I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
Their most heated dispute is over the definition of ‘hamartia,’ which Gastrell says is a tragic flaw. Yash corrects him, saying that the word in ancient Greek, as Aristotle was using it, meant a random error of judgement. From there it escalates quickly. Gastrell claims that nothing in Greek drama is random and that Greek drama wouldn’t have survived at all without this tragic irony that they invented. Yash insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake, that we are all vulnerable to tragedy because we are human.
Lily King, Heart the Lover
Yash is correct, etymologically. The word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) derives from the Greek verb hamartanein, which was originally an archery term meaning “to miss the mark.” In archery, it didn’t mean the archer was a bad person or fundamentally flawed; it simply meant they aimed for the bullseye and missed, perhaps due to a gust of wind, a slip of the finger, or a momentary lapse in focus.
In his Poetics, Aristotle introduced the term to explain why we feel pity and fear for a tragic hero. He argued that for a character to be tragic, they must not be evil, and they must be relatable. The cause of their downfall must not have come from vice or depravity, but from hamartia.
Apparently most modern classical scholars agree with Yash’s view. In the context of ancient Greek drama such as Oedipus Rex, hamartia is usually an intellectual mistake or factual ignorance, not a moral defect. For example, Oedipus kills his father because he does not know the man is his father, not because he is angry or evil.
Gastrell gives the world narrative logic, influenced by Christian theology, where the New Testament uses hamartia to mean “sin.” This view creates structure and meaning. If a person falls because of their own flaw, the universe seems to make sense. If, instead, each person is only one random occurrence away from personal disaster, we are living in chaos, and we aren’t safe, even if we act with goodness.
Neither view seems complete; instead, in most situations in life (and in some Greek tragedies) random events and personal flaws interact to produce tragic outcomes.
Consider Antigone, the Greek drama in which Antigone, sister to dead brothers Eteocles and Polyneices, seeks to give Polyneices the traditional burial ritual that he has been denied, due to his attack upon the city of Thebes during civil war. Creon, uncle to Antigone and her brothers, has declared that anyone who tries to bury Polyneices will be stoned to death. Both Antigone and Creon show an unwillingness to bend. When guards catch Antigone performing the burial ritual, they bring her to Creon. Furious at being challenged, he condemns her. He seals her alive in a rocky cave to starve. Later, realizing his mistake, he rushes to bury Polyneices and then goes to the cave to free Antigone. She has already hanged herself with her veil. Creon’s son Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, kills himself in grief. Then Creon’s wife Eurydice commits suicide too because of the death of her son.
Both Creon and Antigone show willfullness and strategic miscalculation. Antigone might have convinced Creon to give Polyneices a proper burial if she had approached him with diplomacy. Creon, however, is the true tragic figure in this play. He loses both his wife and his son due to his stubbornness and his tactical mistakes.
Tragedy, whether in drama or in real life, is rarely just due to cosmic accident or internal personal defects. Rather, it comes about when many causes — and possibly actions of multiple people — interact to produce unwanted, sometimes terrible outcomes.
In causal reductionism, you try to explain why a complex event happened based on one single thing. For example, someone is unfaithful to their spouse. The easy way to account for this is to say something like, “she is just a cheater.” It’s the “once a cheater, always a cheater” philosophy — some people are just prone to cheat. They will cheat, more than once, given the opportunity.
This accounting relies on a theory of essentialism — people have fixed, immutable natures, and these natures are the dominant cause of their actions. But psychological research suggests that, in fact, actions are often as much determined by situations and external context as by internal dispositions. Attributing people’s actions primarily or solely to their character and internal flaws, while attributing your own bad behavior to your situation, is known as the fundamental attribution error.
Another act of causal reductionism is to label people in certain ways if they don’t behave the way you want. In the dating milieu, one of the most common is to call someone avoidant if they don’t seek the same level of connection with you. While this may be comforting in the moment of a breakup, it can also keep you from truly seeing the reality of the other person, that they are not simply acting out some inborn tendency to avoid intimacy, they are a complicated Other with their own needs, desires, and goals.