Abstract

This essay argues that a person's fate is defined by the interaction of necessity and contingency, indicating that a person's existential competence consists of his or her ability to dance well with both necessity and contingency, not merely with either of them. As a result, it rejects the traditional association of fate with fatalism and fatality on the one hand and resists the present current to define individual fate and identity merely in terms of contingency and as contingency on the other hand. Meanwhile, it defines necessity that shapes a person's fate in terms of laws of nature and human existence, not as some predetermined scheme or design