Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Sketch of an Axiology of Contingency

Yuk Hui

To cite this article: Yuk Hui (2023) Sketch of an Axiology of Contingency, Angelaki, 28:3,
163-171, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216558
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216558

Published online: 21 Jun 2023.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cang20
 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 28 number 3 june 2023

1 introduction
In the beginning was Contingency,
and Contingency was with God,
and Contingency was God.

W e start with the following status quo

ante: in modern philosophy, the ques-
tion of contingency has mainly been treated in
terms of modal logic, namely possibility, exist-
ence (or actuality), and necessity, as well as
their opposites, impossibility, non-existence,
and contingency. Contrary to necessity, whose
judgement is apodictic, contingency means
yuk hui
that otherwise is also possible; it doesn’t have
to be so, therefore its corresponding judgement
is problematic. This form of modal logic, which SKETCH OF AN
we find in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, has
been fruitfully studied in analytic philosophy,
AXIOLOGY OF
and more recently we also see it in the revolts CONTINGENCY
against Kant and the legacy of the Kantian epis-
temology, notably in the work of the French
philosopher Quentin Meillassoux.1 The think-
ers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- subject–object correlation, which according to
ries sought for certainty as the starting point Meillassoux, has fashioned modern European
of knowledge and hoped that given such philosophy since Kant.
surety, it would be possible to build an impec- If Kant’s foundation of knowledge could be
cable system of knowledge immune to errors called a Copernican Revolution in the sense
and illusions. For certain philosophers, given that it is the experience and representation
such a system, it is possible to determine any that makes an object possible instead of the
necessary future event, for example, Laplace’s other way round, Meillassoux’s effort is anti-
infamous demon.2 Meillassoux attempts to revolutionary. It wants to reverse the question
show that contingency has been supressed in by taking the human subject beyond the
those epistemologies that are based on the cor- island of pure reason and embraces the “vast
relation between subject and object, which is and stormy ocean.”3 Meillassoux’s critique of
the product of an anthropocentrism. Therefore, the correlational foundation in Kantian epis-
it is necessary to affirm the necessity of contin- temology and his proposal to rethink contin-
gency to open up a more-than-human epistem- gency has aroused many recent discussions on
ology, namely an epistemology beyond the ontology of contingency and its ethical

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/23/030163-9 © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216558

163
 axiology of contingency
meaning in knowledge production. However,
such an appeal for a non-human epistemology
of absolute contingency falls back into a kind
of mechanism.4 Kant is more sophisticated
than what Meillassoux has presented to us,
and we may even identify an attempt to
escape from “mechanism” in the opening of
“The Architectonic of Pure Reason,”5 though
such an escape was only completed in the Cri-
tique of Judgment. With these inspirations in
mind, I would like to set out a different
path.6 In this short article, instead of address-
ing contingency in modal logic or investigating
its ethical implications, I will attempt to sketch
out what we might call an axiology of contin-
gency, namely the study of the value of
contingency.
This essay is divided into three parts. The
triadic structure follows the paraphrased epi-
graph from the Gospel of St John, where I
have replaced “word” (logos) with “contin-
gency.” The first part addresses the being of
contingency and the necessity of contingency
as the beginning; the second part enquires into
the essence of contingency by identifying con-
tingency and necessity; the third part addresses
the necessity of contingency as end, namely
when contingency attains the highest value.
Although I play on the words of John in a
Hegelian spirit, what I am trying to outline
here – despite of its brevity – is an attempt to
understand contingency as Begriff.
2 in the beginning was contingency
If we say that contingency has value, it is
because it constitutes part of the knowing
process. Veritable knowledge is not merely ana-
lytic, as, for example, in the case of a simple
addition like 1 + 1 = 2; knowing primarily
means reasoning. To reason means to start
from somewhere in order to progress logically.
Therefore, one could start with certainty or
with contingency. For the latter, one starts
with the hypothesis that things could be other-
wise, and there must be sufficient reason for
one thing to be so, or for it to be otherwise.
Like in Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 16 in
F, one is haunted by the question “Must it
be?” before one can arrive at the conclusion
“it must be.” In The Unbearable Lightness of
Being, Milan Kudera refers several times to
Beethoven’s quartet, when the protagonist,
Tomas, asks why his chance encounter with
Tereza, a waitress at the hotel he visits on a
business trip, could be love rather than
merely something contingent.
Facts are contingent and therefore not yet
essential: we meet many people on the street
every day without knowing why or how. The
opening of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
might best exemplify this thesis. Here, the
immediacy of experience (Unmittelbarkeit) is
contingent (zufällig) and is yet to be sublated.
The universal here and now of the immediately
given is only an abstract universal, and subla-
tion means to elevate it to a concrete universal.
That is to say this contingency of immediate
experience stands at the beginning of the dialec-
tics without which there is no movement. Veri-
table knowledge starts with the contingent, like
the route to truth in Parmenides which sets off
from doxa: “nevertheless you shall learn these
also, how it was necessary that the things that
are believed to be should have their being in
general acceptance, ranging through all things
from end to end.”7 Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit opens such path towards a system of
knowledge.8 We know that in the preface to
the Phenomenology, Hegel targets Schelling
and Fichte, who start with the absolute or the
unconditional. Although Fichte’s and Schel-
ling’s philosophies take aim against the Carte-
sian mechanism of reason, their beginning is
still too Cartesian, because like Descartes,
they want to ban all errors from the grounding
of philosophy. However, the ground is also the
unground: all cows are grey in the dark night.
This question of contingency is not only
limited to theoretical philosophy, but also fun-
damental to practical philosophy. In the politi-
cal domain, true freedom is never given as such,
because what is given to us as citizens of the
modern state is only the abstract right,
namely according to the circumstances under
which certain acts are allowed or forbidden.
The right to vote is not exactly freedom,
because the act is in itself arbitrary, zufällig,
164

the same word often also rendered as contin-
gent or fortuitous. In so far as such an act is
arbitrary, to vote for a president would be logi-
cally no different from choosing between
bottles of Coke and Pepsi. That means having
the right doesn’t yet mean freedom, and there-
fore it doesn’t mean necessity either. Now, in
both the theoretical and practical domains veri-
table knowledge demands contingency as the
beginning, as its very basis. But can one start
from contingency and arrive at veritable knowl-
edge? We know that this is the enterprise of the
Hegelian dialectics, which is called logic, but
not in the sense of the formal logic that we
understand today.
Hegel makes contingency necessary for the
system of knowledge. It is necessary, because
it is the negative of veritable knowledge. It is
not possible to have veritable knowledge
without starting from contingency; however,
contingency is yet to be eliminated from
truth. Nature is contingent, because a human
might have eleven toes, a bird might have two
heads. Such phenomena exhibit the “feebleness
of the Concept in nature.”9 Spirit, on the con-
trary, overcomes such empirical contingency,
because in the life of the spirit, the concept is
no longer vulnerable to contingency, it
becomes capable of engendering the world.
The question of contingency in Hegel has
been explored by many authors. Dieter Hen-
rich’s work comes to mind, or Bernard
Mabille’s Hegel. L’é preuve de la contingence,
which may well be the most systematic and pro-
found analysis of this question and certainly has
much better things to say on the subject than I
can do here. However, in contrast to these
authors, what I am trying to do here is to under-
stand the wider implications of the concept of
contingency. In Recursivity and Contingency,
I proposed that Hegel’s take on the Kantian
concept of the organism led to a further devel-
opment of what I call a mechano-organicism, in
contradistinction to Schelling’s development of
a Naturphilosophie.10 It is also in Hegel’s
system that one finds an affinity between his
mechano-organicism and modern cybernetics,
a thesis that was put forward by Gotthard
165
hui
Günther in his Consciousness of Machines: A
Metaphysics of Cybernetics.11
In Hegel, we find two meanings of contin-
gency: first, it means arbitrary, therefore non-
essential; second, even though it is inessential,
it is indispensable, therefore necessary. The
absolute is abandoned as a starting point;
instead, it has to be at the end. This mode of
operation, if we can give it a name with such
a technical sense, finds its significance in
modern science and technology. We just have
to look into modern technology to rediscover
the ambiguity of contingency as both inessen-
tial arbitrariness and indispensable necessity.
For example, in the information theories of
both Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon,
we encounter this ambiguity regarding the
interpretation of entropy. For Wiener, who
understands entropy in line with thermody-
namics, entropy designates the degree of disor-
ganization. Information for Wiener designates
the opposite of entropy, namely, a high
degree of organization. Therefore, the more
information a system possesses, the less disor-
ganized it is. On the contrary, for Shannon,
information is the measure of entropy, and
more information means less redundancy,
that is to say, less regularity and more
entropy. For Wiener and Shannon, the sign
preceding the value of information, in terms
of entropy, has opposite meanings. However,
this does not mean that they have a different
understanding of the cybernetic system. We
are dealing with two sides of the same coin,
namely contingency as what has to be over-
come, for instance in the form of noise that dis-
turbs the channel of communication and has to
be eliminated to ensure accurate transmission;
but also, the understanding that inessential
noise is unavoidable, and might even be used
to boost the efficiency of transmission. These
two meanings of contingency, as inessential
yet necessary, constitute the basic principle of
what Philip Mirowski calls a cyborg science.12
The embrace of noise has become self-evident
in modern computation, in light of its indispen-
sable role in the training of machine learning
algorithms.
 axiology of contingency
3 and contingency was with god
However, in these two senses, we may say that
contingency remains passive, that is to say, con-
tingency has not yet developed into a concept
proper in the Hegelian sense. Contingency has
not yet fully overcome itself as something
purely accidental in the sense of the symvevikós
(συμβεβηκός, accident), which Aristotle defines
in the Metaphysics as any property or accident
that only results from the notion of a thing,
but does not enter into its essence or definition.
That is to say, contingency is still close to
nothing. It has no more than an ephemeral exist-
ence which, even though it may constitute a con-
dition of possibility for other events or entities to
exist, is still contingent upon them, therefore the
accident as a passive given still has to be sub-
lated. For contingency to attain itself as a
concept, it has to pass from a mere passivity to
activity, namely to assert itself as value, a value
that is no less than that of determinacy.
We find examples of such a sublation of the
contingent in music, for instance, in the sto-
chastic music of Ianis Xenakis, who famously
claimed that “pure chance and pure determin-
ism are only two facets of one entity.”13 Xena-
kis’s stochastic music is an attempt to
discover the value of chance túkhē (tύχη) and
disorder ataxia (ατάξις), which are related to
his being Greek. Túkhē and moîra (μοῖρᾰ, lot,
destiny) after all, are not exactly opposites –
but this is merely my own speculation. In the
opening of his treatise on stochastic music,
Xenakis claims that:
Since antiquity the concepts of chance
(tύχη), disorder (ataxia), and disorganization
were considered as the opposite and negation
of reason (logos), order (taxis), and organiz-
ation (systasis). It is only recently that
knowledge has been able to penetrate
chance and has discovered how to separate
its degrees – in other words to rationalize it
progressively, without, however, succeeding
in a definitive and total explanation of the
problem of “pure chance.”14
This opposition between chance and reason,
according to Xenakis, has now been rejected,
and chance, or the aleatoric, no longer has the
status of a merely passive negativity in epistem-
ology. Stochastic music is not about improvisa-
tion as practised by the serialists, Stockhausen
or Boulez. By aleatoric or stochastic, Xenakis
understands a probability, like flipping a coin.
Maybe we can say that here the contingent or
the aleatory is not second to determinacy, but
instead, contingency and determinacy are two
facets of the same entity. However, what
would this really mean? Would it mean that
contingency and determinacy are no longer
different? They are most certainly different,
for there surely would be no need for two
names otherwise. In terms of their functionality
in the system – and if we understand a piece of
music as system – they each have their value
and therefore both are necessary. If we can
say that determinism here means following
tonal rules, and tonal rules are established
according to necessities, for example, the
harmony of chords and scales, then chance
could mean the violation of these rules, or the
production of unexpected irregularities. There-
fore, in stochastic music, we can say that contin-
gency and determinacy are both necessary.
That might be one way to understand Xenakis’s
claim that pure chance and pure determinism
are two facets of the same entity.
However, we encounter another problem: to
what extent is this necessary contingency not
simply arbitrary? That is to say, even if one
agrees that contingency is necessary in the
case of Xenakis, it doesn’t explain why such
and such a note is brought into the compo-
sition. We know there are noises, and everyone
can make noises; however, not all noises
assembled together become music. Xenakis
praises pure chance, but he equally emphasizes
organization. For noises to be called music –
even if noise is not ruled out as a possible com-
ponent of music – the composer has to confront
the question, to what extent these noises are
arbitrary or not. Xenakis uses aleatoric rules
to arrange (1) the time between notes, (2) the
pitch, (3) the length of notes, and (4) the
number of notes into different distributions
(exponential, linear, normal, Poisson15). In his
166

composition “Herma,” the notes are synchro-
nized according to an atonal rule:
I took the first step in that direction in
Herma. I have told you that I chose three
sets of the notes of the piano and introduced
them by playing each note, stochastically,
that is, without establishing any link
between the notes. That is also the first
stage in the relationship between the
elements of a set.
The next stage is to create links between
the notes, that is, intervals. In other words
we look for a law to determine the points
on the line. The line is actually the conti-
nuum of pitches.16
We can find an analogous role for contingency
in the visual arts, for instance, in the surrealist
technique of collage or the abstract paintings
of Kandinsky. We take Kandinsky as an
example because the painter himself was also
haunted by contingency. We know that Kan-
dinsky liberated dots, lines, and surfaces
from the rules of perspective and represen-
tation of traditional painting. However, why
is this dot in this specific position and not in
another; why is the line here and not there?
Why is a line added instead of a plane? In
the case of Kandinsky, we are not troubled
by any barrier to embracing contingency,
since the violation of rules belongs to the
artist’s ultimate right; instead, we are
haunted by not being able to demonstrate
how contingency becomes necessary, rather
than being merely arbitrary. Kandinsky has
to resolve this problem by what he calls an
“inner necessity,” which he opposes to the
external necessity imposed by the rules of per-
spective. In other words, this inner necessity is
not imposed by way of an exteriority, but
rather the exigence of interiority.
Everything “dead” trembled. Everything
showed me its face, its innermost being, its
secret soul, inclined more often to silence
than to speech – not only the stars, moon,
woods and flowers of which poets sing, but
even a cigar butt lying in the ashtray, a
patient white trouser-button looking up at
you from a puddle on the street, a
167
hui
submissive piece of bark carried through
the long grass in the ant’s strong jaws to
some uncertain and vital end, the page of a
calendar, torn forcibly by one’s consciously
outstretched hand from the warm compan-
ionship of the block of remaining pages.
Likewise, every still and every moving
point (= line) became for me just as alive
and revealed to me its soul.17
For Kandinsky this question of inner necessity
is key to overcome the arbitrariness of contin-
gency; here it is life, or a vital force that must
make the parts a whole. The decomposition of
form into dots, lines, and surfaces demands a
re-composition, just like the introduction of
stochastic music demands a new form of com-
position in the literal sense of the word, com-
position, putting two things together. There-
fore, we may say that the question of contin-
gency that we are dealing with here has
already gone far beyond the question of
modality. Contingency asserts itself as a neces-
sity in the artistic process not only because it
cannot be eliminated, but also because it has a
role to play in the composition of beings.
An analogous relation between contingency
and necessity can be found in the I Ching,
which Xenakis also referred to. The I Ching
looks, at first glance, like a deterministic
system, represented by perfectly ordered and
mathematically operable hexagrams. When we
look at the explanation of the I Ching, all con-
tingent phenomena are given meaning, every
appearance is a sign of something else, for
example, seeing fog resembling a dragon in a
field means one will have a good encounter on
that day. The sages observe phenomena in
nature and describe the relations between a
phenomenon and a human event. In the I
Ching, we find a universe of signs, and all
signs have meanings. The determination of
these meanings is carried out through divina-
tion, for instance, by following the pattern of
a tortoise shell or counting the stalks of a
milfoil, which leads us once more to the coinci-
dence of determinacy and contingency.
Retrospectively, one might argue that
Xenakis conflates chance and probability,
 axiology of contingency
túkhē and aftómaton (αυτόματον). Túkhē ,
however, is not the same as aftómaton, aftóma-
ton is only probability, and I think this may be
something that Xenakis ignored, as he appears
to consider túkhē merely as chance; but túkhē
also means luck. We find the difference in
Book II of Aristotle’s Physics, where Aristotle
makes a distinction between two kinds of possi-
bilities; one is called chance túkhē the other
probability, aftómaton. When we throw dice,
every time we expect one out of six probabil-
ities, that is aftómaton. Chance is different, it
is also luck. Aristotle tells a story of going to
the agora and meeting someone who had bor-
rowed money from him, and this person
returns it to him by chance. This kind of
luck, of course, probably only happens to Aris-
totle. However, the distinction he makes
between these two contingent events could
also be read as referring to two different
values. Aftómaton is homogeneous in the
sense that any outcome is a mere statistical
fact; chance is critical, because it may make
your day: imagine being worried about how to
pay for bread, and suddenly someone puts
money in your pocket! Of course, an event
that is later determined as túkhē , may at first
have seemed like aftómaton. Aristotle says
that all instances of túkhē are aftómaton, but
not vice versa.18 What is it that determines an
event as túkhē and not as mere probability?
4 and contingency was god
Here we will climb to the top of our axiology (if
there is really a hierarchy at all), concerning the
question of causality, namely why an event is
túkhē , or fortune, but not aftómaton. We are
concerned less with the cause of the actual, con-
tingent event, since in so far as it is contingent,
it can come from anywhere. For example, there
has been talk of the contingency of the laws of
nature ever since É mile Boutroux, who
argued that laws of nature are always open to
something outside it, or even demands some-
thing outside it for its law to be completed.
Therefore, it is less our concern here to con-
sider the cause of contingency, than dealing
with contingency as a cause. What does it
mean for contingency to be a cause? If there
is a cause, then there is an effect. The effect
follows from the cause. For example, someone
contracts a dangerous virus by chance and
dies two days later. The death seems to be
caused by the contingent encounter with the
virus; however, the true cause is the virus, not
the encounter. I recently read in the local
news that a fourteen-year-old boy committed
suicide, and later he was found to have been
Covid-positive; consequently, his death was
classified as a death caused by Covid. Did the
boy commit suicide because of Covid? If that
were true, then the virus would be responsible
for his death – as a corporeal cause, if we
follow the Stoics. The Greeks have the word
aitı́a (αιτία) or cause, designating whatever is
responsible. In this case, we can speak of a
causal relation between the virus and death, a
necessity. The encounter between man and
virus is subsumed into this causal relation.
However, there are also causes that do not
follow the causal chain of necessity, where the
relation between cause and effect is open to con-
tingency. That is to say, contingency as a cause
may lead to a contingent effect. This may sound
as if arbitrariness merely leads to arbitrariness.
Not exactly, we have to introduce something
else into this causal relation, namely, the will
– which is also why Maxwell’s demon has a
higher value than Laplace’s demon, because
Laplace’s demon ignores entropy and Maxwell’s
demon is primarily negentropic.19 As Deleuze
highlights, the Stoics, the same school that
developed modal logic, call this in-corporeal
cause, the will, a quasi-cause.
The Stoics saw clearly that the event is subject
to a double causality, referring on one hand to
mixtures of bodies which are its cause and, on
the other, to other events which are its quasi-
cause. On the contrary, the Epicureans did
not succeed in developing their theory of
envelopes and surfaces and they did not
reach the idea of incorporeal effects, perhaps
because the “simulacra” remain subjected to
the single causality of bodies in depth.20
In his Logic of Sense, Deleuze appropriates
the quasi-cause of the Stoics. Quasi- means
168

similar; it is similar to a cause, but it is not
exactly the cause as we commonly understand
it. When we call something a cause, we mean
that it is responsible for a consequence.
When it is one cause among many others con-
tributing to the consequence, then we say that
it is a partial cause. A partial cause is not a
quasi-cause, since a partial cause is still a
cause, in so far as necessity is concerned. A
quasi-cause is a cause where the relation
between cause and effect is not bound by the
necessity. This means that the cause has no
necessary corporeal relation to the effect.
However, it could bring about the effect
through the transformation of the will. This
quasi-cause, as Deleuze writes, intervenes “as
nonsense or as an aleatory point” and assures
“the full autonomy of the effect.”21 This
means that the contingent event is no longer
“close to nothing,” but is now dominant.
Perhaps the best example to demonstrate the
quasi-cause is Nietzsche’s own illness. Being
ill does not make someone become a philoso-
pher; there is no necessary causal relation
between being ill and becoming a philosopher;
however, being ill makes Nietzsche a great
thinker of his time.
It would be preferable to say that he “quasi-
perished”; for sickness and death are the
event itself, subject as such to a double caus-
ality: that of bodies, states of affairs, and
mixtures, but also that of the quasi-cause
which represents the state of organization
or disorganization of the incorporeal
surface. Nietzsche, it seems, became insane
and died of general paralysis, a corporeal
syphilitic mixture. But the pathway which
this event followed, this time in relation to
the quasi-cause inspiring his entire work
and co-inspiring his life, has nothing to do
with his general paralysis, the ocular
migraines and the vomiting from which he
suffered, with the exception of giving them
a new causality, that is, an eternal truth inde-
pendent of their corporeal realization – thus
a style in an oeuvre instead of a mixture in
the body. We see no other way of raising
the question of the relations between an
oeuvre and illness except by means of this
double causality.22
169
hui
Or if we look at the great Romani-French jazz gui-
tarist, Django Reinhard, who lost two fingers of
the left hand during a fire accident. One does
not have to lose two fingers in order to become
a guitarist, and indeed normally one fails to
become a guitarist after having lost two fingers,
but Django became a better guitarist than he
had been after losing two fingers. The fire in the
caravan was contingent; however, it was also a
quasi-cause that contributed to making Django
a greater musician – and made those with a five-
fingered hand imitate his style featuring three
fingers. The last biographical example I would
like to offer is that of Bernard Stiegler, who
became a philosopher through incarceration.
Again, one need not go to jail to become a phil-
osopher; as we know, most inmates are not and
will never be philosophers, but being in jail
could be a quasi-cause of becoming a philosopher,
when one is able to generate an inner necessity. In
this sense, Stiegler always said he was a rationalist,
more rational than those who believe in causal
laws, since nihil est sine ratione. This concept
of the quasi-cause, this will to make contingency
necessary, stands as the transformative power of
his thinking. I quote here a passage from an inter-
view with Elie During entitled “Philosopher Par
Accident”:
To put it differently, in passing through the
question of the tragic, the critique that I am
referring to consists in thinking the accident
first, and the accidental origin of human fate;
thinking and philosophising the accident
and with the accident, if I can put it this
way, and therefore by accident, otherwise it
would contribute to reactive discourses.23
Stiegler remains here rather Greek, but more in
the tragic than the Stoic mode24 – because the
Stoics are no longer thinkers of tragedy. The
in-corporeal cause does not suffice to account
for the value that Deleuze assigns to Nietzsche’s
illness. Maybe we can say that it is in tragedy that
contingency acquires its highest
value, and it is also through the
negation of the negation of con-
tingency, that the hero trans-
cends the mortality and stands
on the side of the Olympian gods.
 axiology of contingency
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
1 See Meillassoux.
2 For Laplace’s demon, see Laplace 4:
We may regard the present state of the uni-
verse as the effect of its past and the cause of
its future. An intellect which at a certain
moment would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of all
items of which nature is composed, if this
intellect were also vast enough to submit
these data to analysis, it would embrace in
a single formula the movements of the great-
est bodies of the universe and those of the
tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing
would be uncertain and the future just like
the past would be present before its eyes.
3 Kant A236, B295.
4 For a critique of Meillassoux’s computationism,
see Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, ch. 5.
5 Kant A833, B861.
6 It is not my intention to claim that Kant in all his
works has limited contingency to modality, nor is
it my intention to defend Kant in the face of Meil-
lassoux’s reading; Kant’s epigenesis of reason
cannot avoid the value of contingency in teleology,
which I set out to address in this article. “The
Architectonic of Pure Reason” (Chapter III of
the Transcendental Doctrine of Method, the
second section of the Critique) is an unsatisfactory
attempt to search for a unity between the specu-
lative use of reason (a metaphysics of nature)
and the practical use of reason (a metaphysics of
the moral), and such unification is mediated by
the term purposiveness. It is because the Critique
of Pure Reason was largely a treatise on the apodic-
tic use of reason, and the hypothetical use of
reason only came to its centre in the Critique of
Practical Reason and further clarified in the Critique
of Judgment.
7 Parmenides, Fragment 1, 45.
8 See Hegel, Phenomenology.
9 Hegel, Philosophy, §250, 215.
10 See Hui, Recursivity and Contingency, chs. 1 and
2.
11 See Günther.
12 See Mirowski.
13 Xenakis 4.
14 Ibid. 205.
15 A Poisson distribution is a discrete probability
distribution, which indicates the probability of an
event happening a certain number of times
within a given interval of time or space.
16 Varga 93–94.
17 Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” 361, qtd by Henry
133–34.
18 Aristotle, Book II, ch. V, 197b.
19 For Maxwell’s demon, see Leff and Rex 4:
If we conceive of a being whose faculties are
so sharpened that he can follow every mol-
ecule in its course, such a being, whose attri-
butes are as essentially finite as our own,
would be able to do what is impossible to
us. For we have seen that molecules in a
vessel full of air at uniform temperature are
moving with velocities by no means uniform,
though the mean velocity of any great
number of them, arbitrarily selected, is
almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose
that such a vessel is divided into two portions,
A and B, by a division in which there is a small
hole, and that a being, who can see the individ-
ual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so
as to allow only the swifter molecules to
pass from A to B, and only the slower mol-
ecules to pass from B to A. He will thus,
without expenditure of work, raise the temp-
erature of B and lower that of A, in contradic-
tion to the second law of thermodynamics.
20 Deleuze 94.
21 Ibid. 95.
22 Ibid. 108.
23 Stiegler 94.
24 For a more detailed exploration on the
concept of the tragist, please see Hui, Art and
Cosmotechnics.
170
 hui

bibliography Xenakis, I. Formalized Music: Thought and

Mathematics in Composition. Pendragon Press,
Aristotle. Physics Books I and II. Translated by 1990.
William Charlton, Oxford UP, 1992.
Boutroux, É. De la contingency des lois de la nature.
Librairie Félix Alcan, 1921.
Deleuze, G. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark
Lester, Columbia UP, 1990.
Günther, G. Das Bewußtsein der Maschinen: Eine
Metaphysik der Kybernetik. Agis-Verlag, 1963.
Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated
by A.V. Miller, Oxford UP, 1977.
Hegel, G.W.F. Philosophy of Nature. Translated by
M.J. Petry, vol. 1, George Allen and Unwin, 1970.
Henry, M. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky.
Translated by Scott Davidson, Continuum, 2009.
Hui, Y. Art and Cosmotechnics. U of Minnesota P,
2021.
Hui, Y. Recursivity and Contingency. Rowman and
Littlefield International, 2019.
Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by
Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, 1996.
Laplace, P.S. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.
Translated by F.W. Truscott and F.L. Emory,
Dover, 1951.
Leff, H.S., and A.F. Rex, editors. Maxwell’s Demon:
Entropy, Information, Computing. Adam Hilger,
1990.
Mabille, B. Hegel. L’épreuve de la contingence.
Édition Hermann, 2013.
Meillassoux, Q. After Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray
Brassier, Continuum, 2008.
Mirowski, P. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a
Cyborg Science. Cambridge UP, 2001.
Parmenides. The Fragments of Parmenides. Edited
by A.H. Coxon, Parmenides, 2009.
Stiegler, B. Philosophising by Accident. Translated by
Benoit Dillet, Edinburgh UP, 2017.
Yuk Hui
Varga, B.A. Conversations with Ianis Xenakis. Faber F/7 Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre
& Faber, 1996. City University of Hong Kong
18 Tat Hong Ave
Kowloon, Hong Kong
E-mail: yukhui@cityu.edu.hk