Religion in Late Modernity

CHAPTER 1. The Contingencies of Nature

CHAPTER 1 The Contingencies of Nature Nature Defined The thesis of this chapter, fundamental to and presupposed in nearly all the others, is that civilized experience includes a primordial apprehension of the contingency of nature.1 The expressions of this apprehension of contingency have taken many forms, from the mythic to the philosophical and theological . The expressions have different motifs in different cultures, and there is no preferred cultural starting point. The point here is to explore the truth about this apprehension of contingency, however, and so the argument is advanced for a preferable contemporary way of ontological contingency, framed in the discourse of Western intellectual traditions as informed by the East and South Asian. In particular, two dimensions to the contingency of nature will be distinguished, namely the contingency of natural things within nature, and the contingency of nature as such, and it will be argued that the apprehension of both is one of the founding definitions of human culture. The first can be called cosmological contingency, characteristic of cosmological processes, and the second ontological contingency, the contingency of being as such, from ontos, one of the Greek words for “being.”2 These two senses of contingency are closely related. From a cross-cultural perspective, the notions of both nature and its apprehension are problematic, and some of the discussion to follow treats these problems. Underlying the discussion is a philosophic supposition that will not be defended here but only illustrated, namely, the hypothesis that reality has characters that are variously discerned by the signs and symbols we have to interpret them.3 Reality is not created by our signs, as some allege, but engaged by them. Our signs direct our engagements more or less accurately as they interpret reality in important and relevant respects, and insofar as they register and correlate the important and relevant distinctions and features. This is true as well for the signs and symbols of contingency. We need to inquire whether they interpret reality rightly, not whether there is a reality to which they refer. The inquiry in principle might conclude that the signs and symbols of contingency are misleading because everything about nature is necessary, or that they are hopelessly confused and incoherent. But to the contrary, we can make sense of the primordial expressions of apprehended contingency and will find that they engage us perspicuously with important elements of reality. The following discussion combines historical observations with fairly technical abstract philosophic argumentation. The latter might not be to the taste of some readers, who are invited to skim ahead quickly. The distinctions introduced here are fundamental to nearly all the subsequent chapters, and usually are summarized when they come up there. But as it becomes clear just how fundamental these distinctions are, and their very wide applicability, it might be important to return to this discussion for the detail. “Nature” in the modern sense is a notion that has developed swiftly through the evolution of modern science. There is nothing quite like the Western history of the idea of nature in the other great civilizations of South and East Asia.4 Notwithstanding the diversity of civilizations, we can consider an abstract definition of what is natural that does indeed have counterparts in all: Let us hypothesize that a natural thing is anything that is conditioned or caused by something else and that itself can be a condition. This definition resonates with the Latin roots of the word “nature,” which have to do with being born or arising from something else. The definition is abstract enough to allow for many senses of conditioning or causation, not only those arising within Western cultures but in other cultures as well. Defining natural things skirts the problem of defining nature as a whole or nature as such. Whether nature is indeed a whole, a totality, a system, is extremely problematic and is not supposed to be so in all cultures or even consistently in Western scientific culture.5 A reasonably innocent conception of nature as such, however, can be constructed from the definition of natural things, namely, that nature is the collection of natural things related as conditioning and conditioned things, such that any two things are connected, however indirectly, by a route of conditions. This little definition leaves open such questions as the tightness of conditioning relations, the uniformity or arbitrariness of orders, whether there is a principle 10 Late-Modern Topics [18.188.152.162...