The Auerbachian Disposition:

Character, Fate, and Habitus

Abstract

The article evaluates the relationship between character (Charakter), fate (Schicksal), and habitus in Erich Auerbach’s thesis Dante as Poet of the Earthly World (1929). The maxim of Heraclitus – Ēthos anthrōpōi daímōn – chosen by the philologist as an epigraph, prompts an analysis of the history of the idea of man in the Western poetic tradition and constitutes the a priori motivating principle of a notion of realism that would have driven a range of representations of reality in European literature, from Homer to more recent times. In this history, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy occupies a special chapter. I argue that what enables the conjunction of the various European literary manifestations under the label of “realism” is not so much the content of the works themselves but rather a certain spiritual vision of the world, qualified as genuinely European: the Auerbachian disposition, whose root is Dante. This disposition shapes the conditions of possibility for his concept of mimesis, which is at once universal and multiple.