The Concept of Destiny in the Contemporary Critical Configuration

Abstract

This article poses a conceptual reflection on destiny as an analytical element that allows us to establish new readings on the contemporary crisis. To this end, a brief and selective overview is established, which addresses the different overlaps between various crises (economic, social, political, and climatic) that shape the current world and come from various disciplinary diagnoses. Subsequently, a historical mapping of the notion of destiny in different philosophical schools is carried out, with special attention to its development within tragic poetry. In a third moment, three variants (heroes, saints, and sorcerers' apprentices) are proposed, corresponding to three moments of the emergence of the tragic in history, taking into account the literary material available at distinct historical moments that typify different ways of understanding and acting in the face of destiny and that are susceptible to being typified as elements of sociological analysis. Finally, the possibility of recovering various elements of tragic thought for the construction of a sociological scaffolding that allows us to understand the growing complexity of the contemporary world is proposed.