From Valor to Ruin: An Aristotelian Interpretation of Othello

Grounded in Aristotle’s theory of tragedy as presented in the Poetics, this article offers a reinterpretation of Othello not merely as a tale of personal error (hamartia), but as a critique of systemic misrecognition. In Shakespeare’s play, logos, the rational force of speech and meaning, is corrupted by rhetoric and bias, no longer functioning as a stable conduit of truth. Iago emerges not just as a villain but as a figure of anti-logic, whose manipulation of language dismantles reason and obscures moral distinctions. Othello’s downfall is shown to result not only from a lapse in practical wisdom (phronēsis), but from his progressive estrangement from the civic rationality of the polis. Similarly, Desdemona’s ethical clarity becomes unreadable in a discursive environment structured by suspicion and cultural prejudice. Drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics, the article contends that the play’s catharsis does not offer resolution, but instead reveals the fragility of ethical recognition and the limits of rational discourse in a racially and socially fragmented world. Ultimately, Othello is read as a tragedy that indicts not only individual failure, but the ideological structures that fail to sustain justice, virtue, and intelligible moral action.