Ancient Freewill

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On Fate and Fatalism

Solomon, Robert C.

Philosophy East and West, Volume 53, Number 4, October 2003,

pp. 435-454 (Article)

Published by University of Hawai'i PressDOI: 10.1353/pew.2003.0047

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ON FATE AND FATALISM

Robert C. Solomon

Department of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin

Fatalism is the rather mystical and superstitious view that at certain checkpoints in our lives, we will necessarilyfind ourselves in particular circumstances (the circumstances fate has decreed) no matter what the intervening vagaries of our personal trajectories.. . . It is widely agreed that this sort of fatalism has absolutely nothing torecommend it.

Daniel Dennett 1

Mr. Bush seems aware that fate has brought him to an amazing juncture. The scion who started as an Ivyslacker, getting serious about politics late in life, the candidate who loped into the White House, propelled bydaddys friends and contributors, the good-natured guy who benefited from low expectations, has taken on acampaign that would chill even Churchill: annihilating nihilists in the cradle of civilization who want to wreckcivilization.

Maureen Dowd 2

Until recently, the concepts of fate and fatalism were both very widely accepted andtaken quite seriously. Today, both concepts tend to be the target of widespreadphilosophical disdain. Dan Dennett, for example, dismisses fatalism in his unusuallyentertaining book on free will (Elbow Room) as mysterious and superstitious andthen overgeneralizes the thesis to make it absurd: no agent can do anything about anything (p. 123). Accordingly, he finds nothing to recommend fatalism but thepower to create creepy effects in literature (p. 104). He further insists that freedomis compatible with determinism so long as we do not confuse that with foolishfatalism.

Fatalism is the idea that what happens (or has happened) in some sense has to(or had to) happen. 3 Such beliefs seem to involve a peculiar sense of necessity. It isnot logical necessity (except, perhaps, for Leibniz God) and thus should not beconfused with Doris days tautological if plaintive rendition of Que sera, sera. 4 It isnot scientific or causal necessity (it precedes modern science by millennia) andshould not be confused or conflated with what is often called determinism. Nor isfatalism theological necessity (as in Its Gods will), for notions of fate thrive inmany cultures (for instance, the notion of karma in Buddhist cultures) that do not invoke the concept of God. But, as the concept of karma makes evident, fatalismneed not invoke any agency at all (except, perhaps, the agency of the subject fated).(Fate, by contrast, does seem to imply such an agent, and to that extent is a morenarrow and contentious version of fatalism.) What is necessary seems to be only theoutcome, regardless of causes, regardless of agency. Thus, Oedipus was fated to killhis father and marry his mother no matter what he or anyone else might do to pre-vent it and quite apart from the circuitous causal route that it took for him to get there. And in Sophocles version, at least, there is little mention of the gods.

Philosophy East & West Volume 53, Number 4 October 2003 435454 435> 2003 by University of Hawaii Press


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Simply stated in terms of this bald, mysterious sense of necessity, there are fewnotions older or more venerable than fate and its more philosophical version, fatal-ism. Thus, the fact that fate and fatalism are so utterly dismissed in modern philoso-phy and modern thought in general should provoke our interest. Is fate nothing morethan archaic superstition? Does it in fact go against everything that science hastaught us? Isnt there some sense in which the belief in fate is not only understand-able but almost inescapable? Contemporary philosophy has certainly expressed littlebut contempt for these inquiries, where they are mentioned at all.

Fate and fatalism, this peculiar (creepy) sense of necessity, need not be aglobal thesis and need not apply to every situation and event. It might be posh tosay, in a blurt of New Age inspiration, perhaps, that there are no accidents, but that is usually an unthinking overstatement. Fate and fatalism might be applied tospecific actions and events (what Dennett calls local fatalism 5 ), although (as withdeterminism) one could imagine a thesis that is all-encompassing. I just see no point in insisting on such a thesis. The question I want to ask is whether there is someinteresting and defensible thesis regarding the supposed necessity of some significant events or states of affairs that is other than the usual causal explanation. I want tosuggest that there are quite a few occasions on which such necessity can be cited, solong as necessity is not unreasonably restricted to scientific explanation, much lesslogical necessity, alone.

Particularly subject to fate are those definitive moments in life: birth, marriage,children, going broke, finding oneself at war, or being caught up in a naturalcalamity (legally, an act of God), and, of course, death. Especially fascinating arethose seemingly insignificant encounters, coincidences, slips, and misunderstand-ings that, in retrospect, have momentous consequences. It is fate and fatalism,ultimately, that explain why heroes like Hector and Achilles have to die, why theHebrew temple was destroyed, why hurricane Andrew hit just as the newlyweds

were putting the finishing touches on the new house, why some people are rich andso many are poor, why a young girl should die before her time. It is fate andfatalism that answer such plaintive questions as Why me? and Why should thisburden fall on us, of all people, especially now? But what kind of answer, what kind of explanation, would this be?

Mark Bernstein is one of the few philosophers to give the matter serious (book-length) attention.6 But for him, sadly, the matter of fatalism becomes a technicalexercise concerning the notions of time and truth, raising conundrums about modality, necessity, causality, and the ontological status of events. The question forhim (although he ultimately takes no firm stand on the answer), is whether thenecessity of future events is ontologically the same as the necessity of past events.Ingenious as his arguments may be, his purely (onto)logical approach misses the

pathos and the peculiar felt necessity of the traditional notion. But fatalism need not be construed as either a mysterious or a metaphysical thesis. Nor should it simply bedismissed as a bit of archaic or popular superstition or transformed into a purelytechnical philosophical puzzle. There is a great deal for philosophers to do in

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accounting for the ordinary if often inchoate philosophical beliefs and sensibilities of ordinary people.

The ancient Greeks had their concept of moira, before them the Chinese spokeof ming, and before them early Indian philosophers speculated about karma.7 ItsGods will became the standard explanation of tragedy and disaster for ancient Hebrews and then for the Christians and the Muslims. Such explanations also raisedthe awful question of whether or not the victims of tragedy were also in some sensethemselves to be blamed, but what was not in question was whether or not thetragedy could be explained, that is, had some cosmic significance. Of course, simplyspeaking of concepts of fate among the ancient Greeks, Buddhists, Hebrews, Chi-nese, Christians, and Muslims glosses over enormous differences. There are differ-ences having to do with the relationship between God or gods and fate or thefates, differences between Gods will and fate, differences between fate and fatal-ism, all kinds of differences in the scope and degree as well as the kind of neces-sity that fate involves, differences in the range and kinds of contexts in which fate isappropriately appealed to, and differences in the role of cleverness and strategy (theGreek metis ) in possibly circumventing what is fated and how one is to navigate fate.It may or may not be possible to know ones fate, and there will follow a large vari-ety of tests and techniques for ascertaining just what it is. Perhaps, too, if it is possi-ble to circumvent fate then prognostications of fate will be followed by any numberof prescriptions about how one might alter or escape ones fate. Not surprisingly,many of the great systems of thought in the world, including Christianity and Bud-dhism, have consisted largely of spiritual advice about ones probable fate (e.g.,eternal damnation and repeated reincarnation) and its avoidance (e.g., through faith,prayer, meditation, yoga, and virtuous living).

Fate, Fatalism, Science, and Teleology

It is uncontroversial that the main reason why all discussion of fate and fatalism getsdismissed today as so much superstition and nonsense is our cultures generally sci-entific and naturalistic outlook. But it is a mistake to think that the appeal to fateand fatalism requires the rejection of this outlook and a compensatory turn to theunknown and unknowable, to magic or the supernatural, or to some ill-consideredanti-scientific conception of spirituality. Belief in fate is wholly compatible with thescientific outlook, which is neither to say that the scientific outlook is the only validoutlook nor to say that fatalism must itself be accounted for in terms of the scientificoutlook.

Until the twentieth century, the idea that the universe is governed by chance would have been almost unthinkable. As late as the mid-twentieth century, such

a thought was widely considered absurd. (This Camus dubbed the indifferenceof the world.) The most stubborn argument against evolution continues to be theblinkered whine that all of this could not have come about by chance, and eventhe Big Bang, it is argued, shows somehow that there must be a purpose behind

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existence. Today, popular speakers still rage against thinking and theories that emphasize only meaningless chance and mere probabilities. Such thinking is dis-missed as nihilism. But is the stark choice between scientific stochastic thinkingand comforting theology all that weve got? Knowing what we know about scienceand causation, and about evolution and cosmology, does it still make any sense toappeal to fate and fatalism?

It is worth noting that not only science-minded folk but even those who feelquite free to refer to Gods will regarding each and every event nevertheless hesi-tate to speak of fate. This suggests that the odium against fate and fatalism is not based on scientific thinking alone. There is a further antagonism between Christiantheism and fatalism that is itself an interesting story. Briefly, fate and fatalism areconsidered godless and pagan, despite the obvious affinities with Christian pre-determination, and so are rejected by most Christians in favor of the God-given gift of free will.8

Can philosophy find a place for fate and fatalism without violating science? Toput the matter bluntly, the necessity that is invoked by fate and fatalism is not sci-entific necessity but rather what we might call narrative necessity. The analog isthe logic of a novel or movie plot. Sometimes a plot works, other times not. Weall know that what works in fiction may be very different from the way it is in life,and what happens in life is sometimes so implausible and unexpected that it wouldbe hooted off the stage if depicted in the theater. Thus, the Nietzschean admonitionlive your life like a work of art should be taken with a grain of salt and demandsa certain caution, but it does not follow that we do not conceive of our lives as anongoing story with a developing plot, albeit with unexpected twists and turns, allthe time. Indeed, it takes a considerable effort, whether by way of an existentialist gratuitous act or by way of a desperate authorial disclaimer (the life you arewitnessing has no plot or purpose), to deny this. (But then, of course, such acts or

disclaimers become yet another chapter heading in the ongoing drama of ones life.)The notion of narrative necessity allows us to appreciate how fatalistic explana-tion might be very different from scientific explanation without being in any wayincompatible with it. To appeal to fate and fatalism is nothing other than to insist that in terms of the overall plot (whatever that may turn out to be) an act or event hasconsiderable significance. It is therefore not to say that it could not have turned out otherwise. One might say (following Aristotle and later Hegel) that fate and fatalismhave teleological significance, that is, that it can be argued to be necessary (per-haps looking back in retrospect) insofar as it is part of the path to some ultimatepurpose. It forms an intrinsic part of the narrative as it unfolds. If the story hadunfolded in some other way, then that development instead of this one would havebeen deemed necessary.

The exemplary use of such a concept in the history of philosophy is the notion of necessity (even deductive necessity) displayed by Hegel in his dialecticalwritings (from the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 to the final system of hisEncyclopedia). It has often been commented that what Hegel (following Fichte andSchelling) had in mind was neither logical (mathematical) or causal necessity.



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Indeed, Hegel explicitly argues this himself (in the Preface to the Phenomenology ).The path to Absolute Knowing, according to Hegel, consists of a sequence of necessary steps, but it is not (I have argued) as if the path suggested by Hegel is theonly possible path; nor need the end of the path be considered Absolute in anymysterious sense. 9

Thus one should not take ultimate purpose or the Absolute too seriously or tooliterally. The ultimate purpose need not itself be in any sense necessary. It wasfated and thus necessary in the requisite sense that Achilles would die in the TrojanWar, but the war itselfand Achilles fighting in itwas not necessary. (We are toldthis in the Iliad itself.) And as for the ultimate as the last in the series, in the end,Keynes reminds us, we are all dead. The significance of our actions and the eventsof our lives surely cannot be the mere fact of our death. (There may be one or twonotable exceptions here, but they transcend our discussion.) But, of course, insofaras it is not ones death itself but rather the shape of ones life that is in question, thisteleological notion of necessity makes a lot of sense. Thus, it is necessary, andlooking back I would even call it fate, that I stumbled across Frithjof BergmannsPhilosophy in Literature class while I was in medical school at the University of Michigan, and this turned my head toward philosophy and thus shaped my life. Thisis not to insist that it could not have been otherwise, nor is it to deny that mystumbling across Bergmanns class was just that, something that happened more orless by chance.

Why is narrative necessity not merely a version of determinism? All of theingredients of a causal and of a fatalistic account might well be the same. But nar-rative necessity is teleological as well as (or even rather than) causal. Here, as before,it is important not to make determinism and teleology into incompatible competi-tors as modes of explanation. 10 Biology is full of examples in which teleology anddeterminism complement one another. (To mention only the standard example: the

heart pumps in order to circulate the blood throughout the body and keep theorganism alive, and the heart pumps because it is made of innervated muscle.) So,one might say that fatalism is teleological in that it focuses not so much on thecauses or even on the outcome as such but rather on the narrative significance of anaction or event or its outcome.

The teleology of fatalism is particularly clear when fatalism takes the form of destiny (as in early American imperialism and the popular conception of Mani-fest Destiny, the inevitability of the young United States conquering all of the landsand peoples west to the Pacific Ocean). Destiny is not so much a necessary outcome(it could easily be imagined otherwise) as it is an outcome that is necessary givensome larger sense of purpose. This may well include consideration of the characterand abilities of the person or (in the case above) a people. One cannot understand

destiny just by understanding how (causally) the outcome came about, although aperson or peoples self-conscious awareness of purpose is surely one of the most important causal factors in the explanation. When Nietzsche exclaimed (on thebrink of madness) I am a destiny! he clearly had a vision of his whole life, hiswork, and his influence on the future in mind, the unitary purpose of his life.



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Its Out of Our Hands

We all sometimes find that our lives are out of our hands, subject to all sortsof outside influences and determinants and, indeed, continuously exposed tochance. Indeed, anyone who thinks about it for even a minute or two realizes just how much our lives are out of our hands. Control freaks that we are, this tends tomake us extremely uncomfortable. It is easy to understand, then, why so manypeople would rush to embrace a comforting vision of the universe that holds that at least we are in good hands. (This was Freuds diagnosis of religion, of course, inFuture of an Illusion.) But, then, what if not Gods hands? Todays Twelve Stepprograms appeal rather noncommittally to some higher power (as the AmericanDeists and French Revolutionaries appealed to the Supreme Being), which seemsto serve much the same purpose. Whether invoking a personal agent or not, suchappeals provide some sense of significance and solace, the main alternatives beingmere chance, probability, and luck. Both stochastic and deterministic expla-nations of how some tragic event came about are notoriously inadequate for thispurpose.

The prevailing answer, however, favored especially by the hardheaded, is that there are no hands at all, not even Adam Smiths often appealed-to invisible one.Its all simply a matter of chance or of explaining just how this or that event cameabout. But this isnt very satisfactory, either as an assurance or an explanation.Science aside, what people are looking for is assurance and some sense of thesignificance of events and outcomes. They want their lives to be in some hands,preferably in good hands, and if not in Gods then at least in the somewhat moreobscure and fickle fingers of fate.

If someone or something is taking charge, then there is presumably some signif-icance, some reason, for what happens. This is more than just an explanation. The

eruption of a volcano can be explained in considerable detail by a good vulcan-ologist; indeed, with sufficient data even the time of an eruption can be pinpointedwith some precision. But why that volcano should have erupted just at the time that the village people were abandoning their old gods in favor of new ones is not something the vulcanologist knows or cares a whit about. So, too, one can explainthe long-standing cross-cultural conflicts and military balance in the Middle East preceding the destruction of the second Jerusalem temple in the first century C.E., but that is something quite different from understanding why the Hebrews should havebeen subjected to such a fate. Two professional people meet by chance in thewaiting room between two different business meetings called by a mutual client. But in retrospect, after ten years of happy marriage, they will certainly see their meetingas a matter of fate. No account of the convergent details of their busy schedules or

their romantic availability at the time would explain that happy happenstance,and even if they dismiss it as a matter of luck, they will certainly agree that it wasluck filled with significance. (I will not delve here into the fascinating relationshipbetween fate, luck, and chance. 11 )

What an explanation in terms of fate adds to an explanation in terms of causes



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and antecedent conditions, in other words, is just this notion of significance. I sayadds to because I think that one of the reasons why the notions of fate and fatalismhave been so thoroughly dismissed from our current vocabulary is that they arethought to be not only nonscientific but anti-scientific, blocking rather than supple-menting good, solid, causal accounts of what happened. But thinking in terms of fateneed contradict no scientific evidence or theories. In Kants terms, it is a practicalrather than a theoretical concern. But, as I have suggested above, talk of fate andfatalism has everything to do with the significance of events and need not haveanything to say about causes. Thus, the focus is on dramatic narrative and not oncausal accounts, which is to give a very different reading to Dennetts emphaticphrase no matter what the intervening vagaries of our personal trajectories. If nomatter what means without particular regard to, this is correct. But if no matterwhat means it does not matter what the causal account may be, then this is falseor highly misleading. The two realms of dramatic narrative and causal explanationare both distinctive and thoroughly intertwined.

A powerful illustration of this appeal was presented to me recently by a goodfriend who had terminal cancer. He was told, without much embellishment, that hehad six months. He was deciding whether or not to subject himself to the grue-some treatments that any attempt at a cure or a reprieve requires, but he was alsotrying to decide how he should think of all of this and the rest of his life (the differ-ence between my friend and me being, as has so often been said, only the relativeindeterminacy of my death sentence compared to the precision of his). But my friend(who was both a philosopher and a lapsed Catholic) concluded that Thy will bedone was the only route for him (although he was no longer clear who or what theThy referred to). He reasoned that if he accepted the fact that he would not get better, although he might enjoy a certain peace of mind that comes with resignation,he would surely die. On the other hand, he found many objections to what he

described as the stubborn egotism of resolving that he would get better. The wholepoint of the situation was that he was in no position to resolve anything of the sort. Interms of the ultimate outcome, there was no point to his deliberation. Sufferingthrough the treatments provided no assurance that he would live even a little longer.And so he decided, after much reflection, that putting himself in the hands of another (and not just the hands of the doctors) was the only tolerable way to go on.

Such, I think, is the motivation that makes virtually all of us prone to such fatal-istic thoughts and reflections. If one believes in an all-powerful, loving God (or what is more evasively referred to as a Supreme Being), then the power of such anappeal is obvious. Even Freud, while chastising all such thinking as infantile,never denied its power. For merely historical reasons (although sometimes paradingas metaphysical arguments), such beliefs are often distinguished from fatalism. The

purported metaphysics has much to do with the tangled free will problem in itsoriginal theological context, namely that God gave us free will and therefore what happens to us is our own responsibility. Such a view has always sat uncomfortablywith the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God, but I will have nothingto say about belief in God or Gods will, grace, or providence in this essay. With



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or without mentioning God, however, fate and fatalism are powerful and under-standable human beliefs (or, rather, an enormous variety of related beliefs) about thesupposed necessity of what happens.

Fate, Fatalism and Determinism

Fate is a more ancient and therefore often more personalized version of fatalism. Fateprovides something by way of hands in which we can place ourselves whetheror not we have confidence in their goodness. Nevertheless, I have my own deepdoubts about tying fate and fatalism to any concept of an outside agency, whetherSupreme or just some run-of-the-mill muse or spirit. It is for this reason that onemight distinguish fate and fatalism, the former but not the latter implying some par-ticular agency. Although I will continue to employ that distinction, I do not want todo so on these quasi-mythological grounds. Fate, like fatalism, can be understoodwithout acknowledging any mysterious agency.

Fate is not the same as fatalism, although most conceptions of the former implythe latter. Fate is the explanation. Fatalism is a doctrine. Fates decree and othersuch phrases may suggest some sort of personal agency without indicating anythingof what (or who) such personal agents might be, but we need not invoke suchimages in order to believe in fate. Indeed, the personification of fate is but one of many versions of fatalistic thinking and by no means the most prevalent one. InHindu, Buddhist, and Jain philosophy, for instance, karma is not a distinctive agent,although it is firmly connected to ones own actions (as their residue) and theongoing story of ones life.

In Homers Iliad, fate is distinguished from the personal agency of the gods andgoddesses, but it is not then further identified. (In later Greek and later Roman liter-ature, there is a personification of the Fates, usually as three old womenClotho,

Lachesis, and Atropos12

but this is evidently a secondary and literary devicerather than primary and literal identification.) In the Quran (39 : 56), we read it iswritten, but who it is that writes is not disclosed. (Allah does not write; He dictates.)But the emphasis on writing (rather than merely predicting) underscores the idea of narrative necessity. So, too, in the Ruba iya t of Omar Khayya m it is written that TheMoving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit, Shalllure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. Whosefinger? But notice again that the emphasis is on the narrative, not on the question of agency. Personifications of fate may imply some sort of personal or impersonalagency, but fatalism as such does not. All it requires is a narrative within whichcertain events are deemed necessary for the outcome in the Hegelian, teleologicalsense suggested above.

It is, I hope, a long-abandoned assumption that teleology and teleological expla-nation imply some sort of agency. Even Hegel abandons his agency-like concept of Spirit (subject as well as substance) in favor of the much more impersonalIdea. So, too, in Asian cultures we find virtually agent-less notions of responsibilitysuch as the Chinese Mandate of Heaven. My old student Greg Reihman usefully



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interprets ming as circumstances beyond ones control as a way of avoiding thesuggestion of agency implied by its translation as fate. In the Buddhist and Jainnotions of karma, it is only the persons own actions that account for his or her fate.There is no divine judge or external agency. Fate thus depersonalized (that is devoidof external agency) tends to fall into fatalism, and fate considered as fatalism is not soobviously a merely primitive or archaic form of thinking.

Nevertheless there is (as Dennett complains) some tendency to further reducefatalism to what philosophers call determinism (or, to drive home the point, hard determinism). To put the matter overly bluntly, some philosophers insist that if fatalism is defensible at all it must be so only insofar as it can be subsumed undersome reasonable version of scientific determinism. But the distinction betweenfatalism and determinism is easy to make out in general, as I have suggested (not totally disagreeing with Dennett), although harder once we pursue real cases. Fatal-ism is the thesis that some event must happen, and no further explanation, notablyno causal explanation, is called for. Determinism, by contrast, is the reasonablyscience-minded thesis that whatever happens can be explained in terms of priorcauses and standing conditions (facts, events, states of affairs, internal structures, anddispositions, plus the laws of nature).

Since the scientific revolutions of half a millennium ago, determinism has be-come virtually a matter of plain common sense, if not also (in the past three hundredyears) some sort of necessary or a priori truth.13 But now it is under attack from at least two different quarters, one from outside science and one from inside. First,there is the long-standing problem, raised in theology long before science was in itsmodern ascendancy, about free will. That is, if determinism is true, do our delib-erations and decisions mean anything, and can we still be held morally responsiblefor our actions? Conversely, if we insist on holding people morally responsible, thendeterminism must either be false or be reduced to some more circumscribed thesis,

as in Kant. The second, scientific line of attack is far beyond the realm of this essay. It comes from quantum mechanics, where the very notion of causal determinism hascome under considerable scrutiny. 14

The first concern, that if determinism is true then our deliberations and decisionsdo not have moral significance and have nothing to do with what we do, is theimplausible thesis that Dennett identifies as fatalism. According to this model of fatalism, deliberations and decisions are just gears that turn without effecting themechanism (to borrow an apt phrase from Wittgenstein and Dennett) and haveno effect whatever on the outcome. Of course, there is a whole history and anongoing industry of philosophical attempts to reconcile free will and determinism(compatibilism)for example by making our deliberations and decisions part of the causal machinery that determines our actionsand Dennett is part of this. But

he is unwilling to consider whether fatalism has the fatal flaw he attributes to it. But here, the distinction that we drew above makes all the difference. It is not as if fatalism denies the relevance of causal etiology or insists (absurdly) that it does not matter what anyone does, much less that no one can do anything about any-thing. Fatalism is just concerned with the significance of the outcome rather than



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the causal path that brought it about. I will argue that there is a perfectly reasonablecompatibilist account of fatalism as well, so long as it is not interpreted as the least plausible version of determinism. In short, there is no contradiction or conflict between fatalism and so-called free will. 15

Nor is there any contradiction or conflict between fatalism and science.Whether or not one accepts some notion of fate and fatalism has nothing to do withscience or the facts. That is to say, it has nothing to do with current theories of causation in physics or astrophysics (nor, I should add, astrology), and nothing to dowith our ability (or inability) to explain what happens on the basis of good, solid,scientific grounds. When my friend died of cancer, I had no doubt that his oncologist would be able to describe, in depressing detail, just why he died and why he diedwhen he did. That has nothing to do with the appeal of fate or the belief in fatalism,and it is one of the misfortunes of fate and fatalism to have been caught up in thecrossfire between science and the anti-science advocates of one or another sort of New Age or crackpot religious thinking.

A Note on Fate in Homers Iliad

The greatest Western text on fate, Homers Iliad, is filled with talk of fate, and fatedefines much of its narrative. In the Iliad, fate and fatalism are not distinguished. Fateis necessity, and in particular it determines mens deaths and the outcome of suchgrand struggles as the Trojan War (and many other conflicts are described in itspages). But fate is sharply distinguished from the gods. Fate, for Homer, cannot begainsaid. Not even the godseven Zeus himselfcan countermand fate. Never-theless, Zeus, at least, seems to have ample elbow room. There is a remarkablepassage where Zeus contemplates saving his favorite, Sarpedon, despite the fact that Fate has it that Sarpedon, whom I love more / Than any man, is to be killed by

Patroclus. Hera, her eyes soft and wide, replies, aghast, Son of Cronos, what athing to say! / A mortal man, whose fate has long been fixed, and you want to savehim from rattling death? Do it, but dont expect all of us to approve. She warns that other gods will do the same, and there will be considerable resentment. TheFather of Gods and Men agreed / Reluctantly. 16

Thus, the extent to which Zeus is bound by fateas opposed to the clearbinding of mere mortalsis left ambiguous. Almost always, the gods (and god-desses) act in order to make sure that things turn out as fate decrees. Thus, Poseidonsaves Aeneas from certain death at Achilles hand (20 : 298ff.), for it is destined that Aeneas escape / And the line of Dardanus not be destroyed. Nevertheless, from theprior passage (concerning Zeus decision not to save Sarpedon) it seems that thegods are more guided than limited by fates necessity.

There is no such wiggle room for mortals, however. Achilles, grieving over thedeath of Patroclus, tells the Myrmidons, We two are fated / to redden the selfsameearth with our blood, / Right here in Troy, I will never return home (18 : 350351).Hector, at the beginning of the Iliad, has made a similar speech to the effect that noone shall send him to Hades before his time, although, to be sure, he is fated like all



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the others (6 : 512513). But fate has also to do with mens actions, not just theirdeaths. And it is worth observing that neither fate nor the actions of the gods makemen do what they would not otherwise do. Rather, it (and the gods) provoke andmoderate mens aims and desires, often forcing moments of deliberation upon what would otherwise be rash action. For instance, when at the very beginning of thebook Achilles is about to strike Agamemnon in rage, Athena, sent by Hera, makesthis little speech, I came to see if I could check this temper of yours. Achillesresponds, When you two speak, Goddess, a man has to listen / No matter howangry. Its better that way. / Obey the gods and they hear when you pray. / With that he ground his heavy hand / onto the silver hilt and pushed the great sword / backinto its sheath (1 : 226231). Thus, fate might be regarded in the Iliad as guidingrather than determining mens actions (according to their own psychology), but not their deaths.

The Iliad speaks rather noncommittally of fate. It is always referred to in the it is fated that mode rather than as an active personal agency (as opposed, notably,to the very personable anthropomorphic gods and goddesses). This makes it seemmuch more plausible, especially to a modern reader, than the later Greek andRoman figures of the Fates. Those images are much too fanciful for most con-temporary tastes, although merely citing fate (especially when it is distinct from thegods, as in Homer) seems too mysterious and evasive. Where do these decreescome from? What is their nature (as opposed to their outcome)? What explains thenecessity?

Fatalism, as a doctrine, also tends to be noncommittal. The insistence that what happens must happen is not yet an explanation nor even a narrative. Details andcontextthe specific narrativeare necessary. There must be some specific ac-counting for the necessity that fate and fatalism command. The absence of suchaccounting, of course, is what attracts the wrath of hardheaded philosophers like

Dennett, who dismisses the very concept of fatalism (and not even bothering todenounce the more whimsical notion of fate). But fate and fatalism deserve morerespect and closer attention. The discussion of fate in the Iliad gives us just that. Fateis employed to anticipate the plot and set its parameters, not to provide mysteriouscausal explanations. Moving away from the vacuous global conception of fatalismand merely mythological and poetic images of fate and the fates and taking seri-ously what Dennett dismissively calls merely local fatalism, there are a number of quite specific conceptions of fate and fatalism that command our attention.

Fate as Character

There is at least one interpretation of fate and fatalism that remains well within the

bounds of common sense and scientific thinking and leaves room for freedom (if not free will) as well. It is also compatible with determinism (and therefore supports amodest compatibilism in the problem of free will) and removes the mystery andsuperstition that usually surround discussions of fate and fatalism. This interpretationis often associated with Heraclitus, who said, simply, that fate is character. 17



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So, too, Aristotle famously based his theory of tragedy on the notion of a tragicflaw or hamartia in the tragic heros character. Thus, Oedipus tragedy is oftenexplained by appeal to his tyrannical arrogance, his obstinacy, and his refusal tolisten to either Teiresias or his wife/mother.18 Whether or not this is conducive to anadequate understanding of tragedy (or faithful to Aristotle), it shows quite dramati-cally the insistence that tragic fate can be explained in a way that both satisfiesdeterminism and leaves ample room for all sorts of choices by the protagonist whilepreserving our sense of fatalism.

If fate is character, then it is easy to see how what we do and what happens to usis to a large extent determined, but we can also be held responsible and considerourselves the authors of our actions. David Hume and John Stuart Mill, in moderntimes, were willing to accept determinism (even if conjoined with skeptical doubts)and nevertheless managed to fit agency and responsibility into its domain. Theysuggested that an act is free (and an agent responsible) if it flows from the personscharacter. 19 This saved the notions of agency and responsibility, it was very muchin line with our ordinary intuitions about peoples behavior, and it did not try tochallenge the scientific paradigm.

In order to make good solid sense of fate and fatalism, one need not bring in anyfancy philosophical technology or fanciful metaphysical machinery (and discussionsof fate and fatalism are too often couched in such covert machine imagery). Her-aclitus fragment makes it quite clear that fate is not in the hands of the gods or inany hands other than our own, although it is important not to read too much of themodern notions of free will and autonomy into this claim. The idea that some-one will very likely turn out in such-and-such a way is a perfectly commonsensenotion, denied only by those who have such an exaggerated sense of personal free-dom (or are so unscrupulous in their pursuit of self-help best-seller status) that theywould argue, most implausibly, that anyone can do anything, if only they want it

and believe in it enough. This is at least as absurd as Dennetts dismissive sugges-tion that no one can do anything about anything, and Dennett rightly observesthat such gullible folks are quite likely to fall into fatalistic reflections in responseto their frustrated but unreasonable expectations.

Consider the idea that someone will very likely turn out in such-and-such away: a naughty boy becomes a punk kid, then becomes a juvenile delinquent, thenturns into a petty thief, and then later becomes a hardened criminal. The neigh-bors and some of his family members wag their fingers as they say (with each newchapter) I told you so. The childhood whiz kid on the other hand becomes anhonors student and scholarship winner, and then she becomes a famous scientist.No surprises there, even though she surmounted many obstacles and prejudices onher way to success. Her friends and neighbors say, I always knew. It would be daft

to deny that character provides some sense of narrative necessity (as well as a partialcausal account), but it would be equally daft to insist that such necessity carrieswith it the strict determination of the outcome. Could things have turned out other-wise? Of course. But when people speak of fate they are not talking in terms of somepeculiar sense of causal necessity, nor are they talking about the technical paradoxes



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involving time and modality. When this is what philosophers are talking about, weshould insist that they call their fatalism by some less misleading and less tradi-tional name.

The juvenile delinquent can be rightly held responsible for his increasinglycriminal acts, and the successful scientist may be properly praised for her realizationof the talents she first displayed as a child. To be sure, no narrative of the unfoldingof character can leave out the details of environmental factors, seemingly chanceoccurrences and intrusions, and (especially) the influence of other people. But neither environmental factors nor the influence of other people undermines thiscommonsensical notion of fate as the apparently necessary and even inevitableunfolding of character. Environment, chance, and other people may act as co-determining factors, but Heraclitus focus on the internal necessity of personalcharacter (virtues, talents, traits, flaws, vices, and liabilities) is what we mean byfate.20

With regard to explanations of outcomes on the basis of character, do deter-minism and fatalism differ? Are they (according to this view) merely complements,the former a focus on formative causes, influences, and antecedent provoking con-ditions and the latter a focus on the narrative of personal character? This is perhaps abit too simple-minded. What is a matter of personal talent and what is a functionof cultivation and encouragement are notoriously difficult to distinguish, and what should be credited (or blamed) as influence and what should be credited (or blamed)as susceptibility are rarely all that obvious. But the difference, in general, is of thekind mentioned above. Fatalism is the narrative thesis that some action or event wasbound to happen because it fits so well with the agents character. Psychologicaldeterminism, by contrast, is the science-minded thesis that whatever action or event takes place can be explained in terms of specific psychological causes.

Fatalism, traditionally conceived, insists only of the necessity of the outcome, no

matter what the causes may be. Thus, the standard example of fatalism is poorOedipus, who was cursed and doomed to kill his father and marry his mother nomatter what he (or his parents) might do to prevent it. There are many philosophicalmorals and conundrums to squeeze out of this old tale, but the only point to berepeated here is that the what of fate need make no specific commitments to anyhow. This does not mean that determinism is false, of course, since one might andindeed must insist that there is some chain of events and causes leading up toOedipus tragic deeds. But although this may well interest the scientist it is not themain concern of the fatalist.

The naughty boy who ends up doing hard prison time no doubt has a nastybiography filled with intermediate causes, but for those who told you so theimportant point is that this is how he would end up, quite apart from the causal

details. So, too, the intervening successes and influences of the scientist-scholar are,so far as the fatalist is concerned, only secondary. The outcome is necessarily quiteindependent of the causal necessity of the outcome. Again, the difference betweenthem is not so much the presence or absence of a causal explanation. The differencebetween them is the attribution of special significance to the outcome in terms of the



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overall story. (Thus, historical accounts of a possibly real Oedipus or the tragicheroes of the Iliad tend not to be tragic or fateful but rather just entries in an other-wise impersonal history.)

Fate is character is a good way into a sensible notion of fate that even themost obstinate scientist can accept. It shows quite clearly in what ways fatalism anddeterminism are compatible and even mutually supporting. It also weakens themodal notion of necessity considerably, since it now becomes obvious that what isnecessary from the standpoint of fate and fatalism is neither logically nor causallynecessary and may well have turned out otherwise. The necessity is so only retro-spectively (or by way of anticipation), given the plot of the narrative. If the naughtyboy had turned out to be a successful entrepreneur or the young scientist a frustratedhousewife one might still speak of fate but tell a very different story.

Fate is character also shows the inescapable human-interest aspect of fatalism,for what would character refer to if not those personal charms and annoyances,successes and failures, those virtues and vices that render our relationships so com-plicated and explain our enduring interest in people, whether through gossip orprofessional psychology? Science, including the still struggling science of characterformation, may explain character, and character may in turn account for what wedo, but our sense of fate and fatalism has a different kind of story to tell. It is the storyof who we are and of what happens to us and how what happens fits into the largerscheme of things. It is the dramatic story, not the scientific one, even if many or most of the details are the same. Thus, fate and fatalism focus locally on what is most significant about us, our births, our sweetest romances, our best successes, our worst failures, our calamities, our deaths.

Just for completeness, let it be said that families and cultures have character, too.This point may have become politically incorrect, but it is still obviously true.Again, this does not mean that the outcome is inevitable. The fate of a nation is just

another story we tell. Germany might well have jettisoned Europes widespread anti-Semitism and somehow propped up both the Deutschemark and the Weimar Re-public and not elected, impeached, or ignored Hitler. But it did not follow that course, and those who look at Germanys history and speak of Hitler and the War asGermanys fate are not necessarily speaking either racism or nonsense. (Japanesehistorians come to pretty much the same conclusions looking at the twentieth-century history of Japan.) The American Manifest Destiny (whatever else it mayhave been) was an explicit claim to fate. Looking forward, it laid out the plan for theconquest (and decimation) of a continent. Looking back, it is said to have beeninevitable. Indeed, looking back (as many are doing) and retracing the steps of theascent of man and civilization and rethinking if not human nature then certainlythe nature of human progress, there is (and long has been) a fascination with the

fate of humanity. It remains to be seen how that story will eventually be told, but it certainly makes an enormous difference how we anticipate its telling now.From a deterministic standpoint, surely character is not all that there is to fate. I

have already admitted that of course the naughty boy might have mended his waysor, more plausibly, met a role model or found some interest or fallen in love such



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that he would have turned out very differently from the way he did. And of course Germany and Japan might have enjoyed a different sort of leadership that wouldhave found ample reason for pride in the remarkable cultures of those two coun-tries and avoided the disasters of militarism, or, alternatively, they might havebeen treated very differently by other nations (Germany at Versailles, Japan after theopening around the time of the Meiji Restoration). What I have not said enoughabout, but what is clearly just as important as any such internal (or structural)feature as character, is circumstance. Whatever we are, it is circumstance that shapes us as much as character . It is the wind and the rain and the soil that allow thesapling to grow into a tree. It is the family and the life we grow up in that give shapeto our characters. It is the abundance of the planet earth as well as the behavior of both ancestors and neighbors that are still to determine the fate of humanity. It wasthe seemingly chance encounter with Laius on the road that allowed Oedipus tofulfill his horrid destiny.

But, to conclude this, determinism and fatalism make two quite different claimsand tell two very different stories. The first insists that whatever happens can (inprinciple) be explained in terms of prior causes (events, states of affairs, and inherent structures, plus the laws of nature) and so tells a causal story of the form here is howthis came about. The second insists that whatever happens must happen, but thereneed not be an effort to specify the causal etiology behind the modal must. To besure, it would also be a mistake to interpret fatalism as excluding any such effort, andOedipus behavior and its terrible outcome can be explained, step by step, as oneevent causing another. But that would surely miss the point of the fate/fatalism nar-rative, which is that the outcome has a dramatic significance whatever the path tothat outcome. To confuse causal and narrative necessity or to add some mysteriousagency and insist that fatalism depends on the whims of the gods or frivolous fatesor any other mysterious force is to weaken or force us to dismiss what was and still

can be a quite sensible and appealing philosophical thesis. Thus, it is important that we neither reduce fatalism to determinism nor oppose the two in such a way that determinism becomes the respectable scientific thesis while fatalism is relegated toancient mythology and poetry.

Life and Death as Matters of Fate

Character and circumstances tell us a great deal about why people do what they do,what their predispositions are to certain kinds of behavior and their liability for theconsequences of that behavior. But not all of fatalism and its narratives has to dowith action or in any obvious sense what a person does. Earlier in this essay, I dis-cussed Homers Iliad with reference in particular to the fated death of several heroes.

To be sure, the fact that they were heroes, and the fact that they put themselves inthe front lines and thus in harms way, had a lot to do with their fate. But to saveAeneas, Poseidon simply whisked him away from the front, leaving the attackingGreeks both aghast and terrified. Death comes not just to heroes. It comes to us alland we are all fated to die. Thus, it is with good reason that the Iliad speaks of



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death (as Nietzsche did) as coming at the right time. So, too, the ancient Chinesespoke of fate first of all with reference to ones life expectancy (fen).

Thinking about our own lives, it is hard not to contemplate the very personalquestion, How long do I have? This is not a statistical inquiry about life expec-tancy (an average of 72.2 years for healthy, nonsmoking males, and five yearsmore for comparable females). Nor is it just a practical question (for instance,in calculating what kind of life insurance to buy, or whether or not to start amultivolume book project). The question How long do I have? has special poi-gnancy, of course, for those who have reason to think that their time is distinctivelylimitedpatients with AIDS or cancer, for instance. But the same question is readilyavailableand at times unavoidablefor all of us. It is hard not to think in terms of a certain span of allotted time. And this has nothing to do with tricks concerningthe truth status of future events or the nature of time. To be sure, people die beforetheir time, and these days many people outlive their useful lives by several or evenmany years. But the concept of fate applies just as well to these cases. It is anessential part of the narrative of their lives, the first as tragedy, the second as anti-climax. And again, to dismiss this as just luck (good or bad) or as a matter of chance is to deny the meaning that such narratives give to our lives. To be sure,these are not scientific explanations and are not intended in any sense to replacethem. But between causal necessity and random chance the whole world of humanmeaningfulness unfolds before us. Why insist that science must deny this world?

Thinking of the ancient agrarian world, it is easy to imagine why the notions of fate and fatalism would become a natural part of the human imagination. Considerthe inevitability of change in nature, the cycles of the seasons, the passages of human development, the sacraments, the cycles of life and death. Ancient con-ceptions of time and existence as a wheel or a circle are quite reasonably based onsuch evidence, long before the linear arithmetic of Christianity and the complex

calculations of Einstein were on the horizon. In our own urbanized, increasinglyglobal and virtual world, it is easy to lose sight of the obvious. Nietzsches great thought experiment, eternal recurrence, is also based on such a conception,abstracted, then personalized as an existential imperative. 21 Our sense of time(and here I am not referring to what philosophers or physicists may think about time)is built around our projects, our aspirations, finishing college, law school, internship,or residencyand only secondarily do we tend to think in terms of generations andthe supra-personal cycles of life and death. But thinking beyond the bounds of onesown life, it is hard not to think of the tumbling of generations, the epochs of evolu-tion, the larger narratives within which our lives are embedded. In the context of these larger narratives, it is difficult to avoid revising our personal narratives. That iswhy philosophy is so awe-inspiring and so intimidating.

Opportunity is also largely a matter of fate (although self-made men try todeny it or claim I made my own opportunities). The Chinese also point with somereason to the fate of the individual in the context of the times (shi, shi ming what Hegel captured in his notion of Zeitgeist). A quick look at the awesome expanse of Chinese history, with its various periods of warring states and churning upheaval,



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makes it quite clear that when one is born has an overwhelming effect on the lifeone can live. Just think of the twentieth century, from Sun Yat-sens revolution,which created the Republic, to the Japanese invasion in the thirties to Maos revo-lution in the forties to the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the CulturalRevolution of the fifties and sixties. (Zhang Yimous brilliant movieTo Live [Houzhe] traces the fate of a single family through these tempestuous years.) But even in ourconsiderably more stable and secure existence the truth about shi ming becomesself-evident along with the more localized notion of opportunity (jie).

Think of the difference between what Tom Brokaw calls the greatest genera-tion, who fought (willingly) in World War II, and the generation that fought (bitterly,resentfully, regretfully) in Vietnam. And then think of the present generation of col-lege students, for whom Vietnam is just history. Think of the opportunities enjoyedby my generation (college and university positions for the asking in the largest ex-pansion of higher education since Confucius, lifetime employment in corporationswithout a hint of downsizing) or that slim window of opportunity enjoyed by for-tunate Internet entrepreneurs at the very end of the nineties.

Being born into wealth and privilege as opposed to hardship or poverty wasconsidered definitive of ones fate by the ancient Chinese, although such a notiontoday runs into serious political obstacles and abuses. (We no longer dismiss povertyas unavoidable, as most people did until the late nineteenth century, and there areobvious enticements to the spirit of charity implicit in the there but for the grace of God go I mentality.) But being in the right place at the right time (like being inthe wrong place at the wrong time) is not necessarily a matter of luckthat is,inexplicable chance. It is alsoor it can be viewedas a matter of fate, so long asthis is not taken as a feeble excuse to do nothing.

But perhaps nothing brings home the relevance of fate more poignantly thanthinking about our obligations to loved ones. Both the ancient Chinese and the

ancient South Asians viewed such obligations as ultimate matters of fate. I thinkthere is a very good argument that this point of view is much more desirable andeffective than the one that dominates our way of thinking, the so-called socialcontract view of obligation. According to this view, one owes another because of some (implicit or explicit) agreement. But consider the centerpiece of Confucianethics, the virtue of filial piety (xiao). Or the core of Indian ethics, the concept of dharma (virtue). Perhaps this is the place to discuss briefly the South Asian concept of karma as well. Karma is usually understood in the context of the metaphysicallyperplexing notion of reincarnation, the rebirth of ones soul in another life, anotherperson, or, indeed, another life-form. What this would require in terms of the souland its essential properties is an issue we need not touch here. But the significance of karma is by no means limited to such breathtaking views of the afterlife (or, rather,

the continuation of life in other forms). Karma is simply the residue of action, theidea that the consequences and implications of things done continue long after theinitial deed is over and done with. Thus, karma implies duties and responsibilities aswell as liabilities in the future based on past acts. The possible consequence in somefuture life is just an extension of this idea.Karma, like Heraclitus fate is character,



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refuses to take fate to be a function of some external agency. It is ones own agency,ones own behavior, that determines ones fate.

Nevertheless, fate affects all of us in familiar ways. Among our duties and obli-gations are those to our aging parents (as so many of my generation are finding out today, without government assistanceinsurance or regulatory agenciesof anykind). One reduces the notion of obligation to nonsense once one starts talkingabout implicit (rarely explicit) contracts between children and parents or the sense inwhich particular behaviors are what engender such obligations. A much more real-istic way of looking at the matter is that one is stuck with an obligation, by virtueof nothing else but the circumstances of ones birth and upbringing. One can lightenup this perception with the addition of love and affection, but (as the Chinese sawquite clearly) it is not because we love our parents that we have a duty to take careof them in their old age. Ones duty is a mandate of heaven (tian ming), and onesobligations are decrees of fate. No one taking care of an aging parent fails to feelthe bite of this obligation.

What is at stake in debates about fate and fatalism are not the facts. A scientist,a fatalist, and someone who thinks its all luck can agree on all of the facts of thematter. Where they differ is in the optics, the lens through which they view thesefacts. For the scientist, the quest for an explanation is the first consideration. This is just what is denied by the person who thinks its all luck. The fatalist, by contrast,does insist on an explanation, but not necessarily a scientific or causal one. Thefatalist is interested in the significance of what happens, and that means fitting it intoa narrative that makes sense of our lives. One need not invoke mysterious causes orsubscribe to astrology, divination, or geomancy, much less believe in any invisibledamsels called the Fates, in order to account for such significance. One need onlybe human and have a life story embedded in a larger history to appreciate that spe-cial sense of meaningfulness that once was freely discussed as fate.

Thus, the notion of fate gains respectability in our modern-day world, not as theexpression of any mysterious agency or as an inexplicable necessity but as part of the larger narrative in which we live our lives.

Notes

1 Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. 104.

2 Maureen Dowd, New York Times, 23 September 2001.

3 Dennett, Elbow Room, p. 104.

4 What Will Be Will Be, sung by Doris Day in Alfred Hitchcocks second versionof The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

5 Dennett means this in a strictly dismissive way, however, as evidenced by thefact that his first example of such local fatalism is an impending sneeze.

6 Mark H. Bernstein, Fatalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992).



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7 Lisa Raphals, Fate and Stratagem in Ancient Greece and China, in Shankmanand Durrant, eds., Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 2001). There is at least some question as to whether karma ought to betreated as a version of fate and fatalism. Karma is the residue of action andthus determines (in part) future benefits and punishments (whether in this life orthe next). But insofar as it determines the future on the basis of the past ratherthan simply specifies the future, one might instead consider it a peculiar ver-sion of determinism.

8 Raphals, Fate and Strategem in Ancient Greece and China, p. 208.9 My argument is in my book, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1983), where I also point out that the Absolute means nothingmore controversial than reality (as opposed to mere appearances).

10 I would even go so far as to call Nietzsche a biological determinist. That is,he thinks that our natures are set by our biology and not subject to change. Hismost dramatic illustration of this pervasive thesis is in the first Essay inOn the Genealogy of Morals, where he compares slaves and masters to lambs andgreat birds of prey, commenting explicitly on how futile it would be for eitherto wish it were like the other.

11 I discuss this in my Joy of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press,2000).

12 In early Greek mythology, they are three young, graceful women. Later, theybecame old women, not unlike the sisters in Shakespeares Macbeth. In Romethey were Necessitas, Nona, Decuma, and Morta, and in Norse mythology,Urthr, Verthandi, and Skuld.

13 However much Hume and Kant may differ on the issue, both great philoso-phers take the universality of causality in nature to be necessary, whether byway of natural habits and associations (Hume) or the a priori rules of theknowing mind (Kant).

14 See, for example, Robert Kane The Significance of Free Will (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998).

15 See Robin Small, Fatalism and Deliberation, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 18, no. 1 (March 1988): 1330.

16 The Iliad, 16 : 470496, in Stanley Lombardo, trans., (Indianapolis: Hackett,1997), p. 318.

17 Fragment #104, in Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).18 See Cecil M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945); MarjorieBarstow, Oedipus Rex as the Ideal Tragic Hero of Aristotle,Classical Weekly 6, no. 1 (5 October 1912); and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).



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19 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2d ed., ed. L. A.Sleby-Biggee (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902); John Stuart Mill,A System of Logic, 8th ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1874).

20 Out of fairness, I should say that the notion of character has also come underfire, first in the area of psychology, in particular by those social psychologistswho identify themselves as situationists, and more recently in philosophy.For the situationist view, see J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, From Jerusalemto Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in HelpingBehavior, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973). For philos-ophy, see Gilbert Harman, Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: VirtueEthics and the Fundamental Attribution Error, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (19981999): 315331 (revised version in G. Harman, Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000],pp. 165178). See also Harmans The Nonexistence of Character Traits,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (19992000): 223226, and John

Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2002). On the other side, defending the ordinarynotion of character, see D. T. Kenrick and D. C. Funder, Profiting from Con-troversy: Lessons from the Person-Situation Debate,American Psychologist 43(1988): 2334, and David C. Funder, Personality, Annual Review of Psy- chology 52 (2001): 197221.

21 Bernd Magnus, Nietzsches Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 1978).


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Ancient Freewill