Dictionary

hamartia en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /ˌhæˌmɑɹˈtiː.ə/ (General-American)
• /həˈmɑː.ti.ə/ (Received-Pronunciation)
• /ˌhɑːˌmɑɹˈtiː.ə/ (General-American)
• (US) audio

Etymology

From Ancient Greek ἁμαρτία (hamartía, “tragic failure, sinful nature”), from the verb ἁμαρτάνω (hamartánō, “to miss the mark”).

Meanings

1. (Greek, uncountable, usually) The tragic flaw of the protagonist in a literary tragedy.
   • But ever since the concept of "hamartia" recurred through Aristotle's Poetics, in an attempt to describe man's ingrained iniquity, our impulse has been to identify a telling defect in those brought suddenly and dramatically low. 2014 October 21, Oliver Brown, “Oscar Pistorius jailed for five years […] ”, in The Daily Telegraph (Sport):
   • Creon's main hamartia was his excessive pride.
   • The plot and the tragic figure at its center, destroyed through an act of hamartia, should be tailored to the production of pity and fear. Oedipus is not so much a person as he is a hamartia delivery system, a moving, empty center within the motions of the play, who through his vulnerability to hamartia and its disastrous consequences reveals the pitiable and the fearful to the audience. 2008, Daniel Greenspan, The Passion of Infinity: Kierkegaard, Aristotle and the Rebirth of Tragedy, Walter de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 81:
   • Understanding hamartia as “ignorance of the injurious act,” Lacan distinguishes Greek tragedy from the Renaissance version on the basis that the latter supplants hamartia with the hero's privileged knowledge. 2006, David Ratmoko, On Spectrality: Fantasies of Redemption in the Western Canon, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 71:
2. (uncountable, usually) Sin.
   • As a consequence of the primeval peripety, the Adamic fall narrated in Genesis 3, they have all inherited the catastrophic and tragic hamartia, as it were, of original sin, the engrained powerlessness of the soul to will the good, much less to do it, along with the deep disorientation of the soul's root desire. 2020, Paul M. Blowers, Visions and Faces of the Tragic […] , Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 127:
3. (uncountable, usually) A focal malformation consisting of disorganized arrangement of tissue types.

Forms

Coordinates

hamartoma

Deriveds

hamartoma · hamartiological · hamartiology

Relateds

hubris · peripeteia

Translations (7)

fr hamartia (tragic flaw) · pl hamartia (tragic flaw) · pl hamartia (malformation of tissue) · es hamartia (tragic flaw) · de Hamartie (tragic flaw) · de Irrtum (tragic flaw) · de Hamartie (malformation of tissue)