TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

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
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