2005 Summer Reading
The Burial at Thebes
Hegel on the Antigone

by Prof. Francisco J. Gonzalez, Philosophy

Hegel’s central insight with regard to Greek tragedy has been clearly articulated by Walter Kaufmann: “He realized that at the center of the greatest tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles we find not a tragic hero but a tragic collision, and that the conflict is not between good and evil but between one-sided positions, each of which embodies some good” (Tragedy and Philosophy [Princeton University Press, 1979], 201-202). This interpretation of Greek tragedy is diametrically opposed to one that is still very current today and that is traced back, erroneously, to Aristotle: according to this interpretation, tragedy presents us with a “tragic hero” who falls into misfortune as a result of some “tragic flaw.” This view is on the face of it hard to apply to Antigone. Who, first of all, is the “tragic hero,” Antigone or Creon? If Antigone, then what is her “tragic flaw”? If, on the other hand, we view Antigone as a flawless heroine and find a “tragic flaw” only in Creon, then Creon becomes the “tragic hero” and the play should have been named after him.

Yet the more common tendency in recent interpretations and productions of the play has been to see the main conflict as taking place not within either character but rather between both of them and to characterize this conflict as one between good and evil. Antigone is made the noble defender of individual human rights standing her ground against the arbitrary violence of the ruthless tyrant Creon. Against this Hegel sees in Greek tragedy in general, and in the Antigone in particular, not a conflict between good and evil, but a conflict between good and good. Neither Antigone nor Creon are wrong; both are right. Yet it is also the case that both are guilty for being right: each can maintain his or her own position only by committing a crime against the opposed position, a position that not only has equal validity but is in substance inseparable from the other position. Creon can defend the human law only by violating the divine law on which it depends; Antigone can defend the divine law only by violating the human law in which it finds expression.

In the conflict between good and good, good and evil can no longer be kept comfortably distinct and the whole moral order is threatened with self-destruction. If, as Kaufmann observes, Sophocles’ “world view was terrifying, and most critics would rather not think about it,” Hegel was willing to think about it. Even if Hegel’s conception of Greek tragedy is not ultimately defensible in its generality—there are Greek tragedies to which it simply does not seem to apply—it can serve at least as a caution against the tendency towards moralizing and ideological simplification of a play like Antigone. If we wish to make Antigone politically relevant today, perhaps this relevance should be sought in its resistance to the simplistic black-and-white moral thinking that plagues contemporary political discourse.

Yet what exactly is the conflict of good with good that Hegel finds in the opposition between Antigone and Creon? Are they really both “right” and how so? It is interesting to note that Kaufmann himself, while very sympathetic to Hegel’s general theory of tragedy, also shares the cultural sensibilities of his own time and refuses to follow Hegel in applying this theory to Antigone: “The heroine has no blemish, and our sympathies are not divided between her and Creon” (216). In Hegel’s defense one must ask if the sympathies of the original Greek audience would have been the same as Kaufmann’s, which he rather presumptuously takes to be representative of “our” sympathies. In any case, what Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit sees in the opposition between Antigone and Creon are two equally legitimate and inseparable aspects of what the calls the same “ethical substance”: on the one hand, unconscious, immediate, individual spirit (nature, family, and the “unwritten laws”); on the other, self-conscious, mediated (reflective), and universal spirit (the state and its written laws). Our bond with nature and with those who share our blood is the immediate and unconscious substance of our ethical life, the soil from which ethical relations grow. But this substance becomes conscious of itself, reflects on itself, and riseS above the level of the particular (my own kin) to the level of the universal (all citizens) only in and through the explicit enactment of laws and the formation of the city. Hegel expresses as follows the way in which the two aspects are inseparable: “Neither of the two is alone self-complete. Human law as a living and active principle proceeds from the divine, the law holding on earth from that of the nether world, the conscious from the unconscious, mediation from immediacy; and returns too whence it came. The power of the nether world, on the other hand, finds its realization upon earth; it comes through consciousness to have existence and efficacy” (The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie [New York: Harper and Row, 1967], 478-9). Human law can find its ground and legitimation only in what is beyond the human, i.e., the divine; consciousness can only be the coming to consciousness of what was unconscious; any mediation must have its starting point in what is accepted as immediate truth. On the other hand, the unconscious, immediate, and divine law can find expression and be put into effect only in the conscious formation of human law. In short, the human law is grounded in the divine law, while the divine law can become aware of itself as such and be efficacious only in human law.

As long as both principles are accepted in ethical life as immediate truth, they are preserved in their unity and mutual dependence. But when each becomes a conscious principle that demands action, then a “diremption” occurs, an opposing of one to the other with each seen as excluding the other. “By the act it gives up the specific character of the ethical life, that of being pure and simple certainty of immediate truth, and sets up a division of itself into self as active and reality over against it, and for it therefore, negative” (488). So Antigone adopts the unwritten laws as a conscious principle of action and sees whatever is opposed to them as purely negative; Creon adopts the written laws as a conscious principle of action and sees whatever opposes them as purely negative.

Because “the law manifest to [ethical consciousness] is, in the essential reality, bound up with its opposite” and “the essential reality is the unity of both” (489), this dismissal from the perspective of one law of the other law as purely negative is a blindness. For Hegel, tragedy is not only a conflict between good and good, but one in which each good is blind to the other. Thus Hegel writes: “Since it sees right only on its own side, and wrong on the other, so, of these two, that which belongs to divine law detects, on the other side, mere arbitrary fortuitous violence, while what appertains to human law finds in the other the obstinacy and disobedience of subjective self-sufficiency” (486). Any reader of the Antigone will recognize what Hegel is describing here: in Antigone Creon sees nothing but a selfishness that ranks subjective self-interest above the common good of the state; in Creon Antigone sees nothing but arbitrary power.

Since what each thus negates is part of the very substance of what each defends—the unwritten laws need the state to be consciously taken up and given efficacy, while the written laws derive their legitimacy from their grounding in the divine law—the tragic outcome in the form of the self-destruction of both sides is inevitable. This inevitability is what Hegel calls “destiny”: “It is in the equal subjection of both sides that absolute right is first accomplished, and the ethical substance, as the negative force devouring both sides, in other words, omnipotent and righteous Destiny, makes its appearance” (492-3). Both are devoured by what they oppose because they cannot do without what they oppose. The “unconscious spirit” represented by Antigone finds “only a bloodless shade to lend it help towards actually carrying itself out in the face of that masterful and openly enunciated law. Being the law of weakness and of darkness, it therefore gives way, to begin with, before law which has force and publicity; for the strength of the former is effective in the nether realm, not on earth and in the light of day” (494). But this triumph of the state is also its, and Creon’s, ruin since “The spirit which is manifest to the light of day has the roots of its power in the lower world: the certainty felt by a nation, a certainty which is sure of itself and which makes itself assured, finds the truth of its oath binding all its members into one, solely in the mute unconscious substance of all, in the waters of forgetfulness. In consequence, the fulfillment of the public spirit turns round into its opposite, and learns that its supreme right is supreme wrong, its victory rather its own defeat” (495).

The tragedy is that in the conflict between right and right, each right becomes a wrong without ceasing to be right. As the Chorus at one point observes: “Sooner or later, foul is fair, fair is foul to the man the gods will ruin” (696-698; Fagles trans.). It could be argued that Hegel’s reading, more than any other, does justice to this line and to another one that could be considered the central motif of the play and that Hegel would rightly see as applying to both Creon and Antigone: “no towering form of greatness enters into the lives of mortals free and clear of ruin” (687-689; the word translated as “ruin” here can also mean “blindness”). The greatness of each lies in the active defense of a legitimate good; the ruin/blindness of each is that this defense requires the exclusion of the opposite and yet inseparable good. From the Hegelian perspective, these lines lose all their tragic force and become mere moral platitudes when translated as: “the man obsessed is a cock of the walk in a hurry towards the worst” (Seamus Heaney’s version of 696-698, p. 40) and “No windfall or good fortune comes to mortals that isn’t paid for in the coin of pain” (Heaney’s version of 687-689).

But if Hegel’s conception of Greek tragedy has any validity, what are we supposed to learn from a play such as Antigone? What is the play’s portrayal of a conflict of good with good that results in self-destruction supposed to show us? For Hegel it shows that this conflict is only a transitional stage of spirit and consciousness that needs to be overcome. As he writes, with the self-destruction of the ethical substance “The ethical form and embodiment of the life of spirit has passed away, and another mode appears in its place” (498). In this respect, Hegel’s conception of tragedy forms part of an anti-tragic world view: tragic conflict represents only the stammering of spirit not yet arrived at absolute self-consciousness. One must consider the possibility that Sophocles’ world view was, in the words of Kaufmann, much more “terrifying”than Hegel’s: that for the Greek tragedian the conflict between good and good could not be overcome and absorbed into the human spirit’s march of progress, but rather represented an inescapable and irremediable fact of the human condition. Faced with repeated attempts to politicize, i.e., coarsen and simplify, the Antigone, should we not perhaps, partly in the spirit of Hegel, allow the play to confuse what is foul with what is fair and what is fair with what is foul and thus to confront us with the genuine tragedy of the human condition? Rather than allow the play to be absorbed by ideology, whether that of the world’s Antigones or that of the world’s Creons, should we not use it as a weapon against the myopic simplifications of ideology and in defense of the human condition which these simplifications inevitably betray? Hegel’s vision of a conflict of good with good is deeply disturbing and even more so if we are not Hegelians. But any interpretation and production of the Antigone that deeply disturbs us by undermining our moral certainties has much to recommend it.