Empty Contingency Quotes

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction—and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers.

What he would become. But he had a plan, didn't he? Several plans, depending on the contingencies. But each plan had the same ending--it was just a matter of how he got there. He would last for as long as he needed to write what he needed in that journal. Something about that simple, empty little book, waiting to be filled. It had given him a purpose, a spark, a winding course to ensure the last days of his life had reason and meaning. A mark, left on the world. He would write all the sanity he could muster out of his head before it was taken over by its opposite.

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom

To cultivate these diverse elements of our existence means to nurture them as we would a garden. Just as a garden needs to be protected, tended, and cared for, so do ethical integrity, focused awareness, and understanding. No matter how deep our insight into the empty and contingent nature of things, that alone will do little to cultivate these qualities. Each of these areas in life becomes a challenge, an injunction to act. There is no room for complacency, for they all bear a tag that declares: "Cultivate Me.

Anything to empty life of its incongruities, of its meaningless, messy contingencies, and to impose on it instead the simplification that coheres—and misapprehends everything.

Freedom is the myth of unoccupied, empty, void souls. When nothing guides us, freedom seems an admirable program of action. In truth, freedom does not solve the problem of the lost soul in a universe of pure contingency, but imposes its own directives.

The roots of idolatry lie deep within the human heart, in the terror generated by the awareness that we are empty, powerless, dependent, contingent beings… Idolatry therefore seeks something powerful enough to give us being, life, and worth, yet controllable enough so that it will be our being, life, and worth… Where does the lie come in? It comes first in the denial of the one ultimate power that holds me in existence at every moment; it appears second in the pretension that anything created by that one power could replace it as a source of life and worth.

It is a mistake to suppose that all change or development is growth. The present condition of the earth’s surface is not mature or immature; the horse has not, so far as we know, reached some final and presumably optimal stage in evolutionary development. If a child’s language seems to grow like an embryo, it is only because the environmental contingencies have been neglected. The feral child has no language, not because his isolation has interfered with some growth process, but because he has not been exposed to a verbal community. We have no reason to call any culture mature in the sense that further growth is unlikely or that it would necessarily be a kind of deterioration. We call some cultures underdeveloped or immature in contrast with others we call ‘advanced’, but it is a crude form of jingoism to imply that any government, religion, or economic system is mature. The main objection to the metaphor of growth, in considering either the development of an individual or the evolution of a culture, is that it emphasizes a terminal state which does not have a function. We say that an organism grows toward maturity or in order to reach maturity. Maturity becomes a goal, and progress becomes movement towards a goal. A goal is literally a terminus—the end of something such as a foot race. It has no effect on the race except to bring it to an end. The word is used in this relatively empty sense when we say that the goal of life is death or that the goal of evolution is to fill the earth with life. Death is no doubt the end of life, and a full world may be the end of evolution, but these terminal conditions have no bearing on the processes through which they are reached. We do not live in order to die, and evolution does not proceed in order to fill the earth with life.

Barthes constructed his theory of what he called “myth,” describing essentially the same thing as we mean here by “narrative.” Barthes argues that modern, industrialized societies are governed in large part by such myths, constructed by each society’s political arm and disseminated via the mass media (the political arm’s propaganda machine) as commonsensical, therefore as absolutely real. For Barthes, myth is always political, always constructed, and at the same time always constitutive of our view of the world, and yet myth nearly always seeks to masquerade as something timeless, eternal, and “natural.” He says: Semiology has taught us that myth has the task of giving a historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. . . . The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with Nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short, a perceptible absence.42

Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us. Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.” According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

It is not difficult to see how so many of our negative emotions, our fear and dislike, are directed at those who we fell are impinging on or disrespecting our 'self'; or how we feel that this same self will be enhanced by our latest purchase or even our latest haircut. In this way our experience of the world is always coloured by the needs of 'I', 'me' and 'mine'. The imposition of self as noun upon process self as verb is an aspect of our fear of contingency, and the subsequent grasping for a permanence and certainty that can never be achieved.

Even with good-enough upbringing and the consolidation of what might be called a good-enough self, according to the Buddha’s logic, there will still be disquiet, confusion, and insecurity because we are all instinctively struggling to be something (independent, solid, coherent, and self-sufficient) we can never be. Even in healthy personality development, we emerge from childhood defending against the underlying truth of how contingent, provisional, and dependent we actually are. The persistence of such feelings, far from being a symptom of parental failures (even if there have been such failures), is actually the seed of wisdom. Fighting against them only rigidifies our defenses and isolates us further. Acknowledging the emptiness that frightens us, whatever its source may be, is the key to a deeper, and truer, understanding. The emptiness that we fear is not really empty. When it is successfully turned into an object of awareness, it reveals itself to be vast, luminous, and reassuringly, albeit mysteriously, alive.

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. I wind my experiences around myself and cover myself with glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. But there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed, I am hollow, and my structure of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me I am my own mistake.

Addiction If some scientists believe that “if-then” motivators and other extrinsic rewards resemble prescription drugs that carry potentially dangerous side effects, others believe they’re more like illegal drugs that foster a deeper and more pernicious dependency. According to these scholars, cash rewards and shiny trophies can provide a delicious jolt of pleasure at first, but the feeling soon dissipates—and to keep it alive, the recipient requires ever larger and more frequent doses. The Russian economist Anton Suvorov has constructed an elaborate econometric model to demonstrate this effect, configured around what’s called “principal-agent theory.” Think of the principal as the motivator—the employer, the teacher, the parent. Think of the agent as the motivatee—the employee, the student, the child. A principal essentially tries to get the agent to do what the principal wants, while the agent balances his own interests with whatever the principal is offering. Using a blizzard of complicated equations that test a variety of scenarios between principal and agent, Suvorov has reached conclusions that make intuitive sense to any parent who’s tried to get her kids to empty the garbage. By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. (If the task were desirable, the agent wouldn’t need a prod.) But that initial signal, and the reward that goes with it, forces the principal onto a path that’s difficult to leave. Offer too small a reward and the agent won’t comply. But offer a reward that’s enticing enough to get the agent to act the first time, and the principal “is doomed to give it again in the second.” There’s no going back. Pay your son to take out the trash—and you’ve pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free. What’s more, once the initial money buzz tapers off, you’ll likely have to increase the payment to continue compliance. As Suvorov explains, “Rewards are addictive in that once offered, a contingent reward makes an agent expect it whenever a similar task is faced, which in turn compels the principal to use rewards over and over again.” And before long, the existing reward may no longer suffice. It will quickly feel less like a bonus and more like the status quo—which then forces the principal to offer larger rewards to achieve the same effect.

In short, for theoretical cognition, all truth is to be found in the external world, and for practical cognition, no truth is to be found in the external world. This stance of the will, in which the ends of the good reside within the will alone, and external actuality is, in-itself, empty of all worth of the good will, leaving 'two worlds in opposition'. What the unity of theoretical and practical standpoints allows is a reciprocity and mutual tempering of each such that cognition can be brought in relation to the external world while avoiding the extreme vices of both stances: theoretical cognition's meta-awareness of its own activity as practical prevents the self-conception in which all content of truth is found in the givenness of the object; practical cognition's reunification with theoretical cognition prevents the self-conception in which the will alone is the source of all goodness and worth. Theoretical cognition reminds the will that the contingency of the world can be made to conform with cognition's form of activity, that although it is true that there are ineliminable contingencies, this truth is something that cognition can grasp, and most importantly, it is not a fact that disables the activity of cognition in principle. Since theoretical cognition can find truth of self-certainty in the given contingency of the world - most notably, the instinct of reason finds itself in the form of inner purposiveness as such - nothing in principle prevents the will from finding the truth of self-certainty amid practical contingency, except for its faulty conception of itself. Far from a worthless nullity, the actuality confronting the will is already permeated by rational ends, 'an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Concept'. That is, the external actuality confronting the will is always already a world shaped by the rationally realized ends of the will itself - ultimately, the world of objective spirit, and more directly, the world of ethical life. The insistence of the will that the good is a mere ought that cannot be realized is thus a misconception of both itself and its world - a misconception that theoretical cognition can help to correct. The unity of theoretical and practical cognition brings forth the absolute Idea, which, once more, returns us to the problem of life.

Eventually and inevitably that which was too awful even to think about finally happens. Death reveals in us that eventually tomorrow is today and that we have run out of time. We discover by force of death that there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow, and my structure of pleasure and ambitions has no foundation. I am objectified in them. But they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed. And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness, to tell me that I am my own mistake.

The future is only probable but it is not any empty zone in which we can construct gratuitous projects; it is sketched before us like the beginning of the day's end, and its outline is ourselves. The objects of perception are likewise only probable since we are far from having a complete analysis of them; that does not mean that in their very nature and existence they appear to be absolutely under our control. For us the probability that characterizes objects is what is real and one can only devalue it with reference to the chimera of an apodictic certainty which has no grounds. What should be said is not that "everything is relative," but that "everything is absolute"; the simple fact that man perceives an historical situation as meaningful in a way he believes true introduces a phenomenon of truth of which skepticism has no account and which challenges its conclusions. The contingency of history is only a shadow at the edge of a view of the future from which we can no more refrain than we can from breathing...Even if every historical choice is subjective, every subjectivity nevertheless reaches through its phantasms to things themselves and aims at the truth. Any description of history as the confrontation of choices that cannot be justified omits the fact that every conscience experiences itself engaged with others in a common history, argues in order to convince them, weighs and compares its own chances and those of others, and in seeing itself bound to others through external circumstances establishes the grounds of a presumptive rationality upon which their argument can take place and acquire a meaning.

What was lacking for empiricism was an internal connection between the object and the act it triggers. What intellectualism lacks is the contingency of the opportunities for thought. Consciousness is too poor in the first case and too rich in the second for any phenomenon to be able to solicit it. Empiricism does not see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not go looking for it; intellectualism does not see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or again we would not go looking for it. They are in accord in that neither grasps consciousness in the act of learning, neither accounts for this "circumscribed ignorance," for this still "empty" though already determinate intention that is attention itself.

Emptiness indicates how everything that comes about does so through an unrepeatable matrix of contingencies, conditions, and causes as well as through conceptual, linguistic, and cultural frameworks.

For Lefort, modern democratic society, which was formed in the eighteenth century, removed the ontological certainties of previous orders and based itself instead on heterogeneity and division; it is structured by a symbolically empty place of power, left vacant by the absent body of the prince. As a result of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which according to Lefort split the orders of power, law and knowledge, society could no longer be represented as a single, unified body. However, this empty space of contingency created at the same time a desire for absolute foundations, for a point of transcendence – once provided by religion – that could unify a fragmented social order and master this experience of uncertainty. The persistence of religion is therefore a symptom of the uncertainty and contingency at the foundations of democratic society. This is also why, at various times, ideas of nation, community and people become substitutes for religion, attempting to fill the empty space of power and unify society. For Schmitt, sovereignty fulfils precisely this function. Such ideas, which as Lefort believes speak to a real, yet unavoidable, structural deficit in society, appear at moments when a perceived loss of legitimacy is seen to threaten the social order. The survival of religion itself in modern society – which now works on an imaginary rather than symbolic register – evokes the illusion that firm identity and absolute unity can be restored. The constant danger, for Lefort, is that these representations of identity become so invested with desire that they open the way to a totalitarian drive to forcibly reunite the social order.

Bergson says that mystical experience need not wonder whether the source it puts us in contact with is God himself or his earthly delegation. It experiences the granted invasion of a being which 'can do immensely more than it can.' We must not even say an all-powerful being: Bergson says that the idea of the all is as empty as that of nothingness, and the possible for him remains the shadow of the real. Bergson's God is immense rather than infinite, or He is a qualitative infinite. He is the element of joy or love in the sense that water and fire are elements. Like sentient and human beings, He is a radiance, not an essence. Metaphysical attributes which seek to determine Him are, Bergson says, like all determinations, negations. Even if through some impossibility they became visible, no religious man would recognize the God he prays to in them. Bergson's God is, like the universe, a singular being, an immense this; and even in theology Bergson kept his promise of a philosophy fashioned for actual being and applying to it alone. If we indulge in imaginary computations we must admit, he says, that 'the whole could have been much better than it is.' No one can make someone's death a component of the best possible world. But not only are the solutions of classical theodicy false, the problems have no meaning in the order Bergson puts himself in--the order of radical contingency. Here it is not a question of the conceived world or a conceived God, but of the existing world and an existing God; and that within us which is acquainted with this order is beneath our opinions and our statements. No one will ever stop men from loving their life, no matter how miserable it may be. This vital judgment puts life and God on this side of arraignment as well as of justification. And if we insisted upon understanding how natura naturans had been able to produce a natura naturata in which it is not really realized, why creative effort has been at least provisionally arrested, what obstacle it has encountered and how an obstacle could be insurmountable for it, Bergson would agree that his philosophy does not answer this type of question. But he would also say that the reason why it does not is that it does not have to ask such questions. For in the last analysis his philosophy is not a genesis of the world--not even, as it narrowly missed being, 'integration and differentiation' of being--but the deliberately partial, discontinuous, almost empirical location of several foci of being.