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Hamartia and Virtue

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Hamartia and Virtue Essays on Aristotle's Poetics edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty + "HAMART/A ANO VIRTUE" NANCY SHERMAN PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Hamartia and Virtue Nancy Sherman Being alive Is when each moment's a new start. with past And future shuftled between fingers For a new game. I'm dealing out My hand to them. one more new botched beginning There. where we still stand talking in the quad. ("One more New Botched Beginning", by Stephen Spender) Look. a cantaloupe is a hard thing to buy - maybe the hardest thing there is to buy, when you stop to think about it. A cantaloupe isn't an apple, you know. where you can tell from the outside what's going on inside. I'd rather buy a car than a cantaloupe - I'd rather buy a house than a cantaloupe. If one time in ten 1 come away from the store with a decent cantaloupe, I consider myself lucky. 1 smell it. sniff it. press both ends with my thumb. 1'11 tell you about making a mistake with a cantaloupe: we all do it. We weren't made to buy cantaloupe. Do me a favor. Herm, get off the woman's [back], because it isn't just Lil's weakness buying a cantaloupe: it's a human weakness. (from Patrimony: A True Story, by Philip Roth) l. lntroduction What nags us in thinking about Aristotle's Poetics is that like the tragic pro­ tagonist, we too can unwittingly cause our own undoing. Through our own agency, we can bring about our downfall. That we are not in full control of our happiness is a familiar theme in Aristotle's theory of human action. Living well is always subject to contingency and the unexpected. As such, happiness is a matter of both virtuous agency and luck. Our capacity for virtuous agency is itself in no small part a matter of luck. But what engages us most as tragic spectators is not simply luck. It is not what befalls the protagonist, either in terms of the hand dealt or the crossroads faced. Rather, it is how the tragic figure contributes to her own misfortune. Even where the action is performed under duress as the 177 178 N. Sherman result of an external conflict, agency (or causal responsibility) is still implicated.l It is agency, or better, failed agency, that draws us in. The point is that indi~ viduals make mistakes (hamartiai ), largely unavoidable, that bring incurable suffering to themselves and thos~ they love. Tragedy works through the agent's own bands. It is a mimetic representation not merely of suffering, but of action.2 Tbe task of tbis paper is to explore tbe nature of tragic mistakes and their relation to tbe spectators' propensity for pity. In tbinking about hamartia, one contrast Aristotle has in mind is reasonably straigbtforward: the tragic hero is not simply the victim of arbitrary fate or irrational accident. 3 An individual may suffer barm because a tile falls on his head, or even cause harm because bis spear bits a spectator who, witbout warning, runs into its trajectory, or an abnormal gust of wind carries bis arrow off course mortally wounding bis lover, or the safety catcb on the catapult he is using breaks. These are cases of misfortune or bad luck. In sorne cases they are unlucky coincidences. But tbey are not tbe stuff oftragedy. For the arche (origin) of the cause of those ill~effects is outside tbe agent. 4 One is a victim, not an agent. Tragedy, in contrast, is about human action, its circumstances and errors. It is true, accidents are often like mistaken choices. In both cases one may end up missing tbe target. Indeed, in Greek, the word hamartia is rooted in the notion of missing the mark (hamartanein), and covers a broad spectrum that includes accident and mistake, 5 as well as wrongdoing, error, or sin.6 And Aristotle bimselfuses the full range. Moreover, certain accidents work througb an agent's bands more tban others. I pull the drawer out in the usual. unproblematic way and it unexpectedly falls on my leg; I walk over a floorboard and it breaks beneath me; I drop the gun (wbich I take to be unloaded as it always is) and blow off my daughter's foot; I hurl the spear whicb wounds my lover. In such cases, I trigger the accident. Unlike walking beneath a falling tile, or being hurled by the wind, I set tbe chain of events in motion. But still, the overall flavor is happenstance: an agent bappens to be doing something at an unpropitious moment.7 Tragic hamartia, in contrast, focuses on agency. Tbe protagonist'is not simply a victim ofnature's caprices or faulty mechanics. Ratber what matters is that the agent chooses,8 yet chooses in a way that leads to calamity. The choice goes awry because of ignorance or misjudgment that are in principie more within human control tban sudden gusts of wind. Tbis need not imply culpability; to be the cause of harm, either through act or omission, may be neither sufficient nor necessary for moralliability.9 Still it does point toa class ofimpediments that are internal to the conditions of human agency. On tbe Aristotelian model, belief and desire together inform choice. More or less innocent defects in either can precipitate disastróus decisions. It is limitations endemic to arriving at a wise choice that yield tragic reversals. So, in self ~defense, Oedipus intentionally kills the stranger, and unwittingly becomes a parricide. He mistakes an identity that someone with a more privileged perspective might have gotten right. Phaedra's reluctant choice not t~ keep silent about her love for her stepson, Hippolytus, is Hamartia and Vírtue 179 presented as more of a dilemma about what to do. for she is aware in advance ofthe dangers ofbaring one's soul to those whose confidence has not been tested. Unlike Oedipus. hers is not a case of mistaken identity (literally, of taking one person for another). but of questionable judgment (of error). Whereas Oedipus makes a mistake, Phaedra errs. But whatever the difference. in each case the agent is causally responsible for the disaster that results. The calamity is made intelligible (rationalized) by sorne aspect of the agent's own choice. Moreover. the choice has something to do with a condition of character or agency - ignorance, interest, past judgments. passion, and so on. This connec­ tion between character. agency, and tragic choice is among the topics I shall be exploring. 10 In probing the connection between ignorance, choice, and character, 1 may appear to be reviving the Renaissance and later, Victorian orthodoxy of hamartia as "tragic flaw." 11 On this view. the tragic hero comes to ruin through a "great wrongdoing or sin" (di'hamartian megalen 1453a16). In short, tragedy comes to embrace the spirit of retribution: having sinned. the protagonist is punished for his errant ways. From the perspective of the spectator, potential feelings of indignation at the sight of wrongdoing and hubris are quieted upon witnessing the punitive effects of self -wrought ruin. As it happens. 1 have little interest in restoring this moralistic interpretation. It has little fit with the text of the Poetics, and makes fatally wrong turns at crucial moments. As an interpretation of Aristotle's paradigmatic tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannus, it fails dismally. It is implausible to claim that Oedipus' illusions about his family identity could have been avoided; that there was information of which he could have availed himself. No one in the play reproa­ ches Oedipus (despite the earnest efforts of critics to find a character flaw in his curiosity, anger. pride, and so on), and in the Oedipus Colonus. Oedipus insists he is innocent. that he erred unwillingly .12 The alternative notion of hamartia as a "mistake of fact" is not a perfect fit either. It may be the right gloss for Oedipus, but it works less well for many of the tragedies in the corpus. including those to which Aristotle directly appeals. Brief consideration of the notion of akrasia may be instructive here. Il An expla­ nation of the phenomenon in terms of ignorance of the minor premise (i.e. of the relevant circumstantial facts) is not always apt or adequate. Even where it has a certain plausibility, (as in the case of someone knowing drinking and driving don't mix, but yet failing to see that imbibing this much here and now will adversely affect her driving), we want to know why she failed to apply the principie, what obscured her vision, what beliefs and desires weighed on the other side, how in general, ignorance or misperception relates to aspects of character, such as belief. desire, emotion. and memory. In a comparable way. tragic ignorance does not simply descend upon a character like a sudden blanket of fog. It involves a construal or misconstrual that often has a history in the ends and interests of a character. It is not simply a cognitive matter. Though culpabil­ ity may be quite different in the cases of tragic hamartia and akrasia, ¡.¡ in both the 180 N. Sherman notion of mistake of fact is at times too sterile, at other times, too restrictive to explain the variety of mistaken choices. What I shall be suggesting is a range of ways in which tragic characters can err. Like others, I find systematic support in Aristotle's reminder in the Nicoma­ chean Ethics that while there is only one way to hit the mark. there are many ways to fall short of it. 15 Stilt the point of tragedy is not simply to bear witness to largely innocent but disastrous errors.
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