Philosophy reveals how accidents become essential and essence becomes accidental

Evidence

Remaining irreducible to self-presence, this chance is hard to grasp (saisir). Have I grasped it? To justify the subject’s explosive nature, I have tried to show what constitutes its mechanism or its apparatus: the ontological seesaw of the substance-subject. The process of substance’s selfdetermination leans from side to side. Of necessity, one of its slopes will become larger than the other: either the ‘becoming essential of the accident’ in the Greek moment of subjectivity, or the ‘becoming accidental of essence’ in the modern moment. In the first case I showed how the ‘exemplary individuals’ of Greece tended on their own to acquire the force and the ontological dignity of essence. And then I looked at how the essential being of a revealed God, who enters into his own kenosis and into the life of contingency, completes the process of its own accidentalization. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1256 (#expands, via linked claim)

Habit is the process whereby the contingent becomes essential. Man can ‘present the genus’to the degree that habit is the unforeseen element of the genus. Habit, then, appears as the future of the undifferentiated genus. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 601 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An event becomes a symptom only when external accident translates into lived experience — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 1815; Neurology offers a novel concept of the event free of accident and damage — Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain…, 4309; The essence of necessity is contingency, grounded in an event — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 128 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Plasticity’s mechanism is the substance-subject seesaw between essence and accident #expands (0.90) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1256
• Habit transforms contingent acts into essential determinations of being. #exemplifies (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 601