Hamartia

Hamartia (ἁμαρτία, from hamartanein, to miss the mark) is the Aristotelian term for the error or misjudgment through which the tragic hero brings catastrophe upon himself. Aristotle introduces the concept in the Poetics (chapter 13): the best tragic plot turns on a man neither wholly good nor wholly bad who falls through some hamartia — and the ambiguity of the word, covering both intellectual error and moral fault, has generated a commentary tradition that runs from Aristotle’s ancient readers to the present.

The later Christian tradition absorbed hamartia as the standard New Testament word for sin, which has pulled the term toward the moral rather than the cognitive reading. Bernard Williams in [[williams-shame-necessity|Shame and Necessity]] argues — importantly for the Seba lineage — that the original Greek sense names a condition in which the distinction between error and fault has not yet been drawn cleanly, and that the modern attempt to force hamartia onto one side of that distinction loses what the tragic form actually carries. The Jungian reading — that the hero’s error is the form his individuation takes under the archaic moral economy — is consonant with this. See catharsis and tragic-man.

Hamartia

Relationships