Chance

Fortune has many sides and can fall in many ways

The subject I am going to discuss in this blog is a bit tricky. It is not so that as such it is difficult (it is, but that’s not the problem), but the concept I want to treat is a bit difficult to translate into English. In Dutch we call it “toeval” and for this blog I have translated it as “chance”, which, to my mind, is the word that best covers the Dutch concept. However, actually both words do not cover exactly the same ideas. The internet translator reverso.net translates “toeval” also as coincidence and accident. So, if this blog is a bit confusing to you, it may have a linguistic background. Doesn’t the Sapir-Whorf thesis say that our language determines how we think? Although the strict interpretation of this thesis is not right, there is a kernel of truth in it.
Anyway, I want to try to understand what it means that things happen unexpectedly to us; that we did not foresee them; and that we couldn’t foresee them in our present situation. They are not predicted and not predictable, at least not at the moment they happen to us. They just happen and we don’t know why. If they are not random, they have at least an air of randomness. Therefore, we have to live with such ev
ents as they happen. They happen by chance or by accident.
Now you may think: “What happens happens and I can only adapt myself to what happens to me unexpectedly. If it is positive for me I have luck and if it is negative I have bad luck.” However, it is not as simple as that. For such an attitude supposes a unitary idea of chance (“toeval”), while in fact there is not one type of chance that happens and that’s it. Chance has many faces, or rather, there are several types of chance. Each type requires other reactions or makes other reactions possible. Following Jeroen Hopster in his recent book about chance (especially chapter1), I want to distinguish six types (and without a doubt you can find a few more).

1) Things happen as they happen because the world is shaped that way. Is your child a boy or a girl? You had no influence on it. It just happened. At least that is the present situation for most of us. Or take the colour of your eyes: Nobody had an influence on it. It was decided “by nature”. That such things happen is a matter of existential chance.
2) Chance as contingency. Things happen as they happen but could easily have gone in a different way. A footballer wants to score a goal, but just then a gull flies by and the ball hits the gull, so that the keeper can catch the ball. If the gull hadn’t been at the same place, because the wind was blowing a little bit harder, the match would have gone differently.
3) In a general way, I spoke already of “by accident”. However, chance as such can be accidental. In a narrow way we can say that something happens by accident or that what happens is incidental and doesn’t belong to the essence of what is happening. The steeplechase runner falls, not because he has touched one of the obstacles, but because there happened to be a stone on the track that he hadn’t seen. That he should jump over the obstacles belongs to the essence of the race, but the stone should not have been there and should have been removed by one of the officials.
4) Things can also happen by coincidence: Coincidental chance. Things happen to go together and are seen as meaningful for that reason, but they were not planned to go together. I take the train to Utrecht and meet by chance a friend in the hall of the Central Railway Station. However, my train was late and had it been in time, we hadn’t met, because we hadn’t appointed to meet.
5) Chance as a matter of statistics, so statistical chance (not to be confused with the next point). Population distributions often have a certain pattern. Statistically, pop concerts are more visited by younger people and concerts of early music more by older people. If you like both kinds of music and you want to meet young people, when you go to a concert this evening, go then to a pop concert. If you want to meet old people, go then to a concert of early music (but avoid there the musicians, since they are often young!),
6) Often we don’t know the determining factors of what happens, but we know that there are regularities in what happens. Then we can only resort to probability theory in order to explain what is happening, if we can. But I think that in the human sciences we can ignore this type of chance, since it is probably only a useful concept in physics and biology.

Chance has many faces. It is covered by many concepts: existence, contingency, accident (in a neutral meaning), coincidence, statistics and probability. In Dutch these faces are summarized by the word toeval. In English, we can call it “chance”, although this is maybe a little artificial. However, the idea is the same: What happens to us in an unforeseen way, unpredicted and unpredictably, without a known reason, or accidentally cannot be seen as the consequence of a general abstract phenomenon. For practical reasons we can say “it just happened” and we go on with what we are doing, but if we want to understand what happened, we must explain what we mean with this “it just happened”. There is no chance as such but there are only chances. But there are also chances in a different way, and not only in the way described above. For each chance is not only an event that just happens but also an opportunity and possibly a lucky coincidence you can profit by. What actually was a contingent coincidence that happened by accident and may have not been statistically very likely may turn out well for your existence, if you seize the chance.