Agon: The Benefits of the Ancient Greek Concept of Struggle

How the ancient Greek origin of the word “agony” meant a “struggle” or “contest” and why we should embrace agon

Crowning the Victors at Olympia by James Barry

You find interesting things when you break down the etymology of a word. Take “agony” for example. The origin of the word is Greek and meant something different than what it means today. For us it is a synonym for “pain.” For the Greeks it meant a “contest”, “competition”, or a “struggle”. When someone underwent agon they were undergoing some form of contest. It was a word that could mean everything from a war between armies down to the struggle of a student to learn something. An agon was also a competitive event. You could host an agon in athletics or music for example. In Greek theater to Agonize meant to have a debate.

There are other places this comes up in English that you wouldn’t expect. For example, the protagonist of a story more literally translates as “first competitor”. The protagonist of a story is one undergoing a trial of some kind–the story is about that first competitor changing and growing. A character isn’t a hero in a story without something to strive against. Story writers all know this–it’s the determination of whether a story is man vs man, man vs nature, man vs themself, etc.

Ancient Greeks had a worldview that saw most of what you do in life as a fight between two sides, including things we today would normally not think of as a fight–you trying to learn something from this blog post would be an agon between you and my writing (sorry) to draw out and understand lessons from it. Getting up in the morning is an agon between the part of yourself that wants to sleep in and the part of yourself that wants to live life and succeed.

The Greeks defined existence as a struggle or contest (agon) that tested and built character. To strive to be the best was a moral duty. Life was a perpetual game or race, with little hope of rest.

Camille Paglia, Glittering Images

The Greeks loved competitions of all kinds. We’ve been talking about competitions of the self so far, but they also adored sports (they did invent the Olympics) and glorified war to a degree we’d find disturbing today. You can see this love of competition–of everyone trying to outdo each other and do better than their past selves right in the Iliad, a major foundation of later Greek education and culture. The elite warriors in the Iliad are all competing against each other for glory on the battlefield–trying to outdo each other and kill the strongest warriors they can on the other side. When Patroclus is killed Achilles organizes a funeral including… sports contests (archery, javelin throwing, wrestling, running, and more), and the winners of these games would win valuable prizes. The ancient Greeks loved and lived agons.

The Move Away from Agon

I wrote recently about the Greek concept of arete, meaning excellence. Agon is very much connected with arete. One develops arete through agony. You become excellent in skills, virtues, and life through the difficult struggles you go through and grow from.

It’s interesting how the evolution of agony from meaning a trial–something we must all undergo and grow from–towards meaning pain with no associated meaning behind it, has matched a cultural change towards viewing trials and hardships as things to always be avoided. Our culture seems allergic to the idea of growth and development coming through hardship.

I think we all have some sense of this. If you asked the average person on the street what they want in  life they’ll most likely answer: happiness and comfort. What do most people talk about wanting to do when they retire? Taking it easy, being comfortable, and being free from struggle.

This is a topic for a much larger post in future, but it draws from the works of many including Dr. Adam Fraser, who recently published Strive: Embracing the Gift of Struggle, where he explores and presents his own research on the benefits of striving, struggle and discomfort and how constant happiness and pleasure seeking are actually terrible for us mentally, physically (you don’t become fit without pushing your body), and in our overall life trajectories.

We think what we need is more comfort, less struggle–that’s what we think when we’re young. But people at the end think differently. Our cultural outlook on this is wrong.

I started to explore the deathbed research (yeah, cheery I know). Some slight variation exists in the research but a general theme can be seen around what people wished they’d had more of in their life — and it ain’t happiness. The top three regrets of the dying are:

I wish I’d had the courage to live the life that I wanted to live not the life that other people expected me to live.

I wish I’d had the courage to tell people I cared about how much they meant to me more often.

I wish I’d had the courage to not let fear hold me back from doing the things that scared me.

So while people looking forward into their life wish for more happiness, people at the end of their life are thinking, Screw happiness, I wish I’d had more courage. Witnessing yourself being courageous is one of the most fulfilling and esteem-building events you will ever experience.

Dr. Adam Fraser, Strive: Embracing the Gift of Struggle

Courage is what allows you to struggle and strive. When you’re comfortable and confident in what you are doing you don’t need courage, but neither are you growing. I think it’s destructive how we’ve forgotten what a good agon will do for us. It’s how we grow and become better and more capable. We just seem to struggle accepting this.

For example, in one study, students, when self rating how much they’ve learned in a given class, will self rate themselves as having learned more in a basic lecture style class than in one where they had to actively participate. However, the actual learning achieved was the reverse of what the students self-rated. They actually learned more in active learning than in the basic lecture. Active participation requires the students struggle more cognitively, and the researchers believe this struggle increased the student’s learning, but that difficulty also made the students feel like they had learned less.

Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning. That disconnect may have a detrimental effect on students’ motivation, engagement, and ability to self-regulate their own learning.

We think that comfort and constant happiness are what we should work towards (or, perhaps we think we’re entitled to them), but what I think this shows is that pain and pleasure, happiness and struggle, are flip sides of the same coin. To have great happiness and satisfaction with your life, you’ll also need to experience great struggles that you can grow from.

Nietzsche examined this in The Gay Science when he described pain and pleasure. You can’t have pleasure without pain and pain without pleasure. The only way to minimize pain is to numb yourself to pleasure as well. Refuse struggle and you’ll refuse happiness.

But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death"?

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This is not just a philosophical concept. People who are depressed are often treated with antidepressant medication. Yes the medication seems to prevent the lows in the patient, but research also shows that around half of patients also feel less pleasure and joy. Their emotions are “blunted”.

Happiness is just one emotion of many, and it simply isn’t possible for us to always feel it. 

The problem is happiness is an emotion, and emotions come and go. Sadness, rage, jealousy, embarrassment, enthusiasm and delight — they come in, do a job, which is to steer our behaviour in a certain direction, and then they leave. This is how we were designed and it’s a great system. But we have messed with the system. We picked one emotion (happiness) and said this should be our constant state. Happiness in itself has become the goal. Feeling a constant state of happiness, however, is physiologically and psychologically impossible. It just can’t happen. This expectation of perpetual happiness is not only delusional, it is also fraught with disaster.

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Feeling a constant state of happiness is physiologically and psychologically impossible.

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To get the most out of life you want to feel a whole range of different emotions, both positive and negative. The meaning of life is to experience as many things as possible and we should put emotions in that category as well.

Dr. Adam Fraser, Strive: Embracing the Gift of Struggle

If you were to ask me why we moved away from embracing struggle and expecting lives of ease–that the life we want and expect is a minimal of agon–that would have to be a whole book’s worth of research and I certainly wouldn’t be the first to have thought about this. Perhaps modernism, with all the comforts it provides, has made it easy for us to avoid agon. So many want to win the lottery and never have to experience an agon again–no more work, no more struggle, no more growth necessary then–a comfortable and permanent plateau as a human being where your value is not what you can achieve, but what you pump into the economy as a consumer without producing.

Moving Back To Agon

I suppose this is a great lesson of the earliest spiritual traditions: life requires sacrifices–whether it’s sacrificing a bull to appease a god, or your time and hard work to finish a project, or your happiness in one moment to feel it again in another–the universe functions on sacrifice. Something must be given to gain a change.

Languages change of course, and just because agon no longer means a contest in English does not mean we don’t have other words to mean how the Greeks used the word (I’m literally using the word “contest” here). But I think it’s interesting to note the transition we’ve undergone as a culture where we began to see a contest and the painful struggle of striving that comes with it as wholly a bad thing and against what may actually be more of the natural order. Agony in our modern usage is something no one should have to undergo. Agony in the older sense was something everyone must undergo to grow, and must undergo to also feel the joys of life.

Consider reclaiming agon’s original meaning. Pain and bad things in life are not things that can be eliminated without simultaneously destroying happiness and the good things in life. To feel great joy in success you have to also feel great suffering in the strenuous work you put in, or the many failures you had to undergo first.

I don’t know if anyone feels pride in themselves when they lounge on the couch and don’t attempt to strive for something. Pride comes from feeling like you are trying–like you are being the kind of person you would want to emulate if you saw it in someone else. Pride in yourself comes from going through that ancient Greek form of agony.

Perhaps literally call your struggles in life your agons, and consider that yes, you’ll feel pain as you strive through them, but they will also heighten your joys and pleasures too. They are not agonies you just stoically endure, but fights to win. This is embracing a competitive spirit towards life, or having, as the classicist Carlin Barton subtitled her book on Roman honor (a culture that embraced a similar philosophy towards competition): The Fire in the Bones.