TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

not in the agency-enhancing recognition of an identity but rather in the acknowledgment what
Hannah Arendt calls the “non-sovereign” character of human action. 62
* * *
In order to bring Aristotle’s claims about action and character to bear on the themes of
action and identity we have been discussing so far, however, we need to deal with a
terminological question: what is the relationship between Aristotelian êthos and the notion of
identity? After all, it might be objected that Aristotelian êthos refers not to the full range of
socially contingent characteristics we bear, but to our specifically moral or ethical qualities—that
is, to the virtues and vices Aristotle discusses in his ethical treatises. 63 What does character in
this sense have to do with the “identities” articulated by Antigone and Creon—much less with
the use of “identity” in contemporary politics, with its heavy emphasis on group membership
and ascriptive characteristics rather than the moral states of individual ethical agents?
We can address this question by briefly examining the meaning of êthos, both in broader
context and in Aristotle’s philosophy. In an illuminating discussion of the development of the
term êthos from Homer down to Aristotle, Charles Chamberlain has shown that êthos originally
referred to the “haunts” of an animal—that is, to the places where animals of a particular type
were typically or characteristically found. 64 The term later came to be extended to human beings
and transformed in a number of ways—but far from being used exclusively to refer to the vices
and virtues of individuals, it was also used to refer to “the peculiarities which people of a certain
polis acquire as a result of being brought up under its particular laws and customs”; Thucydides,
for example, has Pericles remind the Athenians that they were brought up in a certain êthos,
which Rex Warner renders as “way of life.” 65 Importantly, then, the line of continuity that
Chamberlain traces from “haunts” to “character” does not suggest some exclusive connection
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