Accident

ACCIDENT. - Etymologically a. (from Lat. accidere = to happen; Gk. συμβεβηκός) is that which can be said of something but not necessarily (logical sense); it is that which inheres in something but without constituting the substance (metaphysical sense). In its logical meaning, the a. must be distinguished not only from what constitutes the "species" ("the definition") of a thing (= genus and difference) but also from the "property" (ἴδιον), that is, from what derives "necessarily" (καθ' αὑτά) from the essence of something. In this sense Aristotle defines the a. as that which is "indifferent" to the essence of something: ... id cui contingit inesse et non inesse uni eidemque, ut v. gr. « sedere » alicui uni (Top. I, 5, 102 b 4). The logical a. constitutes the last "predicable" (v.) of Porphyry's well-known classification.

In its metaphysical meaning, a. is opposed to substance and embraces the whole range of being attributed to the nine "predicaments" (κατηγορίαι, v. CATEGORY) that follow substance and indicate the secondary contents and modes of being. A., then, is everything that has no ontological consistency of its own and that in order to "exist" needs to belong ("inhere") to a substance as its own foundation or real "substratum" (ὑποκείμενον): the a. is therefore a certain secondary reality or essence destined to integrate and develop the principal reality of the substance on which it depends both in being and in existing. In this sense the a. cannot be called a "being" but rather "ens entis" and therefore "cuius esse est inesse": Nam ens dicitur quasi esse habens, hoc autem solum est substantia, Accidentia autem dicuntur entia, non quia sunt, sed quia magis ipsis aliquid est; sicut albedo dicitur esse quia eius subiectum est album. Ideo non dicuntur simpliciter entia, sed entis entia, sicut qualitas et motus. (St. Thomas, Comm. in XII Metaph. Arist., 1, 2419). Thus the a. exists by virtue of the act of being of the substance and has as its property the "aptitudo ad subiectum," for which its definition is: "res cui debetur esse in alio" (St. Thomas, In IV Sent., dist. 24, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; cf. Sum. Theol., 3ᵃ, q. 77, a. 1, ad 2). In this intrinsic order that accidents have toward substance, Aristotle and St. Thomas see the possibility and the unity of metaphysics as a science, insofar as the unity of being remains preserved and founded. In this way there is manifested the strongly dialectical relationship in which substance and a. stand to one another in the sphere of finite beings, because if substance can be called the support and even the cause of accidents, accidents in turn constitute its acts and perfections: "unde et accidens forma dicitur" (St. Thomas, Q. unica De virtutibus in communi, a. 3). It is further by way of accidents that substance acts and is acted upon, and it is through the action of accidents that generation and corruption and all becoming are "prepared," both in the physical and in the spiritual world.

From the phenomenological point of view - when one admits with Aristotle that our knowledge develops necessarily in dependence on experience - the first contents of consciousness refer to the accidental aspects of reality, and the essence as such constitutes only the final term of man's inquiry into the nature of things. This first phase of human knowledge, which Aristotle calls "induction" (v.), comprises that entire sector of the assimilation of the real by the human spirit which precedes and prepares the mature processes of abstraction and reflection. For, if it is true that the "middle term" of demonstration for finding the properties of something and the ontological foundation is the essence of the thing itself, it is no less true that for us accidents too "multum conferunt ad cognoscendum quod quid est" (De anima I, 1, 402b, 21 ff.).

In Scholasticism the divisions of the a. (absolute and modal, proper and common, intrinsic and extrinsic, etc.) were developed and gave rise to very complicated discussions. The doctrine of accidents is of fundamental importance for the Catholic doctrine of certain mysteries of the faith (Grace, sin, the sacraments: in particular the Eucharist). In modern philosophy, and already in ancient and medieval subjectivism, the problem of accidents was absorbed by that of the subjectivity of sensory qualities and by the denial of the substantiality of being.

Cornelio Fabro