simply right in the purest, most immaculate form of being simply right. That rightness is also necessity; it is the metaphysical click that, by being so, fulfills the axiological purpose just explained. This necessity in-itself for its specific ontic element and its axiological element are inseparable, and having come together such, is what makes the break what it is.
Two essays from now, we will specify more precisely this ontic element, but for now, this necessity can be thought of as axio-ontic necessity. It is this that is the rightness that required for rupture: That with which the becoming of value-bearing rupture is truly so, thus making, as it were, for an axis of affirmation along which the rupture comes to be, and which, in being so, exists with ontological heft beyond that of a mere condition to be met.
Here is what we have seen today: A truly contingent being is one that need not have existed—but to exist as such a break, it must exist in a specific, necessary way. After all, if it would have been something that was utterly distinct from the normal workings of things by being different than what it is, then it would have been different, because that is what would have then been necessary for it be utterly distinct from the normal workings of things—but it’s not, meaning that it had to have been this. The being that simply couldn’t have come to be through the normal, deterministic processes of reality, i.e., through causal necessity, must nevertheless have necessity of a different kind to come about so. The break beyond necessity requires necessity—and there is thereby no escaping necessity—only in bondage to necessity can we transcend it. In the reality-expanding break, necessity remains, as a necessary condition of contingency.
We have seen that this necessity, as experienced, is the rightness of that rupture with given, default reality. The corollary to that is that rightness is not only necessary for rupture, but is itself necessity—that which must have been as it is, and which, given its role for value, merits pure, intrinsic affirmation. It is axiological necessity of an undeducible ontology in excess of necessity considered as a fact for something else to be. Which is to say, in being as it “must,” this is not the “must” of externally determined, Newtonian causality, but the “must” of the rightness inherent to and constitutive of rupture. Its source is not any law of natural or social reality, but the being of the event itself, and it does not have the direction of going forward from the past, but is immanent in the present. It is not overlaid on rupture to make rupture value-bearing, but emergent of and in the value-bearing rupture itself. Our necessity is thus not the necessity of the deterministic workings of reality, but of pure, radiant, objective value, which is only that in surpassing causal necessity.
Hence we have it that when we perceive value, we encounter neither rupture nor rightness alone, but rupture constituted as such only by having rightness to it. The singular being that is of value needs both contingency and necessity. When we stand before something and feel, “This need not exist, and yet, it could not have been otherwise,” we are not toggling between two registers—we are apprehending a unity of opposites,7 and we are living the paradox—and thus, as we will see in the future, truly getting activated in our nature as subject. That is exactly the quality that gives these states of experience their metaphysical power; in them, after all, spirit finds union of its consciousness with the singularity of radical rupture and ordered meaning. It’s why these states resist description, why we can only gasp, standing barely beyond ineffability, “That is just beautiful,” without being to render in logical orthodoxy, and thus under simple linguistic sovereignty, what that means.
But for now, it will suffice to abide with the facts so far obtained: That which is of ultimate, objective value bears the metaphysical signature that it need not have been at all, but in actually coming to be, could not have been otherwise—with these two states fused in a co-generative singularity of existence. The manifestation of value cannot just be unexpected, which does not ensure it is amazing, for the unexpected by itself would be merely random; likewise, it cannot just be harmonious, which does not ensure it delights, for the harmonious by itself would be merely sterile. To delight, it must also amaze—break with hitherto reality—and to amaze, it must also delight—be just right—and together thus we rejoice in it: the Good—free to not be, yet becoming precisely as it must.
I speak here of the preponderance of occurrences to which the term “random” is applied; true ontological randomness could occur at the quantum level, at least per the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
I use the term “order” here but it isn’t entirely appropriate. Since we aren’t dealing with randomness, this clearly isn’t disorder. But a break with things as they are… isn’t quite “order” either. Yes, it must follow some kind of “order,” but the very becoming of some being that is radically unlike how things at large are cannot simply be a matter of “order”. The term “structure”, which I have also used, seems even more incorrect for its full connotation.
Lataji had in fact stated (at a much later point) that among all the composers she had worked with, she used to find the compositions of Madan Mohan to be quite challenging, even for her.
‘Gamak’ is a kind of ornamentation in Indian music that is almost impossible to explain in Western terms, given the microtonal nature of Indian classical music and its development and exposition in scales differentiated not just by notes but also by mood, articulation, timbre, pattern and movement (i.e., in ragas). The best Claude could come up with just now is to define it as “a combination of melismatic phrasing, portamento, controlled vibratto and appogiatura” (and if you know what all of these mean, congrats).
I will make just one basic clarifying remark on this matter right now: Paradox is to be differentiated from a contradiction, which this is not, and which, if it were, would be a fair reason to reject this account.
Of course, this way of looking at the nature of things, essentialism (or a Humean “bundle theory”), is not the only way that ontology may be conducted, and structuralists, poststructuralists, existentialists, etc. may raise legitimate even if not ultimately valid objections.
Though contingency and necessity have an opposing or complementary relation in conventional metaphysics, and though they come together here, they are not to be seen as balanced, dual equivalents, with perfect symmetry in how they relate to each other from one side to another. While both rupture and rightness have ontological standing, they work differently. Two essays from now will incorporate the full exposition of this ontology, with all its symmetries and asymmetries, all its simplicity and complexity.