TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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frustrate movement toward that telos.” 71 And this, ultimately, is what enables Aristotle’s consideration of character and action in the Poetics to shed light on the relationship between identity and action, both in the Antigone and in general. * * * We began this section with Aristotle’s claim, in chapter 6 of the Poetics, that tragedy is an imitation of action rather than of persons, and that in tragedy the plot and its constituent actions have a certain kind of priority over character. But after the account of the meaning of êthos we have just developed, this claim might seem puzzling: how can action have priority over character if character is that set of stable qualities that governs and determines our actions? On some accounts, this apparent contradiction can only be addressed by positing a deep gulf between Aristotle’s action-centered account of tragic drama in the Poetics and his character-centered undestanding of “real life” in his ethical works; if this is right, then it can only be misleading to look to the Poetics for insight into the real-life relationship between character and action. 72 Such a conclusion might be inevitable if Aristotle’s account of the relationship between character and action in “real life” were reducible to the thought that êthos determines action. But important parts of the Nicomachean Ethics, including the discussions of habituation and the acquisition of virtue in chapter 2, suggest that Aristotle holds a more complex view. It’s not only that the virtue of bravery causes or is actualized in courageous acts, for example, but also that bravery itself is formed through the doing of brave deeds (NE 2.2, 1104a28–b4); this, Aristotle maintains, “is why we must perform the right activities” (NE 2.1, 1103b23). 73 For Aristotle, then, action and character form a circuit of mutual constitution: character pushes out into the world by shaping the kinds of things we do; and it is at the same time formed and reformed by our worldly activity. Against this background, it becomes possible to find in the Poetics an 25
argument that is consistent with, though perhaps different in emphasis from, Aristotle’s broader ethical views. The point of the Poetics’ claim about the priority of action over character, we might say, is that this circuit of mutual constitution is not closed. While character influences action, it does not perfectly determine it; and this means both that “being of a certain good human character [may fall] short of sufficiency for eudaimonia,” and that character itself is constitutively vulnerable to the various forms of worldly contingency that are transmitted, through our activity, back to our being. 74 What are these “various forms of worldly contingency” that afflict activity? And how do they relate to what, in the context of the Antigone, I have called action’s “impropriety” with respect to identity? 75 The first question of these questions is, of course, enormous; I will merely mention two very general considerations here. First, action projects human beings into a world of causality, initiating sequences of events that, once begun, proceed without necessarily respecting the agent’s intentions. This fact of the causality of human action most obviously threatens our capacity to control the consequences of our actions. But it also limits our capacity to control the significance of our actions, insofar as it prevents us from locating a natural and uncontroversial boundary between our actions and the events that follow from them. To be sure, we rely on such boundaries all the time, particularly in the law, where we often need to decide whether an event is to be imputed to an agent as his act, for which he may be held responsible. But although these conceptions of the limits of responsibility or imputability may represent themselves as reflections of some sheerly factual line of demarcation between, say, the willed and the caused, it is in a way the very absence of such a line that allows imputability to arise as a problem in the first place. Will and agency only become possible sources of injury or damage because they are not isolated from a separate world of causes and effects, but are themselves sources of 26
Page 1 and 2: TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDEN
Page 3 and 4: Of course, the tradition of dramati
Page 5 and 6: one with itself by virtue of its tr
Page 7 and 8: At first glance, the Antigone doesn
Page 9 and 10: Yet the Antigone’s struggle is no
Page 11 and 12: commanders but also to Polyneices,
Page 13 and 14: Creon’s first speech sharply cont
Page 15 and 16: What happens when Antigone and Creo
Page 17 and 18: (844). Given the function of the la
Page 19 and 20: Worse still, Creon’s acts, like A
Page 21 and 22: preceding events; she leaves the ro
Page 23 and 24: not in the agency-enhancing recogni
Page 25: those relating to thought or intell
Page 29 and 30: causal order of the world, the will
Page 31 and 32: This is not altogether wrong, but i
Page 33 and 34: the paradigmatic recognition scene
Page 35 and 36: 6. This ambivalence is registered i
Page 37 and 38: 19. See for instance Lysias 2.7-10
Page 39 and 40: thus either to love [philian] or ha
Page 41 and 42: etween (and therefore the inseparab
Page 43 and 44: 61. This use of Aristotle’s Poeti
Page 45 and 46: arbitrary, see Marion Smiley, Moral

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