ABSTRACT
According to a widely held view, formulated classically by Wilamowitz and Dodds, the hero of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is an innocent victim of fate. More recently, several commentators have defended an older approach according to which Oedipus is shown by Sophocles to be cognitively at fault. This latter view seems to me correct, and I defend it in this chapter. I discuss Aristotle’s concept of hamartia, arguing that it includes moral and cognitive aspects, and showing how, on an Aristotelian approach, actions arise naturally from character, so that mistakes (hamartiai) are to be traced to defective dispositions of agents. In tragedy the rule for protagonists is, as Bradley noted, that ‘character is destiny’. Oedipus has been (and continues to be) widely lauded by commentators for his supposed intellectual prowess, but what the drama actually shows us is intellectual obtuseness and ill-judged precipitancy. I suggest that the pattern of culpable error followed by punishment is replicated throughout the entire European tragic tradition. It follows—and I apply this moral generally to European tragedy—that the Oedipus Rex is not an attack on Enlightenment values of pragmatic intelligence, as has so often been held, but precisely supports them. The doctrine of hamartia is itself a fundamentally rationalizing and secularizing move on Aristotle’s part: where we can trace the aetiology of catastrophe to human cognitive error, we have some chance of learning from our mistakes. I stress the purely human dimension, because I maintain that, contrary to what many critics have held, Aristotle’s omission of the divine plane from his discussion of tragedy was not a mistake, but driven by insight into the deep mechanism of tragedy. I argue that the principle of divine intervention in tragedy is captured by Aquinas’ dictum that God acts in each person according to that person’s character. The point of the supernatural in traditional literature is not to undermine the autonomy and sufficiency of human motivation but to represent it in a particular way—to enlarge and dignify it. Sophocles’ Oedipus, I argue, is an entirely free agent: Apollo is presented as merely predicting the future, not determining it. But the application of Aquinas’ principle means that, even if I am wrong about that, Oedipus remains responsible for his actions, since (as already in Homer) determination by a god (by contrast with determination by another human being) is compatible with—indeed is a way of representing—agent freedom.
