One of the most enduring philosophical intuitions is that events sometimes exceed the reach of law. A spear flies wide, a lover meets another by coincidence in a marketplace, a kingdom collapses not by plan but by “ill-starred” circumstances; and behind these instances looms a question older than metaphysics: do things sometimes simply happen?
Already in the archaic poets, one sees that the ancient world recognized a domain of events not easily absorbed into the regular operations of divine or natural causality. Homer’s narratives are hardly inclined toward randomness – Zeus and Athena guide the fates of men – but there are moments where the poet hesitates to ascribe agency. When Achilles hurls his spear and it “went astray,” the text leaves unexplained whether a god diverted it or whether the world itself harbors a small, ungoverned drift. The casting of the lots in the Iliad, falling from a bronze helmet as though endowed with their own volition, marks a curious threshold: the space where signs, divine intention, and blind throw become indistinguishable. Orpheus, in turn, supplies an even more archaic sense of emergence, for in the Orphic cosmogonies the universe is born from Night and a cosmic egg that ruptures without discernible prompting. The birth of Phanes is not the execution of a plan; it is a radiant event, spontaneous in a way that later philosophical systems would struggle to categorize. The Orphic cosmos is not chaotic per se, but its inception is one of fecund unpredictability, a creative accident that inaugurates order.
Yet this early intuition of spontaneity is countered decisively by ancient traditions in which chance is not primordial but derivative. The hymns of Zarathustra, among the oldest philosophical-religious compositions we possess, articulate a world divided between asha and druj, truth and deception, order and distortion. The cosmos is not haphazard but moral. What seems accidental is often situated within the struggle of the two primal spirits who, as the Gathas say, “made life and not-life.” This dualistic framework allows contingency because it affirms meaningful choice; but it constrains the metaphysics of chance by interpreting contingency as the battleground of freedom rather than as a structural feature of reality. Indeed, for Zarathustra the existence of chance is less a metaphysical datum than a moral requirement: it is what permits the just to distinguish themselves from the wicked.
A more extreme inversion of the Orphic ethos appears in the teachings of Mani. Whereas the Orphic world is a spontaneous efflorescence, the Manichaean cosmos is a catastrophe, the product of a fateful and unhappy collision between realms of Light and Darkness. Here, the world itself is an accident, but one of a tragic, not creative, kind. Chance is reinterpreted as the agonized remainder of a primordial disaster; its signs are the scattered fragments of divine substance struggling within the oppressive machinery of matter. If Orpheus presents chance as the mysterious joy of becoming, Mani presents it as the world’s wound – an ontological disorder to be redeemed, not embraced.
The Hellenistic and late antique thinkers approach this question with a different vocabulary altogether. Plato’s Timaeus famously stages the cosmos as the rational handiwork of a divine craftsman, yet he also acknowledges a substrate – the chôra – which refuses complete subsumption under form. This receptacle is the precondition for all becoming; it is irregular, elusive, a “wandering cause,” as he elsewhere names it. The Demiurge imposes order, but the material world retains a measure of unruliness: chance arises not as negation of order but as the inertial resistance of matter to intelligible structure. Plato’s cosmology thereby preserves a delicate balance: chance is real, but not ultimate.
The later Platonists, especially the school around Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, tend to diminish the domain of chance by emphasizing the emanative unity of all things. For Plotinus, the universe is the necessary overflow of the One into Intellect, Soul, and finally Nature. In the Enneads, he remarks that “all things are signs,” meaning that the apparent irregularities and accidents of life communicate the hidden logic of the All. The unpredictable is not without cause; it is merely situated within a causal order too subtle to be grasped by the untrained mind. If something appears random, it is because “we do not see the whole.” In such a scheme, chance is perspectival illusion, not metaphysical possibility.
But even within this Neoplatonic framework, there are countercurrents. The writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite articulate a theology in which God is radically beyond causation. While Dionysius does not affirm chance in a strict metaphysical sense, he acknowledges that divine transcendence results in events whose origins cannot be traced through the chain of secondary causes. Miracles, symbolic eruptions, and interruptions of natural order testify to a God who exceeds intelligibility. The unexpected is not random but supra-rational. Synesius of Cyrene, himself a late antique philosopher-bishop, further complicates the picture: his treatise De Insomniis interprets dreams as divine communications expressed through symbolic dramas that confound the rational mind. The irregularity of dreams reveals neither chaos nor predetermination but a higher meaning delivered obliquely, as though chance were a veil through which the divine filters its messages.
In the Hermetic writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the cosmos is governed by a universal Mind whose providential wisdom leaves no room for true randomness. The Poimandres asserts that “all is full of Nous,” and that nothing in the cosmos is unrelated to this supreme intelligence. Such Hermetic determinism is not mechanical in the modern sense; it is organic, spiritual, and suffused with intention. Apparent accidents are fragments of a total symbolic order. To the Hermetist, chance is ignorance – not merely of physical causes but of the spiritual architecture of the universe.
This epistemic conception of chance resurfaces strongly in the Renaissance, particularly in the thought of Paracelsus. For him, nature is saturated with signatures – cryptic marks that disclose the hidden affinities and virtues of all things. An event that seems accidental is simply one whose signature we have not learned to read. Paracelsus argues repeatedly that the stars “incline but do not compel,” thereby introducing a soft determinism that permits variability within broad celestial tendencies. Chance becomes the residue of unperceived correspondences, echoes of influences too interwoven or too subtle for ordinary cognition. Agrippa, in his De occulta philosophia, adopts much the same stance: fortune is the intersection of unseen causes, not a fundamental feature of the cosmos. Cardan, in his Liber de ludo aleae, goes further by subjecting games of chance to mathematical analysis. Yet even he – often called the father of probability – believes that the stars exert probabilistic rather than deterministic effects. The world is not random; it is statistically meaningful, its apparent accidents inflected by cosmic tendencies that mathematics can approximate but not fully unveil.
Across these centuries, another interpretation quietly persists: chance as the incursion of freedom. Swedenborg, in his vast theological corpus, rejects the notion that anything happens “by chance” (Divine Providence, §70). Yet he also insists that providence operates in such a way as to preserve human liberty. Divine order must appear partially hidden for the sake of moral development. Thus, Swedenborgian providence produces a world that looks contingent so that we may exercise genuine choice. Contingency, then, is not metaphysical but pedagogical – an aspect of divine governance deliberately arranged to protect freedom.
Rousseau takes a more secular stance but preserves the connection between chance and self-determination. His Confessions recount innumerable pivotal events – encounters, misadventures, strokes of luck – which he attributes to “hazard,” yet these contingencies are not meaningless. They shape his moral psychology, drawing forth aspects of his character that reason alone could not uncover. The accidental, for Rousseau, is a mode of self-revelation: the individual becomes who he is through unforeseeable encounters with circumstance. This aligns him not with Plato or Plotinus, but with those ancient poets for whom life’s deviations are as significant as its regularities.
Contrast this with the more theatrical esotericisms associated with Cagliostro and the late French mystics like Saint-Martin. For Saint-Martin, chance is a consequence of the human fall from primordial unity; events no longer proceed with transparent rationality, so the divine communicates through “indirect” signs, including what appear to be accidents. Cagliostro – half myth, half man – exemplifies a different attitude: the belief that spiritual mastery can bend contingency, that the will can compel or redirect the seemingly accidental. Whether one views him as an adept or an adventurer is immaterial; the lore surrounding him attests to an enduring esoteric conviction that the boundary between necessity and chance is porous and manipulable by the initiated.
One might be tempted to believe that the modern period, with its scientific clarity, dispensed with these ancient metaphysics. But Karl Popper, perhaps the most rigorous modern defender of ontological indeterminism, revives an ancient intuition: the universe is open. In The Open Universe, he asserts that the future is not fixed, that quantum physics provides genuine randomness, and that novelty enters the world through non-determined events. Popper’s indeterminism is metaphysical, not merely scientific; it is a wager that the world is not a closed text but a manuscript still in the writing. In this, Popper aligns – unexpectedly – with Orphic cosmogony and even with Mani (though without the latter’s pessimism): the universe contains within itself an element of spontaneity irreducible to prior causes.
What all these thinkers share – despite their mutual contradictions – is the recognition that the phenomenon of chance cannot be reduced to a single dimension. It is simultaneously metaphysical (concerning the structure of the real), epistemological (concerning our knowledge of causes), ethical (concerning freedom and responsibility), and symbolic (concerning the meaning we discern in events). One may deny chance at one level while affirming it at another. Hermes Trismegistus denies randomness metaphysically while conceding it epistemically. Swedenborg denies it metaphysically but embraces it morally. Plato affirms it ontologically within matter but denies it at the level of divine rationality. Cardan affirms it mathematically while grounding it astrologically. Popper affirms it universally and ontologically. And Mani affirms it cosmologically while declaring it a defect.
If one seeks a synthesis – not in the sense of homogenizing these traditions, but in the sense of discerning a structural coherence across them – it might be this: chance expresses the inexhaustibility of causality. It marks the places where the causal texture of the world becomes too fine for human apprehension, too emergent to be predicted, or too deeply infused with freedom to be subsumed under necessity. Chance is the horizon where explanation fades not because the world is without order, but because the world’s order is richer than our conceptual nets can capture. It is the shimmer at the edges of causal networks, the sign that reality is not merely a system but a fecund and evolving totality.
If chance is thus the paradoxical union of order and novelty, ignorance and revelation, then it occupies a privileged place in the metaphysics of experience. It is neither the enemy of meaning nor its negation, but its interval – its breathing space. A fully deterministic world would be static; a purely random one, unintelligible. The world we inhabit is neither, and it is precisely this mixture that makes it livable, creative, dramatic, and morally weighty. The dignity of the aleatory lies in its power to remind us that being is not exhausted by our schemas – that the real exceeds its representations and that existence forever unfolds beyond the horizon of the known.
Chance, in essence, is an invitation: the sign that the cosmos is not complete, that we ourselves are not complete, and that the story of the world continues to be written not only by necessity but by the manifold tremors of the unforeseen. In the end, perhaps the highest insight is that chance is not simply what escapes order, but what keeps order from becoming a tomb – what grants the universe its freedom to be more than the sum of its laws, and what grants us the freedom to wander, discover, err, and begin again.
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