Tragic Man

Vernant’s and Vidal-Naquet’s Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1972) names a narrow but decisive historical window — fifth-century Attic tragedy — as the site where a specific psychological category is first attempted: the agent who is master of his acts and responsible for them. Vernant writes in the Preface to the 2006 edition of Myth and Thought: “We try to show that in fifth-century Attic tragedy one finds the first hesitant sketches of the man-agent, master of his actions and responsible for them, possessing a will” (Vernant 1983, Preface).

The emphasis falls on hesitant. The tragic agent does not possess a will in the modern sense. He acts under the pressure of the gods, the daimōn, the family curse, and the city at once; his choice is constrained by what Vernant, following Albin Lesky, calls “double motivation” — the act belongs simultaneously to the human agent and to the divine power that drives it. Tragedy stages the question the archaic Greek did not have to ask and the modern has forgotten how to ask: under what conditions, and at what cost, is a human act the agent’s own?

The tragic agent stands between the distributed homeric-plural-self — whose thumos, phrēn, and noos belong to the body and to the gods — and the unified subject of philosophical ethics. He is the figure in whom the will is first possible as a problem rather than as a possession. For the Lineage, this matters doubly: it names the historical emergence of the category of responsibility that Jungian ethics assumes, and it preserves the archaic recognition that the psyche is never wholly the agent’s own — that what we act from also acts on us.

Relationships

• myth-and-tragedy-in-ancient-greece
• double-motivation
• daimon
• ate
• homeric-plural-self

Primary sources

• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983, Preface)
• myth-and-tragedy-in-ancient-greece (Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 1988)