Contingency — That which can be but could also not be, and whose opposite involves no contradiction. It is one of the fundamental modal categories, alongside the necessary (what cannot fail to be) and the impossible (what cannot be): the contingent is precisely what is neither necessary nor impossible, lying within the realm of the possible that could have been otherwise. The distinction goes back to the Aristotelian theory of the modes of being and of judgment and was systematized in medieval modal logic. A contingent being exists but does not contain within itself the reason for its existence: it could fail to exist, and so depends on something else in order to be. In Leibniz, contingency is tied to truths of fact — as opposed to truths of reason, whose denial is contradictory — and to the principle of sufficient reason, according to which nothing happens without a reason explaining why it is so and not otherwise. In medieval metaphysics, Thomas Aquinas begins precisely from the existence of beings that can be and not be in order to conclude, in the so-called third way, that a Necessary Being is required as their ultimate cause — a classic argument for God’s existence. In Sartre’s existentialism, by contrast, contingency becomes the radical condition of human existence: the human being finds itself “thrown” into the world with no prior reason and no fixed nature, and from this gratuitousness arise both freedom and anguish. The concept is thus closely bound up with notions such as possibility, necessity, and facticity.
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