Hegel on Contingency, or, Fluidity And Multiplicity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This piece presents some motifs concerning fluidity and multiplicity that arise from the Contingency chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic . I do not present it as a microcosm of an overall interpretation of Hegel. Still, emphasising Hegel's categories of fluidity and dissolution, and of multiplicity and its marks, obviously intensifies a certain version of the dialectic. One might call this ‘far left Hegelianism’. If it were to be generalised as a reading of Hegel, it might share something with Jean-Luc Nancy's polemical little book, Hegel: L'inquiétude du négatif (Paris: Hachette, 1997). A reading like this one is unlikely to have been written prior to Deleuze's ontology of multiplicity. In undialectical philosophies, contingency, like desire, suggests themes of arbitrariness, unsystematic events, isolated moments of chance, and so on. In Hegel, of course, the roles played by desire and contingency are quite the contrary. Desire is part of Hegel's account of how a subject can in the movement of life find itself as part of the truth of objects, at the same time as it finds objects as part of its own truth — the direct contrary of arbitrary subjective preference. Contingency is part of Hegel's account of how the mark of a necessary totality is visible in every free actualisation of a possibility — the direct contrary of isolated events. The clue to the dialectic is the way the desubstantialising categories of fluidity and multiplicity are generated precisely through the apparently substantialising categories of actuality and necessity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it