ABSTRACT
Organisms are contingent in another sense, the sense in which they are necessarily so. Even though all things are contingent, it is claimed that they cannot exist except by virtue of what is not contingent. The world as people finds it, because everywhere contingent needs boundaries. A bounded ambient provides systemic stability and hence stability of meaning. A bounded ambient becomes another kind of flight from the radical contingency of the world. In a world that has no ultimate, in which contingency an inescapable fact is, stability can never be guaranteed. Both agent and ambient must change so that they can both endure. Organisms interacting with other organisms are able to fashion mutual ambient that complicate these solution-making processes, but in doing so they also make possible new forms of sustainability and the emergence of higher orders of meaning, in particular human civilizations.
