We Are Accidents: Accidentality in Mexican Philosophy

Carlos Alberto Sanchez (San Jose State University), Manuel Vargas (University of California, San Diego)

Précis: Accidentality is a concept in the philosophy of Emilio Uranga, a 20th century, Mexican philosopher. Dr. Sánchez explains it as follows in the excerpt from his recent book, Blooming in the Ruins: How Mexican Philosophy Can Guide Us toward the Good Life: What does it mean to be accidental? It means that your existence is not necessary. Or, that you did not have to exist. Yet here you are. It means that you are a product, or a bi- product, of luck, chance, fortune, or maybe grace. It also means that your being here is not guaranteed, that the ground you stand on is, Uranga says, ‘unstable quicksand’ that may swallow you up at any moment. In short, to be accidental is to exist precariously. Accidentality is familiar to you, but in a somewhat superficial way. You know that what you own—your car, house, phone, espresso machine—are accidental in the sense that you didn’t have to own them or in the sense that they may be taken away (by a thief, a fire, bank repossession). You may also believe that where you are in life is a result of chance encounters, serendipitous decisions, or accidents the consequences of which could’ve gone a completely different way. In my case, there is a possible world where my parents never met, never made it to the United States, a world in which I was never born, and never wrote these words. Yet here I am, purely by accident. A more philosophical way to understand accidentality is to think of it in relation to what philosophers call ‘substance’. A substance is radically independent of anything else, it is self-sufficient, and it is that on which other things depend or that which makes other things possible. For Uranga, essences and ideals are substances. Thus, the European ideal of humanity is a kind of substance whereby to be accidental is to be an accident of that ideal. The implication of this is that if certain people are accidental to the ideal, then they are less than human, or inhuman.