History of a concept. Hubris (or hubris, translated as “excessiveness”), is a notion which, in ancient Greece, refers to excessive attitudes: passion, pride, outrage, crime, transgression. In other words, this term is opposed to temperance and reason (logos). The man who indulges in excess condemns himself for defying the gods. Consequently, hubris is inseparable from Nemesis, goddess of revenge, responsible for punishing those who have indulged in such drunkenness, whatever its form. But things are not so simple, since the Greek man affected by excess is also the victim of a destiny – the moïra – which requires everyone to hold their place in the universe and to respect their share of good and bad, fortune and misfortune. And we know that few heroes are capable of such boring wisdom. In other words, hubris goes hand in hand with the idea that human history – that is to say History – is tragic, the subject being condemned to restrict his hubris, under pain of destruction, while being unaware of what history makes of him.
Oedipus, the king of Thebes, reached with excess after having defeated the Sphynge, is the prototype of the tragic hero, forced to discover that, without knowing it, he is a “defilement”, who killed his father and married his mother. Once the truth is revealed, he will obey his destiny (moïra) gouging out his eyes (nemesis). He will become the expiatory victim – or the remedy (pharmakos) –, necessary for the purification of the city. Excessiveness therefore leads to self-annihilation. And we understand why Freud seized on this story to relaunch, at the beginning of the 20e century, the idea that the human condition is tragic: each subject is dependent on his unconscious (destiny) and it is from becoming aware of what escapes him that his highest freedom derives. Freud wanted to think about the tragedies of his time, showing that the death drive, primary force (uber), has access to civilization as its antidote (logos and culture) which makes it possible to sublimate it.
Inordinate self-love
In 1979, Raymond Aron also recalled, with regard to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that a head of state may be intelligent and educated, but he fails when he imagines being able to settle all conflicts, forgetting that History escapes him: one can therefore be stricken with hubris, as much by indulging in the madness of domination as by the conviction of being able to rule it by an illusory rational mastery of all situations. In other words, to take a current example, faced with a dictator (Vladimir Putin), whose paranoid logic is unstoppable because he thinks he is the savior of a “holy Russia”, threatened by Nazis and homosexuals westernized, no negotiation is possible. This means that if one continues to speak to him, for diplomatic reasons, one must not oneself be affected by an excess of narcissism which would lead one to believe that one could bring him back to reason. He cannot hear anything of this order, since he lives in a parallel world: that of heir to Tsar Nicolas Iis liberating Berlin in 1945.
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