TRAGIC RECOGNITION: ACTION AND IDENTITY IN ANTIGONE ...

arbitrary, see Marion Smiley, Moral Responsibility and the Boundaries of Community (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
78. This is not to say that natural disasters are always properly understood as the entirely
arbitrary action of wholly external forces upon blameless human beings: what we experience as
the sheer contingency of nature is sometimes closely related to our own activity and modes of
interaction with nonhuman forces—as, for example, when homes built on “former” floodplains
are destroyed by floods; or when the overprescription of highly successful antibiotics contributes
to the development and spread of drug-resistant strains of bacteria. For more detailed examples
of such tragic interactions between human beings and nature, especially in modern scientific
forestry and agriculture, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
79. On the inferiority of tragic plots based on “mere chance,” see Arist. Poet. 9, 1452a1–11;
good discussions can be found in Sherman, “Hamartia and Virtue”; Rorty, “Psychology of
Aristotelian Tragedy”; Bernard Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice,
and Conflict in Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
chap. 8.
80. On this implication of freedom, see Arendt, The Human Condition, 244, and “What is
Freedom,” in Between Past and Future, 169–71. Amelie Rorty mentions that “reversals” of
action are “most likely to occur in the interaction among several characters, each acting from his
or her own intentions”: “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” 11.
81. Seyla Benhabib, also referring to Arendt, calls this the “interpretive indeterminacy” of
action. See her Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 136.
82. Although causal contingency also plays a role in the tragedy, I think the account of
impropriety and identity I give below can ultimately be described as a specific modality or
manifestation of the way in which human plurality deprives us of sovereignty over the
significance of our actions.
83. Aristotle’s use of hamartia occurs in Poet. 13, 1453a10; for a good discussion see Sherman,
“Hamartia and Virtue”; and for an account parallel to mine of hamartia as a kind of blindness or
ignorance that arises precisely from an agent’s own virtues of character, see Rorty, “Psychology
of Aristotelian Tragedy,” 11. Rorty’s account seems distinctive to me in suggesting that the
vulnerabilities of character may arise precisely from the best moments of character itself; other
accounts of character’s vulnerability, such as Nussbaum’s, focus on the ways in which
circumstances external to character itself may render character insufficient for eudaimonia; for
example, Nussbaum (334–35, 380–81) focuses on the cases like Priam’s (in which misfortune
deprives someone of the resources or objects necessary for good activity); Oedipus’s (in which
the “luck of circumstances” makes it the case that the description under which someone intended
his act was, through no fault of his own, not the “morally salient description of what took
place”); and Agamemnon’s (in which circumstances require someone to choose, in full knowledge
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