Hubris

The English word 'hubris' – pronounced with the stress on the first syllable (IPA: /‘hjuː brɪs/) and sometimes spelt 'hybris' - is a transliteration of the Classical Greek ὕβρις (hubris). Although both the English word and its Greek ancestor may be said to mean ‘pride’ or ‘arrogance’, the two words are used in significantly different ways.

In contemporary English hubris is an excessive or misplaced pride in one’s abilities or achievements, an over-confidence in one’s powers - a fault of character which can make a person over-ambitious, keen to attempt more than they should, and willing to ignore moral constraints in the pursuit of their objectives. Hubris, so understood, may well lead to bad consequences for the person who behaves hubristically - and for others: it is the pride that comes before a fall, and is sometimes identified in contemporary discussions of tragic drama, ancient and modern, as the fatal flaw of character which leads to the downfall of the tragic protagonist – though see further below.

In Classical Greek ὕβρις (hubris) is violent behaviour resulting from strong emotion, lust, or the agent’s sense of, and pride in, their own superiority. The word was primarily a legal term, applicable to all the more serious injuries that one person might inflict on another and to sexual offences. Aristotle’s account of hubris in his Rhetoric is often quoted: ‘What is distinctive [of hubris] is humiliating others: hubris consists in causing injury or annoyance whereby the sufferer is disgraced, not to obtain any other advantage for oneself besides the performance of the act, but for one’s own pleasure .... The cause of the pleasure felt by those who act hubristically is the idea that, in ill treating others, they are more fully showing superiority’ (Aristotle, Rhetoric, II 2, 1378b). A well-known case of hubris was the physical assault which Meidias, a wealthy and influential Athenian, launched in 353 BCE on his enemy, the Athenian orator Demosthenes, while the latter was engaged in celebrating a religious ritual.

Clearly, whatever the similarities between them, one difference between the Classical Greek concept of hubris and the contemporary concept is that the former necessarily involves a victim, someone whom the hubristic person treats badly, whereas hubris as we understand it today, insofar as it does not essentially involve the idea of treating someone else badly, may have no bad consequences for anyone apart from the agent.

Finally, it may be noted that although some modern discussions of Greek tragedy appeal to (the contemporary concept of) hubris in identifying the flaw of character responsible for the tragic hero’s downfall, the word hubris is conspicuous by its absence from Aristotle’s seminal discussion of tragic drama in his Poetics.