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 Press DOI: 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 necessarily find 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 to recommend it. Daniel Dennett1 Mr. Bush seems aware that fate has brought him to an amazing juncture. The scion who started as an Ivy slacker, getting serious about politics late in life, the candidate who loped into the White House, propelled by daddys friends and contributors, the good-natured guy who benefited from low expectations, has taken on a campaign that would chill even Churchill: annihilating nihilists in the cradle of civilization who want to wreck civilization. Maureen Dowd2

Until recently, the concepts of fate and fatalism were both very widely accepted and taken quite seriously. Today, both concepts tend to be the target of widespread philosophical disdain. Dan Dennett, for example, dismisses fatalism in his unusually entertaining book on free will (Elbow Room) as mysterious and superstitious and then overgeneralizes the thesis to make it absurd: no agent can do anything about anything (p. 123). Accordingly, he finds nothing to recommend fatalism but the power to create creepy effects in literature (p. 104). He further insists that freedom is compatible with determinism so long as we do not confuse that with foolish fatalism. 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 is not logical necessity (except, perhaps, for Leibniz God) and thus should not be confused with Doris days tautological if plaintive rendition of Que sera, sera.4 It is not scientific or causal necessity (it precedes modern science by millennia) and should not be confused or conflated with what is often called determinism. Nor is fatalism theological necessity (as in Its Gods will), for notions of fate thrive in many 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, fatalism need 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 more narrow and contentious version of fatalism.) What is necessary seems to be only the outcome, regardless of causes, regardless of agency. Thus, Oedipus was fated to kill his father and marry his mother no matter what he or anyone else might do to prevent 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.

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Simply stated in terms of this bald, mysterious sense of necessity, there are few notions older or more venerable than fate and its more philosophical version, fatalism. Thus, the fact that fate and fatalism are so utterly dismissed in modern philosophy and modern thought in general should provoke our interest. Is fate nothing more than archaic superstition? Does it in fact go against everything that science has taught us? Isnt there some sense in which the belief in fate is not only understandable but almost inescapable? Contemporary philosophy has certainly expressed little but contempt for these inquiries, where they are mentioned at all. Fate and fatalism, this peculiar (creepy) sense of necessity, need not be a global thesis and need not apply to every situation and event. It might be posh to say, 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 to specific actions and events (what Dennett calls local fatalism 5), although (as with determinism) 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 some interesting 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 to suggest that there are quite a few occasions on which such necessity can be cited, so long as necessity is not unreasonably restricted to scientific explanation, much less logical 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 natural calamity (legally, an act of God), and, of course, death. Especially fascinating are those seemingly insignificant encounters, coincidences, slips, and misunderstandings that, in retrospect, have momentous consequences. It is fate and fatalism, ultimately, that explain why heroes like Hector and Achilles have to die, why the Hebrew 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 and so many are poor, why a young girl should die before her time. It is fate and fatalism that answer such plaintive questions as Why me? and Why should this burden 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 (booklength) attention.6 But for him, sadly, the matter of fatalism becomes a technical exercise concerning the notions of time and truth, raising conundrums about modality, necessity, causality, and the ontological status of events. The question for him (although he ultimately takes no firm stand on the answer), is whether the necessity 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 be dismissed as a bit of archaic or popular superstition or transformed into a purely technical 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 spoke of ming, and before them early Indian philosophers speculated about karma.7 Its Gods will became the standard explanation of tragedy and disaster for ancient Hebrews and then for the Christians and the Muslims. Such explanations also raised the awful question of whether or not the victims of tragedy were also in some sense themselves to be blamed, but what was not in question was whether or not the tragedy could be explained, that is, had some cosmic significance. Of course, simply speaking of concepts of fate among the ancient Greeks, Buddhists, Hebrews, Chinese, Christians, and Muslims glosses over enormous differences. There are differences having to do with the relationship between God or gods and fate or the fates, differences between Gods will and fate, differences between fate and fatalism, all kinds of differences in the scope and degree as well as the kind of necessity that fate involves, differences in the range and kinds of contexts in which fate is appropriately appealed to, and differences in the role of cleverness and strategy (the Greek 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 variety of tests and techniques for ascertaining just what it is. Perhaps, too, if it is possible to circumvent fate then prognostications of fate will be followed by any number of 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 Buddhism, 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 gets dismissed today as so much superstition and nonsense is our cultures generally scientific and naturalistic outlook. But it is a mistake to think that the appeal to fate and fatalism requires the rejection of this outlook and a compensatory turn to the unknown and unknowable, to magic or the supernatural, or to some ill-considered anti-scientific conception of spirituality. Belief in fate is wholly compatible with the scientific outlook, which is neither to say that the scientific outlook is the only valid outlook nor to say that fatalism must itself be accounted for in terms of the scientific outlook. 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 indifference of the world.) The most stubborn argument against evolution continues to be the blinkered whine that all of this could not have come about by chance, and even the 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 dismissed as nihilism. But is the stark choice between scientific stochastic thinking and comforting theology all that weve got? Knowing what we know about science and causation, and about evolution and cosmology, does it still make any sense to appeal to fate and fatalism? It is worth noting that not only science-minded folk but even those who feel quite free to refer to Gods will regarding each and every event nevertheless hesitate 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 Christian theism and fatalism that is itself an interesting story. Briefly, fate and fatalism are considered godless and pagan, despite the obvious affinities with Christian predetermination, 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? To put the matter bluntly, the necessity that is invoked by fate and fatalism is not scientific necessity but rather what we might call narrative necessity. The analog is the logic of a novel or movie plot. Sometimes a plot works, other times not. We all 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 would be hooted off the stage if depicted in the theater. Thus, the Nietzschean admonition live your life like a work of art should be taken with a grain of salt and demands a certain caution, but it does not follow that we do not conceive of our lives as an ongoing story with a developing plot, albeit with unexpected twists and turns, all the 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 are witnessing 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 explanation might be very different from scientific explanation without being in any way incompatible 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 has considerable 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 fatalism have teleological significance, that is, that it can be argued to be necessary (perhaps looking back in retrospect) insofar as it is part of the path to some ultimate purpose. It forms an intrinsic part of the narrative as it unfolds. If the story had unfolded in some other way, then that development instead of this one would have been 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 dialectical writings (from the Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807 to the final system of his Encyclopedia). It has often been commented that what Hegel (following Fichte and Schelling) 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 the only possible path; nor need the end of the path be considered Absolute in any mysterious sense.9 Thus one should not take ultimate purpose or the Absolute too seriously or too literally. The ultimate purpose need not itself be in any sense necessary. It was fated and thus necessary in the requisite sense that Achilles would die in the Trojan War, but the war itselfand Achilles fighting in itwas not necessary. (We are told this 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 events of our lives surely cannot be the mere fact of our death. (There may be one or two notable exceptions here, but they transcend our discussion.) But, of course, insofar as it is not ones death itself but rather the shape of ones life that is in question, this teleological notion of necessity makes a lot of sense. Thus, it is necessary, and looking back I would even call it fate, that I stumbled across Frithjof Bergmanns Philosophy 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. This is not to insist that it could not have been otherwise, nor is it to deny that my stumbling across Bergmanns class was just that, something that happened more or less by chance. Why is narrative necessity not merely a version of determinism? All of the ingredients of a causal and of a fatalistic account might well be the same. But narrative 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 competitors as modes of explanation.10 Biology is full of examples in which teleology and determinism complement one another. (To mention only the standard example: the heart pumps in order to circulate the blood throughout the body and keep the organism 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 the causes or even on the outcome as such but rather on the narrative significance of an action 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 Manifest Destiny, the inevitability of the young United States conquering all of the lands and 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 given some larger sense of purpose. This may well include consideration of the character and 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 a person or peoples self-conscious awareness of purpose is surely one of the most important causal factors in the explanation. When Nietzsche exclaimed (on the brink of madness) I am a destiny! he clearly had a vision of his whole life, his work, 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 sorts of outside influences and determinants and, indeed, continuously exposed to chance. 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 to make us extremely uncomfortable. It is easy to understand, then, why so many people 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, in Future of an Illusion.) But, then, what if not Gods hands? Todays Twelve Step programs appeal rather noncommittally to some higher power (as the American Deists and French Revolutionaries appealed to the Supreme Being), which seems to serve much the same purpose. Whether invoking a personal agent or not, such appeals provide some sense of significance and solace, the main alternatives being mere chance, probability, and luck. Both stochastic and deterministic explanations of how some tragic event came about are notoriously inadequate for this purpose. 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 came about. 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 the significance 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 more obscure and fickle fingers of fate. If someone or something is taking charge, then there is presumably some significance, 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 vulcanologist; indeed, with sufficient data even the time of an eruption can be pinpointed with 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 explain the 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 have been subjected to such a fate. Two professional people meet by chance in the waiting 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 meeting as 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 was luck filled with significance. (I will not delve here into the fascinating relationship between 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 say adds to because I think that one of the reasons why the notions of fate and fatalism have been so thoroughly dismissed from our current vocabulary is that they are thought to be not only nonscientific but anti-scientific, blocking rather than supplementing good, solid, causal accounts of what happened. But thinking in terms of fate need contradict no scientific evidence or theories. In Kants terms, it is a practical rather than a theoretical concern. But, as I have suggested above, talk of fate and fatalism has everything to do with the significance of events and need not have anything to say about causes. Thus, the focus is on dramatic narrative and not on causal accounts, which is to give a very different reading to Dennetts emphatic phrase no matter what the intervening vagaries of our personal trajectories. If no matter what means without particular regard to, this is correct. But if no matter what means it does not matter what the causal account may be, then this is false or highly misleading. The two realms of dramatic narrative and causal explanation are both distinctive and thoroughly intertwined. A powerful illustration of this appeal was presented to me recently by a good friend who had terminal cancer. He was told, without much embellishment, that he had six months. He was deciding whether or not to subject himself to the gruesome treatments that any attempt at a cure or a reprieve requires, but he was also trying to decide how he should think of all of this and the rest of his life (the difference between my friend and me being, as has so often been said, only the relative indeterminacy 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 be done was the only route for him (although he was no longer clear who or what the Thy 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 whole point of the situation was that he was in no position to resolve anything of the sort. In terms of the ultimate outcome, there was no point to his deliberation. Suffering through 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 fatalistic 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 an appeal is obvious. Even Freud, while chastising all such thinking as infantile, never denied its power. For merely historical reasons (although sometimes parading as metaphysical arguments), such beliefs are often distinguished from fatalism. The purported metaphysics has much to do with the tangled free will problem in its original 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 uncomfortably with the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God, but I will have nothing to 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 understandable human beliefs (or, rather, an enormous variety of related beliefs) about the supposed necessity of what happens. Fate, Fatalism and Determinism Fate is a more ancient and therefore often more personalized version of fatalism. Fate provides something by way of hands in which we can place ourselves whether or not we have confidence in their goodness. Nevertheless, I have my own deep doubts about tying fate and fatalism to any concept of an outside agency, whether Supreme or just some run-of-the-mill muse or spirit. It is for this reason that one might distinguish fate and fatalism, the former but not the latter implying some particular agency. Although I will continue to employ that distinction, I do not want to do so on these quasi-mythological grounds. Fate, like fatalism, can be understood without acknowledging any mysterious agency. Fate is not the same as fatalism, although most conceptions of the former imply the latter. Fate is the explanation. Fatalism is a doctrine. Fates decree and other such phrases may suggest some sort of personal agency without indicating anything of what (or who) such personal agents might be, but we need not invoke such images 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. In Hindu, 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 the ongoing story of ones life. In Homers Iliad, fate is distinguished from the personal agency of the gods and goddesses, but it is not then further identified. (In later Greek and later Roman literature, there is a personification of the Fates, usually as three old womenClotho, Lachesis, and Atropos12 but this is evidently a secondary and literary device rather than primary and literal identification.) In the Quran (39 : 56), we read it is written, 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 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam it is written that The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit, Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it. Whose finger? 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 impersonal agency, but fatalism as such does not. All it requires is a narrative within which certain events are deemed necessary for the outcome in the Hegelian, teleological sense suggested above. It is, I hope, a long-abandoned assumption that teleology and teleological explanation 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 impersonal Idea. So, too, in Asian cultures we find virtually agent-less notions of responsibility such 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 the suggestion of agency implied by its translation as fate. In the Buddhist and Jain notions 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 devoid of external agency) tends to fall into fatalism, and fate considered as fatalism is not so obviously a merely primitive or archaic form of thinking. Nevertheless there is (as Dennett complains) some tendency to further reduce fatalism 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 under some reasonable version of scientific determinism. But the distinction between fatalism 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. Fatalism is the thesis that some event must happen, and no further explanation, notably no causal explanation, is called for. Determinism, by contrast, is the reasonably science-minded thesis that whatever happens can be explained in terms of prior causes and standing conditions (facts, events, states of affairs, internal structures, and dispositions, plus the laws of nature). Since the scientific revolutions of half a millennium ago, determinism has become virtually a matter of plain common sense, if not also (in the past three hundred years) 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 its modern ascendancy, about free will. That is, if determinism is true, do our deliberations and decisions mean anything, and can we still be held morally responsible for our actions? Conversely, if we insist on holding people morally responsible, then determinism 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 has come under considerable scrutiny.14 The first concern, that if determinism is true then our deliberations and decisions do not have moral significance and have nothing to do with what we do, is the implausible thesis that Dennett identifies as fatalism. According to this model of fatalism, deliberations and decisions are just gears that turn without effecting the mechanism (to borrow an apt phrase from Wittgenstein and Dennett) and have no effect whatever on the outcome. Of course, there is a whole history and an ongoing 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 anything. 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 reasonable compatibilist 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 with science 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 do with 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 died when 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 the crossfire 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 fate defines much of its narrative. In the Iliad, fate and fatalism are not distinguished. Fate is necessity, and in particular it determines mens deaths and the outcome of such grand struggles as the Trojan War (and many other conflicts are described in its pages). But fate is sharply distinguished from the gods. Fate, for Homer, cannot be gainsaid. Not even the godseven Zeus himselfcan countermand fate. Nevertheless, Zeus, at least, seems to have ample elbow room. There is a remarkable passage 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 a thing to say! / A mortal man, whose fate has long been fixed, and you want to save him 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. The Father of Gods and Men agreed / Reluctantly. 16 Thus, the extent to which Zeus is bound by fateas opposed to the clear binding of mere mortalsis left ambiguous. Almost always, the gods (and goddesses) act in order to make sure that things turn out as fate decrees. Thus, Poseidon saves Aeneas from certain death at Achilles hand (20 : 298 ff.), for it is destined that Aeneas escape / And the line of Dardanus not be destroyed. Nevertheless, from the prior passage (concerning Zeus decision not to save Sarpedon) it seems that the gods are more guided than limited by fates necessity. There is no such wiggle room for mortals, however. Achilles, grieving over the death of Patroclus, tells the Myrmidons, We two are fated / to redden the selfsame earth 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 no one 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 their deaths. And it is worth observing that neither fate nor the actions of the gods make men do what they would not otherwise do. Rather, it (and the gods) provoke and moderate mens aims and desires, often forcing moments of deliberation upon what would otherwise be rash action. For instance, when at the very beginning of the book Achilles is about to strike Agamemnon in rage, Athena, sent by Hera, makes this little speech, I came to see if I could check this temper of yours. Achilles responds, When you two speak, Goddess, a man has to listen / No matter how angry. 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 / back into its sheath (1 : 226231). Thus, fate might be regarded in the Iliad as guiding rather 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 seem much more plausible, especially to a modern reader, than the later Greek and Roman figures of the Fates. Those images are much too fanciful for most contemporary tastes, although merely citing fate (especially when it is distinct from the gods, as in Homer) seems too mysterious and evasive. Where do these decrees come from? What is their nature (as opposed to their outcome)? What explains the necessity? 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 and contextthe specific narrativeare necessary. There must be some specific accounting for the necessity that fate and fatalism command. The absence of such accounting, of course, is what attracts the wrath of hardheaded philosophers like Dennett, who dismisses the very concept of fatalism (and not even bothering to denounce the more whimsical notion of fate). But fate and fatalism deserve more respect and closer attention. The discussion of fate in the Iliad gives us just that. Fate is employed to anticipate the plot and set its parameters, not to provide mysterious causal explanations. Moving away from the vacuous global conception of fatalism and merely mythological and poetic images of fate and the fates and taking seriously 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 a modest compatibilism in the problem of free will) and removes the mystery and superstition that usually surround discussions of fate and fatalism. This interpretation is 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 tragic flaw or hamartia in the tragic heros character. Thus, Oedipus tragedy is often explained by appeal to his tyrannical arrogance, his obstinacy, and his refusal to listen to either Teiresias or his wife/mother.18 Whether or not this is conducive to an adequate understanding of tragedy (or faithful to Aristotle), it shows quite dramatically the insistence that tragic fate can be explained in a way that both satisfies determinism and leaves ample room for all sorts of choices by the protagonist while preserving our sense of fatalism. If fate is character, then it is easy to see how what we do and what happens to us is to a large extent determined, but we can also be held responsible and consider ourselves the authors of our actions. David Hume and John Stuart Mill, in modern times, were willing to accept determinism (even if conjoined with skeptical doubts) and nevertheless managed to fit agency and responsibility into its domain. They suggested that an act is free (and an agent responsible) if it flows from the persons character. 19 This saved the notions of agency and responsibility, it was very much in line with our ordinary intuitions about peoples behavior, and it did not try to challenge the scientific paradigm. In order to make good solid sense of fate and fatalism, one need not bring in any fancy philosophical technology or fanciful metaphysical machinery (and discussions of fate and fatalism are too often couched in such covert machine imagery). Heraclitus fragment makes it quite clear that fate is not in the hands of the gods or in any hands other than our own, although it is important not to read too much of the modern notions of free will and autonomy into this claim. The idea that someone will very likely turn out in such-and-such a way is a perfectly commonsense notion, denied only by those who have such an exaggerated sense of personal freedom (or are so unscrupulous in their pursuit of self-help best-seller status) that they would 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 suggestion that no one can do anything about anything, and Dennett rightly observes that such gullible folks are quite likely to fall into fatalistic reflections in response to their frustrated but unreasonable expectations. Consider the idea that someone will very likely turn out in such-and-such a way: a naughty boy becomes a punk kid, then becomes a juvenile delinquent, then turns into a petty thief, and then later becomes a hardened criminal. The neighbors and some of his family members wag their fingers as they say (with each new chapter) I told you so. The childhood whiz kid on the other hand becomes an honors student and scholarship winner, and then she becomes a famous scientist. No surprises there, even though she surmounted many obstacles and prejudices on her 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 partial causal account), but it would be equally daft to insist that such necessity carries with it the strict determination of the outcome. Could things have turned out otherwise? Of course. But when people speak of fate they are not talking in terms of some peculiar 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, we should insist that they call their fatalism by some less misleading and less traditional name. The juvenile delinquent can be rightly held responsible for his increasingly criminal acts, and the successful scientist may be properly praised for her realization of the talents she first displayed as a child. To be sure, no narrative of the unfolding of character can leave out the details of environmental factors, seemingly chance occurrences and intrusions, and (especially) the influence of other people. But neither environmental factors nor the influence of other people undermines this commonsensical notion of fate as the apparently necessary and even inevitable unfolding of character. Environment, chance, and other people may act as codetermining factors, but Heraclitus focus on the internal necessity of personal character (virtues, talents, traits, flaws, vices, and liabilities) is what we mean by fate. 20 With regard to explanations of outcomes on the basis of character, do determinism and fatalism differ? Are they (according to this view) merely complements, the former a focus on formative causes, influences, and antecedent provoking conditions and the latter a focus on the narrative of personal character? This is perhaps a bit too simple-minded. What is a matter of personal talent and what is a function of 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 the kind mentioned above. Fatalism is the narrative thesis that some action or event was bound to happen because it fits so well with the agents character. Psychological determinism, 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 poor Oedipus, who was cursed and doomed to kill his father and marry his mother no matter what he (or his parents) might do to prevent it. There are many philosophical morals and conundrums to squeeze out of this old tale, but the only point to be repeated here is that the what of fate need make no specific commitments to any how. This does not mean that determinism is false, of course, since one might and indeed must insist that there is some chain of events and causes leading up to Oedipus tragic deeds. But although this may well interest the scientist it is not the main concern of the fatalist. The naughty boy who ends up doing hard prison time no doubt has a nasty biography filled with intermediate causes, but for those who told you so the important 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 quite independent of the causal necessity of the outcome. Again, the difference between them is not so much the presence or absence of a causal explanation. The difference between 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 tragic heroes of the Iliad tend not to be tragic or fateful but rather just entries in an otherwise impersonal history.) Fate is character is a good way into a sensible notion of fate that even the most obstinate scientist can accept. It shows quite clearly in what ways fatalism and determinism are compatible and even mutually supporting. It also weakens the modal notion of necessity considerably, since it now becomes obvious that what is necessary from the standpoint of fate and fatalism is neither logically nor causally necessary and may well have turned out otherwise. The necessity is so only retrospectively (or by way of anticipation), given the plot of the narrative. If the naughty boy had turned out to be a successful entrepreneur or the young scientist a frustrated housewife 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 complicated and explain our enduring interest in people, whether through gossip or professional psychology? Science, including the still struggling science of character formation, may explain character, and character may in turn account for what we do, but our sense of fate and fatalism has a different kind of story to tell. It is the story of who we are and of what happens to us and how what happens fits into the larger scheme 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 antiSemitism and somehow propped up both the Deutschemark and the Weimar Republic 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 as Germanys fate are not necessarily speaking either racism or nonsense. (Japanese historians come to pretty much the same conclusions looking at the twentiethcentury history of Japan.) The American Manifest Destiny (whatever else it may have been) was an explicit claim to fate. Looking forward, it laid out the plan for the conquest (and decimation) of a continent. Looking back, it is said to have been inevitable. Indeed, looking back (as many are doing) and retracing the steps of the ascent of man and civilization and rethinking if not human nature then certainly the 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 ways or, 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 would have found ample reason for pride in the remarkable cultures of those two countries and avoided the disasters of militarism, or, alternatively, they might have been treated very differently by other nations (Germany at Versailles, Japan after the opening around the time of the Meiji Restoration). What I have not said enough about, 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 the sapling to grow into a tree. It is the family and the life we grow up in that give shape to 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 was the seemingly chance encounter with Laius on the road that allowed Oedipus to fulfill his horrid destiny. But, to conclude this, determinism and fatalism make two quite different claims and tell two very different stories. The first insists that whatever happens can (in principle) 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 how this came about. The second insists that whatever happens must happen, but there need not be an effort to specify the causal etiology behind the modal must. To be sure, it would also be a mistake to interpret fatalism as excluding any such effort, and Oedipus behavior and its terrible outcome can be explained, step by step, as one event causing another. But that would surely miss the point of the fate/fatalism narrative, which is that the outcome has a dramatic significance whatever the path to that outcome. To confuse causal and narrative necessity or to add some mysterious agency and insist that fatalism depends on the whims of the gods or frivolous fates or 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 to ancient 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 the consequences of that behavior. But not all of fatalism and its narratives has to do with action or in any obvious sense what a person does. Earlier in this essay, I discussed 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 in the front lines and thus in harms way, had a lot to do with their fate. But to save Aeneas, Poseidon simply whisked him away from the front, leaving the attacking Greeks both aghast and terrified. Death comes not just to heroes. It comes to us all and 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 Chinese spoke 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 personal question, How long do I have? This is not a statistical inquiry about life expectancy (an average of 72.2 years for healthy, nonsmoking males, and five years more 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 a multivolume book project). The question How long do I have? has special poignancy, of course, for those who have reason to think that their time is distinctively limitedpatients with AIDS or cancer, for instance. But the same question is readily availableand 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 concerning the truth status of future events or the nature of time. To be sure, people die before their time, and these days many people outlive their useful lives by several or even many years. But the concept of fate applies just as well to these cases. It is an essential part of the narrative of their lives, the first as tragedy, the second as anticlimax. 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 replace them. But between causal necessity and random chance the whole world of human meaningfulness 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. Consider the inevitability of change in nature, the cycles of the seasons, the passages of human development, the sacraments, the cycles of life and death. Ancient conceptions of time and existence as a wheel or a circle are quite reasonably based on such evidence, long before the linear arithmetic of Christianity and the complex calculations of Einstein were on the horizon. In our own urbanized, increasingly global 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 and the supra-personal cycles of life and death. But thinking beyond the bounds of ones own life, it is hard not to think of the tumbling of generations, the epochs of evolution, 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 is why philosophy is so awe-inspiring and so intimidating. Opportunity is also largely a matter of fate (although self-made men try to deny it or claim I made my own opportunities). The Chinese also point with some reason to the fate of the individual in the context of the times (shi, shi mingwhat 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 life one 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 revolution in the forties to the horrors of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution of the fifties and sixties. (Zhang Yimous brilliant movie To Live [Houzhe] traces the fate of a single family through these tempestuous years.) But even in our considerably more stable and secure existence the truth about shi ming becomes self-evident along with the more localized notion of opportunity (jie). Think of the difference between what Tom Brokaw calls the greatest generation, 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 college students, for whom Vietnam is just history. Think of the opportunities enjoyed by my generation (college and university positions for the asking in the largest expansion of higher education since Confucius, lifetime employment in corporations without a hint of downsizing) or that slim window of opportunity enjoyed by fortunate Internet entrepreneurs at the very end of the nineties. Being born into wealth and privilege as opposed to hardship or poverty was considered definitive of ones fate by the ancient Chinese, although such a notion today runs into serious political obstacles and abuses. (We no longer dismiss poverty as unavoidable, as most people did until the late nineteenth century, and there are obvious 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 in the 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 as this is not taken as a feeble excuse to do nothing. But perhaps nothing brings home the relevance of fate more poignantly than thinking about our obligations to loved ones. Both the ancient Chinese and the ancient South Asians viewed such obligations as ultimate matters of fate. I think there is a very good argument that this point of view is much more desirable and effective than the one that dominates our way of thinking, the so-called social contract view of obligation. According to this view, one owes another because of some (implicit or explicit) agreement. But consider the centerpiece of Confucian ethics, 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 metaphysically perplexing notion of reincarnation, the rebirth of ones soul in another life, another person, or, indeed, another life-form. What this would require in terms of the soul and 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, the idea that the consequences and implications of things done continue long after the initial deed is over and done with. Thus, karma implies duties and responsibilities as well as liabilities in the future based on past acts. The possible consequence in some future 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 obligations are those to our aging parents (as so many of my generation are finding out today, without government assistanceinsurance or regulatory agenciesof any kind). One reduces the notion of obligation to nonsense once one starts talking about implicit (rarely explicit) contracts between children and parents or the sense in which particular behaviors are what engender such obligations. A much more realistic way of looking at the matter is that one is stuck with an obligation, by virtue of nothing else but the circumstances of ones birth and upbringing. One can lighten up this perception with the addition of love and affection, but (as the Chinese saw quite clearly) it is not because we love our parents that we have a duty to take care of them in their old age. Ones duty is a mandate of heaven (tian ming), and ones obligations are decrees of fate. No one taking care of an aging parent fails to feel the 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 the matter. Where they differ is in the optics, the lens through which they view these facts. 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. The fatalist is interested in the significance of what happens, and that means fitting it into a narrative that makes sense of our lives. One need not invoke mysterious causes or subscribe to astrology, divination, or geomancy, much less believe in any invisible damsels called the Fates, in order to account for such significance. One need only be human and have a life story embedded in a larger history to appreciate that special sense of meaningfulness that once was freely discussed as fate. Thus, the notion of fate gains respectability in our modern-day world, not as the expression 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 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). 5 Dennett means this in a strictly dismissive way, however, as evidenced by the fact 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 Shankman and Durrant, eds., Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons in Chinese Philosophy and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). There is at least some question as to whether karma ought to be treated as a version of fate and fatalism. Karma is the residue of action and thus determines (in part) future benefits and punishments (whether in this life or the next). But insofar as it determines the future on the basis of the past rather than simply specifies the future, one might instead consider it a peculiar version 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 University Press, 1983), where I also point out that the Absolute means nothing more 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. His most dramatic illustration of this pervasive thesis is in the first Essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, where he compares slaves and masters to lambs and great birds of prey, commenting explicitly on how futile it would be for either to 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, they became old women, not unlike the sisters in Shakespeares Macbeth. In Rome they 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 philosophers take the universality of causality in nature to be necessary, whether by way of natural habits and associations (Hume) or the a priori rules of the knowing mind (Kant). 14 See, for example, Robert Kane The Significance of Free Will (New York: Oxford University 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 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 18 See Cecil M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945); Marjorie Barstow, 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 under fire, first in the area of psychology, in particular by those social psychologists who identify themselves as situationists, and more recently in philosophy. For the situationist view, see J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson, From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973). For philosophy, see Gilbert Harman, Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics 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: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On the other side, defending the ordinary notion of character, see D. T. Kenrick and D. C. Funder, Profiting from Controversy: Lessons from the Person-Situation Debate, American Psychologist 43 (1988): 2334, and David C. Funder, Personality, Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 197221. 21 Bernd Magnus, Nietzsches Existential Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

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