Talk:Hamartia

Is anyone interested in adding to this article the fact that "hamartia" is the same word that is used in the new testament for "sin". Check out the first page of the gospel of Matthew.

Which translation? The Singing Badger 00:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

"Hamartia" in the Greek text of Matthew is, yes, usually rendered as "sin." Giorgio Agamben has a discussion of this in his essay "Comedy," in the volume _The End of the Poem_.

Heavy breathing

Shouldn't there be a heavy breathing mark on άμαρτία, to give it the h? Right now, it would transliterate as amartia.--Prosfilaes 21:12, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Additions by User:Hraysmithj

Hraysmithj's additions strongly suggest original research. Please review, wikify and restore to the article:

Some have understood “hamartia” this way: “Traditionally, [hamartia] has been interpreted as referring to a 'tragic flaw' in the character of the protagonist (the tragic hero). More often than not, the tragic flaw is hubris. . . Regardless of what Aristotle actually meant, the term "tragic flaw" and the ideas behind it are firmly ensconced within traditional literary criticism.”

We should be very careful about perpetuating an egregious mistake by valuing “traditional literary criticism” over common sense and accuracy. Though “hamartia” is too frequently found since the Renaissance translated as “tragic flaw,” the better rendering, as many a classicist has told me, is “error or missing the mark.” Aristotle uses hamartia once and only once in the entirety of The Poetics. When discussing tragic agent, Aristotle is speaking of the nature of an agent as something neither totally good nor totally bad but somewhere in between. A tragic agent brings about change because of an act, a hamartia, an error brought about by missing the mark.

Take a serious look at where you actually are when you accept the notion of a “tragic flaw.” Consider Oedipus and his supposed “flaw,” pride. If only he had not been so head-strong, if only he had listen to his wife/mother when advised to go no further, and so forth, Oedipus could avoided “downfall.” Unfortunately, this view ignores basic facts of the story. What are the acts which have brought misfortune to Thebes? Murder and incest–Oedpius the agent of both. No action that Oedipus might conceivably take in Sophocles dramatic poem could erase these fundamental facts. Oedipus hamartia is not pride, nor hastiness, nor any other trait that might be summoned out of aether to damn him. His hamartia is his ignorance–he didn’t know who he was. Aristotle’s notion of hamartia here echoes the Greek notion that the good person never knowingly does wrong. Traits, what most mistakenly see as “flaws,” are just traits, examples of what Aristotle meant when he spoke of ethos–the habitual acts of agents which allow us to use short descriptors such as honest, dishonest, good, bad. We conclude a person is hasty, for instance, because we have seen that person perform hasty acts before. Such traits don’t make a person good or bad but do help make probable actions performed in the present since those actions have antecedents in the past. It is as wrongheaded to see Oedipus’ traits as causes of his misfortune as it would be to blame his brown hair, if that were his hair color, or the melatonin content of his skin. Hamartia describes an act performed in ignorance not a trait of an agent. Hamartia has to do with deeds not with character.

Another point to remember is that Aristotle, who based upon his familiarity with hundreds more dramatic poems than we possess, does not use words such as protagonist or antagonist nor does he limit hamartia to any single person. To the Greeks, the protagonist was the actor, the performer, who had the most lines in a performance whether those lines belonged to a single personage he represented or to multiple personages he was charged with representing in a single poem. Antagonist is a much, much later term, coined to be a companion to a misapplication of protagonist. Such later critical terms have no foundation in nor use to describe Greek tragic poetry. Though antagonist has solid appropriateness in later contexts, we mislead ourselves and others when we try to use it in a context that cannot sustain it.

If you wish to explore further the dangers of “flaw” hunting in Greek tragic poetry, see how much the notion helps in understanding other works such as Sophocles’ Philoctetes or Euripides’ Iphigenia At Taurus. --Ghirla ^-трёп- 11:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

This is an interesting point and relates a bit to the point I wanted to bring up, which is why I turned to the discussion page. I note that the English language essay here as well as that on tragedy is at odds with the German and Polish articles. They say that the tragic flaw is "wina niezawiniona" to quote the Polish example, or a guilt which is not a guilt, because the tragic hero is the victim of circumstance. He cannot do anything to prevent his ultimate downfall other than make it more or less ignoble. It is all "force majeure". The definition taught to me at University of tragedy was that tragedy rests on three legs, you need a character who is a leader among men but with a character flaw (such as hubris), then second he needs to make a free decision, which, being affected by his character flaw, is faulty, and third, it leads to his downfall. In comedy you get the first two elements, flawed characters and faulty decisions, but they all turn out right in the end so the third leg is different. It seems to me that this is correct, since if you do not have a free-will decision that is affected by the charcter flaw, you do not have something of literary interest. Literature is not about force majeure, with humans as helpless victims, but is about examining the human condition and the human character. There is no literary value in producing something where people are mere playthings of the gods. Yes there is force majeure, but this exists only to bring in that conflict which will test the character of the individual, the tragic hero.

It can also be argued that in this way tragedies were also intended by those philosophers who first wrote them (remember that Sophocles was first and foremost a philosopher and was concerned with ethics and morality)to be a way of warning to the leaders of the time to be aware of the faults arising from hubris. After all, they didn't have a free press then where they could write leader articles criticising the leaders' faults and would have had short lives had they done so, but this didn't come from nowhere. I think we need to use a bit of common sense in interpreting what hamartia meant to Aristotle, and again if we see it referring to sin in Koine a few hundred years later, you can say that this association probably didn't come from nowhere either.

Uncle Davey (Talk) 23:21, 21 November 2006 (UTC)