Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Decoding the Tragic in Aristotle shows that involuntariness of actions is the key to understanding Aristotle’s concept of the tragic. In the Nicomachean Ethics and in the Eudemian Ethics, a type of counter-voluntary error through ignorance, hamartia di’agnoian, receives analysis with examples combining real-life situations and tragic myths. This correlates with the most appreciated dramatic structures in both chapter 13 (with hamartia materialized in action, e.g., Oedipus, likely in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King) and chapter 14 (with an added hamartia with action in potential, e.g., Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians) of the Poetics, often seen as incompatible. Lesser forms of involuntary action (e.g., through coercion, anagkē) are ranked lower on the tragic scale, whereas voluntary harm against kin is even less appreciated, as a comparison among three different dramatic treatments of the myth of Alcmaeon in three Aristotelian treatises indicates. Aristotle’s involuntariness differs from accident, chance, or bad luck. It produces the highest degree of the tragic, when it is properly reflected in the action (praxis) that tragedy is mimesis of, by arousing pity, fear, and an adjacent feeling of wonder. Although Aristotle can engage with moral dilemmas (such as Neoptolemus’ in Sophocles’ Philoctetes in the Nicomachean Ethics), as well as with other ethical and rhetorical problems expressed within dramas, the focus of the Poetics remains on structures that are best able to create the tragic effect. Aristotle’s concept of the tragic emerges as unique and distinct from that of other philosophers and literary theorists, anticipating contemporary approaches to art in the fields of cognitive theory and neuroaesthetics.</jats:p>