The Seba library treats Contingency in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Frank, Arthur W., Hannah, Barbara, Thompson, Evan).
Contingency is the body’s condition of being subject to forces that cannot be controlled.
Frank’s canonical definition establishes bodily contingency as the fundamental somatic condition of uncontrollable vulnerability, around which his entire typology of illness bodies is organized.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
contingency ought to be accepted as normative. The communicative body-self takes its place in Schweitzer’s ‘brotherhood of those who bear the mark of pain.’
Frank argues that the communicative body transforms contingency from a crisis to be managed into an ethically generative acceptance of shared mortal fragility.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
no theorist except Duns Scotus had been ‘ready to pay the price of contingency for the gift of freedom’ … Contingency, spontaneity, freedom, and responsibility all go hand in hand.
Via Arendt, Hannah frames contingency as the philosophically indispensable cost of authentic freedom, linking it to spontaneity and the impossibility of fully justified action.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981thesis
A constant theme of social theory is contingency, interpreted as the problem of how stable a course of action can be when this action depends on, but cannot control, some other action.
Frank situates bodily contingency within a broader social-theoretical tradition and makes it his book’s organizing thematic by tying autobiographical illness experience directly to the category.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
the ‘pageant’ of evolution is a staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable.
Thompson, drawing on Gould, situates contingency at the heart of evolutionary theory, arguing that the existence of any species — including humanity — is the product of unrepeatable historical accident.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the disciplined body makes itself predictable as resistance to its fundamental contingency, and the dominating body lacks desire because its contingency seems to deny what it desires to desire.
Frank maps contingency onto his body-type continuum, showing how different somatic orientations represent either defensive resistance to or acceptance of bodily unpredictability.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
Seeking to be for the other, reaching out as a way of being, does not mean rescuing this other from his own contingency.
Frank distinguishes dyadic care from rescue, arguing that genuine ethical relatedness requires acknowledging rather than eliminating the other’s irreducible contingency.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
the instability of fortune occupies an important place in antique literature and … elsewhere it but rarely conveys the impression of a living historical reality.
Auerbach identifies the literary-historical precursor to modern contingency thinking in the ancient topos of fortune’s instability, noting its typically exceptionalized rather than normative status in classical mimesis.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside