While leaving my place the other day, I pulled out behind a very slow car. Unfortunately, whenever I pull out onto this particular road, I find myself behind a slow vehicle, especially when I am late for whatever date, appointment, or event I am headed. On the occasion in question, I said outloud to myself, "I am SO UNLUCKY!" Immediatly, as the words left my mouth, I thought of Aristotle and his writing on chance and luck in Book II of Physics.
He introduces luck and chance as things that some people believe to be causes and specifies that we need to determine if luck and chance are indeed the same thing.
When I pulled out behind that slow car, was it luck? Was it chance? Can someone truly be unlucky?
Chance is not the same thing as luck, and it is debatable whether luck really exists. If Aristotle is going to assign luck to every bad event and every good event, that would make every event either lucky or unlucky. I think that could be a word used as an adjective to describe a situation, like if one said, "That soup was very hot and I burnt my tongue" in the same vein one could say "Meeting up with Edgar today was lucky." It is a way to describe the situation like hot or cold, but not necessarily saying luck exists as some scientific or unscientific way to determine why things happen. I think luck exists in the sense that it is a descriptive word used to elaborate on certain situations.
Aristotle makes an interesting distinction between luck and chance, and applies chance to animals and inanimate objects. Chance is an easier one to explain than luck. My idea of chance, based on what Aristotle said, is that something is going to happen no matter what. Things are always happening. If an inanimate object falls because of an earthquake and hits someone, it hits that person by chance, because it, not being alive or with conscious thought, had no intention of hitting a person or no intention of not hitting a person.
So when I was driving behind the extremely slow vehicle, was I a victim of chance or luck? The car is an inanimate object, but the driver is a human being and I am a human being. I say, that because the vehicle was being operated by a human being, and that that road is one I take almost every day, that I was both a victim of chance and luck. My conclusion is based on the fact that Aristotle said (in the Person A and Person B debt in the market place example) that is Person A frequents the market place every day, then encountering the Person B is not luck. I drive that road every day, so therefore, getting behind a slow vehicle is not bad luck, it is chance.