Chapter 1: What Exactly Is “Contingency”?

Hello everyone. This is Akira.

Imagine this.

You’re walking down the street as usual when suddenly it starts to rain.

You hurriedly duck into a nearby café, lock eyes with someone at the counter, and start chatting casually… from that one conversation, an unexpected job opportunity comes your way.

Or perhaps a single post you happened to see on social media becomes the spark for a life-changing encounter. Lucky events that feel like winning the lottery, or sudden accidents that make you think “Why now…?”

Have you ever connected with an unexpected person through a matching app and felt your heart race thinking “Is this fate?”

I’m sure you’ve experienced such “just by chance” or “what a surprise!” moments at least once or twice.

In those moments, didn’t it feel for a brief second as if the world was smiling at you?

This is precisely the “contingency” we feel in everyday life.

Kuki Shūzō took these familiar “just by chance” moments seriously and elevated them into a major philosophical theme, rather than dismissing them with a simple “Well, you got lucky.”

He wrote the book 『The Problem of Contingency』 around 1935.

After deeply exploring Japan’s unique aesthetic sensibility in his masterpiece 『The Structure of Iki』, he turned to an even more fundamental question.

In his youth, Kuki spent a long time studying in Europe and absorbed a great deal of Western philosophy. In Western philosophy, “necessity” — the idea that “things must absolutely be this way” — had long been highly valued.

The world is logical, and everything has a solid reason — that was the mainstream view.

But deep in his soul, Kuki felt a certain “discomfort.”

“Is this world really made up only of things that are already determined? Isn’t it the unexpectedness of life, the sense of freedom, and above all the ‘surprising encounters’ that play the biggest role — and aren’t those precisely the domain of ‘just by chance’?”

Kuki valued the irreplaceable feeling of “this me, living right here and now” more than pure “logic.”

That is why he had to seriously consider “contingency” as the key to living freely.

It might feel difficult at first.

I felt the same way in the beginning. But it’s okay.

Let’s unravel it slowly together.

Once you understand this “contingency,” the “just by chance” moments in life suddenly start to look cool, free, and meaningful.

They become not mere luck, but hints that give you the strength to live right now.

Kuki goes on to divide contingency into three more detailed types, but we’ll talk about that in the coming chapters.

For today, try quietly listening to the small “what a surprise!” moments that happen in your day.

That is the first door to a “new self” named contingency.

Akira

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