(Below parts of a translation of Jean Grenier’s text ‘Le Choix’ / The Choice. This is the third paragraph of the first part of the book. Other bits and bops of my translation can be found here. This is a work in progress, and my progress is slow. The translation might not live up to academic standards. – HvS)
Jean Grenier Writes:
|
[p8] The notion of contingency is essential. Not all philosophers like this: also Spinoza… |
|
But for all that we have said so far, it must still be true that the world can be considered to be contingent. And that a grown man will not consider it childish to apply the notion of ‘the possible’ to the world. And that he might still think that this world of which he is a part might not have been. Or that he is surprised that it exists (τὶ) and that it exists how it does (τὶ τὸ ὄν). |
|
Voila, that which inspires this astonishment is the philosophical crux par excellence. It is this which the great philosophers refuse to admit. For instance, Spinoza, for whom wisdom consists of becoming conscious of the necessity of the world. |
|
But Spinoza [still] starts by noting the astonishment in which men are faced with natural events and their hunger for teleological and supernatural explanation. And he is indignant about this. He wants to heal them. So what more can we say, except that he is himself also in the presence of this feeling of surprise, common to all men who reflect? |
|
Moreover, [if we look at his philosophy,] he indeed admits that everything was absolutely and blindly predetermined by the divine substance. But at the same time he no less recognizes the difference between substance, attributes, and modes. And that the natural fact is not strictly necessary, that everything depends on the previous established order [9] and that consequently the fact that one man exists instead of some other, is still fully fortuitous. |
|
And so contingency resurfaces once more, though we thought it to be banished. The whole is necessary, but it turns out [its] details are not. Spinoza did not really suppress all contingency, but he only displaced it. To himt, the possible is a consequence, not a principle. |
|
[We can look at it like this:] In the same way that we consider it to be up to us to plant a tree, but also think that once it is planted, it cannot help but give flowers and fruits in number determined by its species, the soil, the season, etcetera; in the same way, Spinoza considers the tree to be necessary and the number and quality of its fruits to be contingent. |
|
In this he simply acts like the scholastic theologians, and like all those who are oriented more towards God than towards mankind. They are more struck than their adversaries by contingency of the world, and the console themselves by attaching it to some further necessity [Note 6] |
|
So it is really contingency which is the first mover of all speculation. This idea can be expressed as: there is no reason for the world to be rather that for it not to be. This is the idea of radical contingency. Or again, there is no reason for the world to be such rather than so. This is the idea of modal contingency. The first is the idea of the contingency of Being, and the second that of the contingency of the order of what is. |
– Translation HvS
Pragmata 