Chance and fortune

Use in the book

The title of chapter 6 places fortune beside what happens of itself. The reports in chapter 7 ask how chance relates to variability and the limits of human calculation. The poems and technical notices therefore approach the same word through different kinds of question.

Places to read

1. I.6.headingFortune is placed beside spontaneous occurrence.
2. I.7.9aEpicurus, Anaxagoras, and the Stoics appear in contrasting reports about chance.
3. I.5.13A tragic line denies that fortune can force its way ahead of fate.

Translation in this edition

“Fortune” usually suits a person’s lot or a poetic power; “chance” suits the causal discussions. Capitalization can mark personification, but it does not settle a philosophical theory.

Use in the book

B53 emphasizes contingency by adding that the conjunction was so on one occasion and often otherwise. A particular result does not exhaust the possible arrangements. B59 applies encounter to the assembling scene associated with early organisms: as divinity mingles more widely with divinity, things fall together wherever each happens to meet. The line does not make chance a substitute for every other power. It expressly places the encounters in a setting of divine mingling.

B103 is more compressed. It attributes thought to the will of Chance. Its personifying idiom should not be turned automatically into a fully individuated goddess with a separate narrative or cultic role, but neither should the named agency be erased from the translation. The nearby B104 describes loose assembly, suggesting that arrangement matters to the larger lost discussion; the exact causal sequence is not fully preserved.

Chance thus marks the importance of encounters and variable configurations within a world whose constituents and opposed powers endure. It need not mean absolute lawlessness, creation without materials, or a modern statistical mechanism. Nor do the composite creatures by themselves prove an ongoing Darwinian process. The source gives contingency in combination and a striking phrase about thought; the rest requires reconstruction.

Places to read

1. B 53The conjunction occurred so then, but often otherwise.
2. B 59Parts meet and fall together within the scene of greater divine mingling.
3. B 103All things have thought by the will of Chance.
4. B 104Loose coming-together survives beside the thought passage in the cited witness.
5. B 61Unfamiliar combinations illustrate the range of forms, without themselves stating a selection mechanism.

Translation in this edition

The edition separates B103 from an inherited heading that had grouped it under B104. Capitalizing Chance reflects the printed Greek’s Τύχης; it should not settle every question about how literally to understand the personification.

Use in the book

Plato’s Laws passage at A48 repeats that the four bodies and their products exist by nature and chance, without mind, god or art. Their powers carry them into suitable encounters, with opposite qualities blending as chance and necessity combine. The account is hostile, embedded in an argument against impious naturalism. Plato names no thinker; Diels places it under followers of Empedocles. It is therefore evidence for a position associated with the school or interpreted through its materials, not an unqualified quotation of Empedocles’ own cosmology.

Ps.-Plutarch’s A30 connects the beginning of motion with the accidental gathering or weighting of fire. The English translation deemphasizes the contingency conveyed by τετυχηκέναι, and the Greek is disordered and incomplete. This more local mechanism cannot simply prove the complete chance-cosmogony presented in the Laws.

The source’s own references to B103 and B104 indicate where the broader question would need to be pursued, but the verses are not printed here. This article consequently records the reach and limits of the testimony rather than assigning Empedocles an unrestricted doctrine of randomness.

Places to read

1. A 48 (polemical)Plato, Laws X 889b. Presents an unnamed naturalist explanation by chance and nature; Diels associates it with followers of Empedocles.
2. A 30 (testimony)Ps.-Plutarch, Stromateis, in Eusebius P.E. I 8,10. Links initial motion with a chance concentration of fire in a damaged, reordered account.

Translation in this edition

A48 should not be used as Empedocles’ first-person denial of gods, particularly beside the divine roots of A32 and A40. “Chance” also does not mean a modern probability model.

Use in the book

Chance means a happening without the purposive and intelligible ordering that Ficino finds in the world. He calls fortune a privation or failure of reason and argues that it cannot account for either God or the world's sustained arrangement. His polemic addresses Lucretius by name and contrasts random handling of stones with constructing a useful, coordinated building. The repeated ends reached by living things and the stable relations among their organs supply further examples.

This strong rejection of chance as the ultimate explanation of the universe should not be collapsed into a denial of every contingent occurrence. In II.12.20–212, Ficino explicitly allows God to will contingent modes of events within an ordered universe. The difference is between treating lack of order as the source of order and admitting variable effects arising through created causes. “Chance” is therefore not automatically an interchangeable translation of every occurrence of contingentia.

Further passage references. II.11.17–182, 26; II.12.2–32; II.13.14–20234567; II.12.20–212

Places to read

1. II.12.3God’s being and acting are denied to arise as chance happened to determine.
2. II.13.17The regularity of species, organs and motions is argued to require ordering counsel.
3. II.12.20Variable effects of mobile proximate causes retain a place in exact universal order.

Translation in this edition

Do not turn the polemic against fortune as first cause into a denial of every contingent created event. The latter vocabulary is expressly admitted in II.12.20–212, while II.12.3 rejects contingency as the explanation of God’s own being.

casus / contingere

casus / contingere. Printed forms: casu; contigit; obtigit.

Chance, or occurrence and coming about. Ficino contrasts chance with an established recurrent order; contigit itself need not mean chance without casu. References: II.2.8, II.2.9. See Chance.

forte / fortuitus / sors

forte / fortuitus / sors. Printed forms: forte; fortuito; fortuitum; sortis.

By chance / fortuitous / chance or lot. The cluster excludes chance from God’s own being and activity; it does not cancel the later allowance of contingent creatures. References: II.12.2. See Chance.

Lucretius (authorities and cited works)

Lucretius. The named Epicurean opponent in Ficino's argument against chance as the explanation of the world's orderly formation and governance. The direct addresses belong to Ficino's polemical presentation. II.13.14–20234567. See Chance; Providence; Art and nature.