Chance Is What We Make It

A history of accidents could be an amusing potpourri of those little unpredictable events that could easily have been different, but which had great consequences. Examples might include the length of Cleopatra's nose, the rain at Agincourt, or the coincident shifts of wind, current, temperature, and human plans before the fateful convergence of the Titanic and its iceberg. In private life, there is the accidentally forgotten book that returns us to the library where a girl or boy has arrived accidentally just then, and accidentally alone, but who will become the mother or father of our children.

Luck can indeed be a lady, but many accidents should not happen. In such cases, we investigate, to attribute blame and responsibility: not an accident at all, we usually tell ourselves, but the result of incompetence, negligence, or design. Indeed, most human beings prefer to feel guilty than unlucky: If the rains fail it is no accident, but because we are at fault, and must propitiate the gods. We are not content with the White House's all-purpose excuse that stuff happens, because it violates our faith in our mastery over human events. (You cannot sue luck, but we can sure sue each other.) Of course, the reverse applies too, so that when we are lucky we take personal credit for the success. The financial industry is built upon this very principle.

Aristotle distinguished between "substances" and "accidents," this second ground being those properties that substances happen to have, but which could come and go without affecting their "essence" and, hence, existence. We can change height without ceasing to be who we are, say: We do so as we grow up, or grow older. But we cannot change species: If I cease to be a human being, I cease to exist. Accidents in this sense need not be truly accidental: There may be good scientific reason for me to be the height I am, even if a shorter or taller version would still have been me. Aristotle's idea would therefore not figure in a history of accidents in the vernacular sense. His accidents are closer to what we call "properties," such as speaking Greek, or having brown eyes, whereas our "accidents" tend to be events. It may even be an accident that we have the one word for the two different ideas. In "Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History" (University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $35), Ross Hamilton's vast, serious canvas is wide enough to include both notions, brought together by the paradoxical idea that it is the accidents that happen to us that determine our essential nature. In the modern consciousness, apparently, it is "spots of time," or moments, that create meaning and structure, defining who we are. Mr. Hamilton has assembled testimony from a panoramic array of writers, philosophers, and French theorists in support of this diagnosis of the modern way of looking at things: Dante is defined by his chance encounter with Beatrice, for example, and Wordsworth by an equally rapturous encounter with a daffodil.

In the face of such a chorus, it is difficult to dissent, yet I find the idea dubious, a product of our tyrannical narrative impulses. It is not surprising that the artist depicting a life, for example, should seize upon the extraordinary moments, the fatal encounters or chance meetings or automobile crashes that marked his subject for his or her future. Similarly, the autobiographer describing how she came to be important enough to need to write about herself knows that the humdrum plod scarcely makes exciting copy. Such accounts are like soap operas, which need their hotel fires and outrageous coincidences. If you fish with this kind of net, this is the kind of fish you will catch.

But do these chance events really knead accident into our essences? A stroke of luck in my own life was: If I had been allotted a different admissions interviewer when I arrived in Cambridge, I would probably have become a lawyer and not a philosopher. I thank heavens for the accident, but however much I highlight it when scripting the drama of my life, I remain well aware that had it turned out otherwise, it would still have been the same me. Indeed, I am so grateful for the accident exactly because it would have been I myself that would have had to endure the unspeakable drudgeries of the law. The notions of accident and chance have had varying fortunes throughout history: In Western culture, we have shown a clear preference for the meaningful accident over the meaningless chance. It was not chance that led Oedipus and his father to converge at the fatal crossroads, in our telling, but destiny or fate. In many religious sensibilities, there is no such thing as chance, and many sing of Adam and Eve's happy sin that merited so great a Redeemer, and was therefore part of God's plan, even if tough on Adam and Eve.

In the modern period, while chance was being driven out of the psychological sphere by Freud, who famously found meaning in apparently random dreams and slips of the tongue just as others do in tea leaves, it was almost simultaneously regaining a place in physics. After two centuries of determinism, random quantum events, for the first time, built chance into our conception of the fabric of the world. Chance is no longer what fills the gaps in our understanding of the universe, but the way of nature herself. Some think that this makes new room for free will, by releasing us from the iron bounds of necessity. But chance is as hard a master as necessity: It is not a very promising step on the road to genuine responsibility to suppose that we act as we do because of the fallout from a microscopic roulette wheel.

Mr. Blackburn is a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of many books, including "Think," "Being Good," and "Plato's Republic." His book "How to Read Hume" will be published by Granta later this year.