Essay On Oedipus The King

55 Pages 13672 Words

ing else out there (where exactly varies from one vision to the next) which, in effect, sets and controls the rules of our lives, determining most or all things of particular importance to us: our good and bad fortune, our happiness and sorrow, and, above all, our death. To have a fatalistic sense of life is to hold that in this game of life, the rules, the flow of play, the success or failure of my team (and my contribution to that), and so on are out of the control of any human being or collection of human beings. The outcome and all the various stages of the game are determined from non-human sources.
The terms fate and fatalistic do assert, however, that something or someone is in control, and hence the universe does not operate by chance. We may have little to no accurate idea of why fate works the way it does (although differing fatalistic vision will provide different senses of just how much we can know and deal with fate), but at least there is something out there controlling what goes on. To assert that chance rules all things (as Jocasta does in the play) is to claim that there is little we can do to control things and nothing we can learn about it, since the concept of chance suggests that what occurs is quite arbitrary, unrelated to any higher system of order or meaning.
All these points are clear enough, but it is important to insist upon them, because (as I shall mention later) such fatalism is, in many ways, profoundly different from what we believe nowadays, and thus books which hold up a fatalistic view of life (and that includes almost all books up until the eighteenth century) can provide difficulties for us, especially since a fatalistic view of life in some ways challenges some of our most cherished beliefs and can make us profoundly uncomfortable (a factor which is, of course, something which can make such books uniquely valuable to us).
If we hold a fatalistic world view or believe in fate, it is not uncommon...