Hegel on Possibility by Nahum Brown;

Author:Nahum Brown;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Formal contingency: The indifference strategy

This unity of possibility and actuality is contingency. The contingent is an actuality that is, at the same time, determined only as possibility, whose other or opposite equally is. This actuality is merely being or existence, but is posited in its truth as having the value of positedness or as having the value of possibility. On the other hand, possibility is self-reflectedness, in other words, the in-itself posited as positedness. What is possible is an actual in the sense of actuality. It has the same value as contingent actuality. It is itself something contingent. (WLII 205)

Hegel claims that the unmediated actualization of the possible itself leads to an unsustainable contradiction, in which, it turns out, the possible becomes impossible. But this does not stop thought from attempting to conceive of both sides of possibility as one actuality. The immediate, unsustainable contradiction of actualizing both sides of possibility at once generates a series of developmental stages of the modal categories. Each stage of Hegel’s developmental modality “softens” the contradiction of actualizing the possible qua the possible by expanding our conception of actuality to include the negative side of possibility as part of its constitution. Formally, something cannot be both itself and the opposite of itself since this would lead directly to contradiction. But if the actualization of the opposition inherent in possibility were to become “softened” to the point at which the two sides of possibility were no longer to lead to contradiction explicitly, this would affirm the differences that the opposition had contained without causing the erasure of these differences from existence.

Essentially, Hegel expands the category of actuality to include the positive and negative sides of possibility as one actuality. The first model of expansion is “formal contingency.” In contingency, the negativity of the possible—that what is possible can and can not be—becomes contingent actuality. What is immediately actual is a fact of existence. But this fact is contingent, which means that it is but its other could have been. The negative side of possibility appears through whatever happens immediately to exist in actuality, and in this way, possibility itself is also posited, however indirectly. Because A is a contingent actuality, A posits -A as what equally exists. Contingency thus presents, in a certain respect, the actual A as containing the existence of -A within its own concept. The reason why this is not a contradiction is because A and -A contain each other in a relationship of indifference. The indifference strategy explains as non-contradictory what would otherwise be the explicit contradiction of A and -A together. To recognize actuality as contingent actuality is to insert enough mediation between the positive and negative sides of possibility so that the actualization of the possible itself can appear in existence. However, it appears this way only partially and insufficiently through the division of what is from what could have been.

Let’s visualize what Hegel has in mind. The actual world appears in its immediate givenness. This is the simple actuality of concrete existence.

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