The term tuche — Greek for chance, fortune, or luck — enters the depth-psychology-adjacent corpus principally through Martha Nussbaum's landmark 1986 study, where it functions as the conceptual antagonist to techne (art, science, craft). For Nussbaum, tuche names the domain of uncontrolled contingency that impinges upon human flourishing: those events, reversals, and conditions that no deliberate skill or rational procedure can fully master. The antithesis between tuche and techne structures her reading of fifth-century Greek intellectual history, in which the progressive technai — from mathematics to medicine to rhetoric — are understood precisely as instruments for the human conquest of fortune's domain. Plato's philosophical ambition, on this account, is the most radical attempt at such conquest: the philosopher's techne would 'save lives' by reducing exposure to tuche altogether. Yet Nussbaum's deeper argument rehabilitates tuche as irreducible: tragic drama, Aristotelian ethics, and the poetry of Pindar attest to genuine losses inflicted by fortune upon excellent character. Bernard Williams's parallel treatment confirms that in Euripides, tuche's enlarged dramatic role coincides with a diminishment of prophetic certainty — fortune displaces divine determination. The term thus marks the fault-line between rationalist aspirations to self-sufficiency and the stubborn fragility of the good human life, making it indispensable for any depth-psychological engagement with ethics, tragedy, and the limits of mastery.
The antithesis between tuche and techne (art or science) and mythic stories of the saving power of techne: a hope for human progress.
This table-of-contents entry frames tuche as the structural opposite of techne, establishing the tuche/techne antithesis as the central organizing problem of Nussbaum's inquiry into Greek ethics and tragedy.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
surveying the full range of the fifth-century arts in the light of their underlying corporate aim, the elimination of tuche, we can make some observations that will prepare us, too, to understand why Socrates rejects it.
Nussbaum identifies the elimination of tuche as the shared teleological aim of all fifth-century technai, explaining both their appeal and the grounds of Socratic critique.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
the Protagoras, which takes as its explicit subject the human hope for science and the relationship between science and ordinary belief, is a good place to begin our investigation of Plato's relationship to the problems of tuche, as ordinary belief depicts them.
The Protagoras is situated as the entry point for examining how Plato positions philosophy against the pre-theoretical experience of tuche as depicted in common human belief.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
and tuche, 318-42, 384, 386; see also Activity, role in good life, Stability, Vulnerability
The index entry links eudaimonia and tuche across a sustained section of the text, indicating that the relationship between fortune and human flourishing constitutes a central argumentative thread in Nussbaum's Aristotle chapters.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
It is only logical that as tuche's part in the dramatization of human destiny grows, the essential significance of oracles and prophecies is lessened.
Williams cites the observation that tuche's expanding role in Euripidean drama inversely diminishes the significance of divine prophecy, repositioning fortune as the primary agent of tragic destiny.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
Women and the feminine: … as vulnerable to tuche, 67
The index cross-references the vulnerability of women to tuche, connecting gendered exposure to fortune with broader arguments about fragility and the limits of ethical self-sufficiency.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Self-sufficiency … and 'irrational' parts of soul, 7; of love, 177, 183, 199, 210, 364, 368; Platonic conception of, 5, 18, 87, 120, 137, 159, 184, 264, 310, 381, 420
Index entries on self-sufficiency cluster around Platonic aspirations to independence from fortune, providing the normative counter-ideal against which tuche's claims are evaluated.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Vulnerability, 80, 100, 137, 192, 238, 290-1; of activity, 91, 143, 146-8, 197, 273, 318-42, 343-5, 386; of good character, 67, 90, 318-42, 360, 381-2, 383-5, 397, 421
The extensive vulnerability index shows how tuche's domain — the uncontrollable — intersects with every major site of human excellence, from activity and character to love and politics.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
there is no such gap or that it is trivial, you will naturally judge that tragedy is either false or trivial … Aristotle's belief that the gap is both real and important illuminates his anti-Platonic claim that tragic action is important.
Nussbaum argues that acknowledging the real gap between good character and good fortune — i.e., the genuine power of tuche — is what grounds Aristotle's defense of tragedy's ethical seriousness.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
Examples of recognized technai include items that we would call by each of these three names … The Greek word is more inclusive than any one of these English terms.
By mapping the semantic range of techne, Nussbaum establishes the conceptual breadth of what tuche is opposed to, clarifying what it means for fortune to resist artistic or scientific mastery.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
The fifth-century Prometheus Bound calls numbering 'chief of all the stratagems', expressing a popular view that number is somehow a, or even the, chief element in techne.
Mathematical enumeration is presented as the paradigmatic instrument of techne, and by implication of anti-tuche mastery, since the denumerable is the controllable while the innumerable escapes human grasp.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting
as Heraclitus said, 'It is in being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself: a back-stretching harmony, as of a bow or a lyre.'
Heraclitean tension is invoked to characterize the tragic acknowledgment of irresolvable conflict, implicitly contrasting the tragic acceptance of fortune's irreducibility with rationalist schemes of control.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside