In One Way Street, Benjamin offers some (tongue-in-cheek) "Principles of the Weighty tome; or How to Write Fat Books."

Principle I: The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.

According to Benjamin, to define and crystallise one's terms of analysis necessarily excludes alternatives; it pins down the text, allowing a limited but 'correct' reading. All the contents of the text are thus bracketed. The text attempts to be finite which is, of course, impossible: we can never define anything for all time; nor can we finitely catalogue all connections we foresee as arising from its subject-matter.

At the other extreme, we have 'radical contingency': a point in time from which anything can follow, and nothing necessarily does. This is what Gould speaks of in pondering the Burgess Shale: it symbolises a moment in time which could not be adequately explained by (then) contemporary theories of evolution, which posited a linear path leading to humankind as the ultimate destination.

Gould has been criticised for allegedly claiming that evolutionary history would never happen again in quite this way. And the problem with this (for evolutionary theorists, anyway) is that there are then no laws, or rules of the game of evolution: every adaptation, every mutation, any selection, every tiny incremental configuration in the evolutionary process, becomes purely contingent (Dennet 299-311).

Perhaps this is what Rorty means when he says:

We (should) try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat everything--our language, our intelligence, our conscience, our community--as a product of time and chance. (22)