Re: To Snob or Not to Snob

[ken <kenneth.mackendrick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 02 Jun 1999 12:49:56 -0400  Christopher Gunn wrote:

> OK, let's try for one more round of disentanglement....

> "Radically contingency":

> Do you mean "radically contingent," at the outer fringe of
> contingent possibilities (i.e., unusual; dense in particularity;
> highly perspectivial in a kind of Nietzchean sense),

> OR do you mean "radical contingency," a configuration of
> contingent circumstances that make radicalism possible
> (i.e., some almost random kinds of not-knowing give rise to
> critical distance).
>
> I guess these options aren't mutually exclusive, but I'm not
> sure that "radically contingency" is a good way to express
their synthesis.  Or is it something else instead that you
mean? I'm not belaboring this to be picky;  it strikes me as an
important issue that I'd like a better handle on....

I'm pretty sure not A, and maybe B.

It's a thorny issue that I don't completely understand, and I'm
not completely sure what you mean here.  However, as I see
it, the problem is this:  Is contingency ontological (are things
in themselves contingent) or is it epistemological (an
expression of the fact that we do not know the complete chain
of causes...).

So I'll follow it this way.  Contingency expreses the
incompleteness of our knowledge, but this incompleteness
also ontologically defines the object of knowledge itself.

In Hegelese: it is only the subject's (free) act of 'dotting the i'
which retroactively installs necessity.  So the subject
recognizes (and thus constitutes) necessity as the supreme
act of freedom and as the self-supression of necessity.  So,
every necessity is in itself radically contingent - in that it
cannot be deduced, inferred, but only retroactively
presupposed.

I'll try to think of an example.  I'm thinking of the movie Dark
City for some reason.  Reality is.  But we only know that
reality is because we pass judgement regarding what could be
otherwise.  In other words, we recognize that the world could
be different, but it isn't, so we assume that certain things are
necessary.  So the *is* here is installed as a retroactive
presupposition of a contingent decision which constitutes it as
such.

Oh my.

ken