Contingency is the inexplicable, pointless thisness of things

Evidence

Eventually, while looking at the ‘boiled leather’ of a chestnut tree in the local park and feeling the nausea again, Roquentin realises that it is not just the tree but the Being of the tree that is bothering him. It is the way in which, inexplicably and pointlessly, it simply sits there refusing to make sense or tone itself down. This is what contingency is: the random, outrageous thisness of things. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 336

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines contingency as the random, outrageous thisness of things — the term’s central existentialist meaning.
• XREF: Connects to Heidegger’s thrownness/Geworfenheit and the general existentialist doctrine that existence precedes essence. — connects to: Self-perception is impossible because the for-itself is contingency; The question why being exists is meaningless; contingency is being’s root — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1434; The essence of necessity is contingency, grounded in an event — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 128 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• The essence of necessity is contingency, grounded in an event #expands (0.78) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 128
• Contingency and necessity are co-implicated with no ontological priority between them. #expands (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1114