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Abstract. Such terms as Fate, Necessity, Destiny are routinely treated as high-level philosophical and theological abstractions. This article argues in favor of viewing them, alternatively, in terms of their philological and etymological content. Its method is based on the work of Richard B. Onians, who saw in these locutions only half-dead metaphors, which were used in the oldest texts not, as we do, to express abstract ideas, but, rather, to represent pseudoscientific notions and to describe religious convictions concerning the hidden forces that were thought to govern human existence. Examples are drawn from the entire range of ancient Greek epic and tragic literature, as filtered through the lens of the classically educated Sigmund Freud.
OEDIPUS'S BASIC ERROR WAS to have viewed evil as a problem, whereas he learns to his grief that it is actually a mystery, an irresolvable paradox, a natural contradiction between the mutually exclusive possibilities of self-determination and predetermination, between freedom of the will and divine omniscience. This is the quandary as it is perceived by philosophy and religion. In the domains of religion and theology Fate is indeed a mystery. Ill-equipped as I am to elucidate mysteries, I will move the discussion to a firmer ground, where the concept of Fate is merely a problem, where scholars, those who "traffic in words," as Goethe calls us, stand a fighting chance.1
My major concerns will be: 1) to determine what words mean in the texts where they are found; 2) to examine the connections among the contextual meanings of the words which we translate variously as Fate, Necessity, Destiny, and so forth; 3) to examine the connection between the linguistic and literary expressions of the idea of Fate, and human behavior as described in the writings of Sigmund Freud.
It is an intriguing fact that in his reflections on tragedy Aristotle does not use any of the several words for Fate in ancient Greek. He is, moreover, probably the only critic on record who fails to evoke to the notion of Fate in speaking of Oedipus the King. Although completely absent from the Poetics, the idea of Fate is a constant theme in Freud. And if Freud evokes this problematic notion recurrently, at times along with Schicksal, Notwendigkeit, or Ananke, he...