Substance/Accident

AN INSCRUTABLE GRIN – Substance and accident not only have been central concepts of metaphysics since antiquity, but also – like so many other philosophical distinctions – have found their way, entirely unnoticed, into our everyday thinking. We constantly think of this or that as substantial, i.e. central and important, the other as accidental and negligible.

Traditionally, substance (from the Latin substare, to stand underneath) is that which underlies everything. That which could be excluded without changing the essence of something is accident (in Latin: accidens). The essence of a house, for example, includes the walls and roof that constitute a space more or less protected from the influences of the outside world. The color of the façade and the number of windows – or indeed, strictly speaking, whether or not there are any windows at all – are, by contrast, minor details. A human being must have a head, while a face is composed of eyes, nose, and mouth – whether the latter is smiling or not is irrelevant. Whoever would make such a claim, however, has probably never fallen for someone else’s smile, and in their sheer contemplation has forgotten that a person’s smile is by no means insignificant, but something that cannot be imagined away.

And then there is the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, that grinning feline whose mouth we still see even after he has made himself disappear, compelling us to ask what is essential to a thing and what only incidental – or, in the terminology established over the history of philosophy: what the hypo-keimenon (Greek: “that which underlies”) or sub-stantia (Latin: “that which stands underneath”) is when we no longer look upon it as an opposing “surface” that fascinates us. Good to know that a smile or a look is sometimes enough to turn an entire philosophical construct into a glass house.

WHEN ONE THING NO LONGER FOLLOWS THE OTHER – We are used to the idea that one thing follows another, that things take their course and events play out as the laws of nature dictate. And naturally in everyday life we know what can be traced back to what. The stain on my pants is from my morning coffee, or actually from the man at the buffet who bumped into me, or strictly speaking from the cup spilling over in my hand that couldn’t move away in time.

Aristotle and the medieval scholastics who followed him recognized four types of causes: formal causes (materials can take on different colors); material causes (brown liquids leave brown stains on white pants); efficient or moving causes (someone bumps into me and my hand moves); and lastly – as we can see even with respect to such a trivial matter as the discoloration of white summer trousers – final causes (mishaps occur that cannot be said to have any purpose or significance, even when we consider them from all logically possible perspectives).

With every large-scale catastrophe – the sinking of the Titanic, say – a shocked public once again asks itself the same much debated questions: was the disaster caused by a higher power, human negligence, or a technical malfunction? Was the ship fated to hit the iceberg? Was the captain at fault? Or was the death toll so high simply because there weren’t enough lifeboats and help didn’t arrive quickly enough?

In addition to such more or less straightforward misfortunes, we also have to deal with so-called “wicked problems” whose complexity makes it impossible to distinguish strictly between cause and effect, a precondition of traditional determinations of causality. It is only for this reason that (particularly legal) debates over whether smoking actually causes cancer, or whether a warming climate can be traced back directly to the use of carbon-based fuels, can drag on for decades (thanks to clever attorneys, and in the interest of lobbyists).

Advanced approaches in quantum physics or chaos theory have long since abandoned the question, virulent since the days of Newton, of whether everything that occurs can be explained by fundamentally mechanical causes. Numerous skeptics throughout the history of philosophy, most prominently perhaps David Hume in the eighteenth century, have even disavowed all forms of causality or necessity in the spirit of empiricism. Contemporary efforts by speculative materialists to smash the Gordian knot of causality by no longer admitting any necessity other than that of absolute contingency are perhaps even more radical, a risky intellectual maneuver in a risky age.

SUBSTANTIAL ACCIDENTS – A look at the dominant technologies of the twenty-first century suggests a more common definition of the word “accident.” In the sense of unexpected calamities or misfortunes, accidents have a different relationship to the substance that underlies them. No longer mere accessories to substance, twenty-first-century accidents have the potential to turn the existing (metaphysical) order upside down. The catastrophes that threaten us today are not merely accidental in the Aristotelian sense, i.e. they do not concern only partial aspects, but threaten the system in question as a whole. This applies not only to a potential nuclear disaster, but also to the “glitches” of the financial world or the looming collapse of the climate. “We have witnessed the emergence of the algorithmic catastrophe that must be distinguished from industrial or military accidents. The causality of an industrial accident could be traced and avoided, but the control of algorithmic catastrophe is increasingly beyond the capacity of human beings.”1 So writes the philosopher of technology Yuk Hui, who further asserts that “[a]ll catastrophes are algorithmic, even the natural ones.”2

Algorithmic or cybernetic catastrophes pose fundamentally new questions for metaphysics. (At the end of his life, faced with cybernetics as a science for regulating and controlling complex social organizations, living organisms, and machines, Heidegger even prematurely prophesied the end of metaphysics itself.) Certainly not the least important of these is whether it is possible to use advanced technologies to get a grip on anthropogenic problems (i.e. problems that we ourselves have created), or whether we are now dealing with “runaway technologies” that are racing away from us, and from the problems they have created, for good.

ALGORITHMIC UNPREDICTABILITY – What does the phrase “runaway technology” actually mean? One possible reading is that algorithms, for example, are capable of generating ­unpredictabilities in accordance with their fixed structure. Interestingly, this phenomenon is often identified by (mostly male) philosophers of technology as having catastrophic potential.

Luciana Parisi suggests a more positive reading of algorithmically generated unpredictabilities, based on the assumption that “the computational searching for the incomputable space of nondenumerable quantities has become superior to the view that algorithms are simply instructions leading to optimized solutions.”3 This incomputable space is not simply a negatively infinite sequence, but rather constitutes a substantial unpredictability; in establishing this space, algorithms have an effect on our existence. In the twenty-first century, then, we are dealing not primarily with unpredictable catastrophism, but with the opening up of promising potentialities of communication and coordination. Algorithms so understood would then be a kind of “runaway technology” racing toward a new, positive (metaphysical) infinity.

HOMO NARRANS VS. HOMO APOCALYPTICUS – One of the countless definitions of what human beings are or may be is that we are storytelling animals, meaning that we understand every development in terms of its end. All’s well that ends well, so don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched. This is particularly true of modern human beings – “Kummt eh da Komet!” (The comet is coming anyway!), the Austrian folk poet Johann Nestroy once wrote, to the reassurance of his morbid nineteenth-century audience. Perhaps this is one reason why we seem so unconcerned by the sixth (and possibly final) great extinction that we ourselves are in the midst of bringing about.

“The problem,” as Jean-Pierre Dupuy writes, “is that catastrophe is not believable: it is held to be possible only once it has occurred, and by that point it is too late. This obstacle can be overcome, I believe, only if an utterly new meta-physical conception is adopted of our relationship to time.”4 This has been particularly true for the past two centuries. According to Bruno Latour, “Modernity is living entirely within the Apocalypse or, more precisely, as we shall soon see, after the Apocalypse. This is why modernity has condemned itself to understanding nothing about what history is bringing it that is really new. So, we have to agree finally to engage for real in an apocalyptic discourse in the present time.”5

Secularized thought plays its post-apocalyptic game as though time were already at an end, the Last Judgment already delivered. But can we also integrate the apocalypse philosophically into our thinking, other than as ushering us, like...