Antigone

I have chosen Antigone because this tragedy says something unique about the unavoidable nature of conflict in moral life and, in addition, outlines a wisdom — the tragic wisdom of which Karl Jaspers spoke — capable of directing us in conflicts of an entirely different nature

Ricoeur identifies Antigone as the philosophical exemplar of tragic wisdom precisely because its moral conflict — man against woman, old against young, society against the individual — possesses a transhistorical, agonistic permanence that instructs ethics beyond its own conceptual resources.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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Antigone shows a deeper understanding of the community and its values than Creon does when she argues that the obligation to bury the dead is an unwritten law, which cannot be set aside by the decree of a particular ruler.

Nussbaum argues that Antigone’s appeal to unwritten law constitutes a substantively superior ethical position relative to Creon’s civic monism, even as the play implicitly criticizes her single-mindedness.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Antigone structures her entire life and her vision of the world in accordance with this simple, self-contained system of duties. Even within this system, should a conflict ever arise, she is ready with a fixed priority ordering that will clearly dictate her choice.

Nussbaum diagnoses Antigone’s virtue as itself a form of simplification — a ruthless reduction of piety and duty to a single, hierarchically ordered system that mirrors Creon’s monism in structure if not in content.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Each has omitted recognitions, denied claims, called situations by names that are not their most relevant or truest names. One is far more correct in the actual content of her decision; but both have narrowed their sights.

Nussbaum’s central thesis on the Antigone holds that both protagonists suffer from a narrowing of moral vision, though Antigone’s content is closer to the truth, positioning the play as a critique of simplification in practical reason.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Antigone herself narrowed these unwritten laws down to funereal demands. But in invoking them to found her intimate conviction, she posited the limit that points up the human, all too human, character of every institution.

Ricoeur reads Antigone’s appeal to unwritten law as simultaneously a restriction and a philosophically decisive gesture: it marks the limit of positive institution and grounds the ethical instruction that tragedy alone can provide.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992thesis

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it is not the mere idea of his father’s pain that governs the decision… it might be thought that the heroic figure in Sophocles who stands in the greatest contrast to Ajax… is Antigone; she has most often been seen so in the course of her demanding and variegated Nachleben

Williams situates Antigone as Ajax’s polar opposite in Sophocles’ moral universe — the figure whose consciousness is most directed toward a demand transcending social esteem — while acknowledging the complexity of her Nachleben as documented by Steiner.

Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis

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you have (one) of those above, having thrust it below, having lodged a soul ignominiously in a tomb (Antigone), and you on the other hand have (one) of those below, a corpse dispossessed, without death ritual, impure (Polyneices).

Seaford reveals that Teiresias’s condemnation of Creon frames Antigone’s entombment and Polynices’ exposure as the twin poles of a hideous economic exchange, arguing that the perversion of death ritual in the Antigone is structurally organized around a logic of profit and exchange.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Creon has all three of the tyrannical features described above: he is much concerned with money, abuses the sacred, and comes to grief entirely isolated from his kin.

Seaford reads the Antigone through the lens of monetisation, arguing that Creon’s tyrannical psychology — his projection of monetary motives onto opponents, his abuse of death ritual — is structurally homologous with presocratic critiques of the money-dominated mind.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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Creon’s love for his dead son, a love that can no longer be either denied or accommodated within the framework of the civic theory of the good, forces him to reject this theory.

Nussbaum traces the dramatic arc of the Antigone through Creon’s recognition scene, in which his impoverished deliberative framework collapses before the irreducible claims of familial love that Antigone had always insisted upon.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Creon’s question insinuates that Antigone is out of step with popular opinion, and that she should feel aidos on that account; he reproaches her, in effect, with failure to conform

Cairns analyses the aidos-exchange between Creon and Antigone at line 510, showing how Creon deploys the concept as a weapon of social conformity while Antigone redefines honour in terms of familial piety rather than popular consensus.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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Creon does not want to be instructed in phronein by a young man like Haemon, who dares to tell him that he has lost the sense of eu phronein. Too late, Creon admits his folly.

Ricoeur traces the cycle of phronein through the Antigone to show how practical wisdom arrives only through the destruction Creon has wrought, completing a tragic education that the play stages but no rational system can substitute for.

Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting

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Anima takes the lead in the person of Antigone who provides the hodos (113). He calls Ismene and Antigone ‘my children … and sisters’. Incest shifts from literalism and taboo to sister-daughter, an accompanying double sense that guides his way.

Hillman reads Antigone in Oedipus at Colonus as the anima-figure who provides the guiding path, reinterpreting the incest motif as a psychological doubling rather than a literal taboo and marking the transition from Freudian to Jungian modes of mythic reading.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Polynices, shrieking sharp, eagle-like, flew into our land… his helmet decked with horse-hair. This eagle plumed with horsehair, his anomalous doubleness indicating the complexities that could be expected to mark their moral dealings with him, lies there still beneath the sun’s eye, untended.

Nussbaum reads the Chorus’s opening imagery of Polynices as a figure of irreducible moral ambiguity, establishing from the outset that the Antigone’s landscape is one of genuine conflict rather than simple transgression.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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The brief, ‘But the long-lived Moirai bore down on her too, my child’, which compares her predicament to Antigone’s… This woman (like Creon) needed to render her opposition inert and inexpressive, because their humanness made itself too keenly felt as a claim upon her.

Nussbaum extends the Antigone’s central dynamic — the need to suppress the claims of others — to the choral odes, reading the mythological comparanda as variations on the theme of vision, blindness, and the intolerable demands of human claims.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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psyche occurs twice in Antigone in difficult but possibly traditional uses. In his opening address to the citizens, Creon declares that it is impossible to know the ‘plan’, ‘thought’, or psyche of a man before he is manifest in his rule

Claus examines the pre-Platonic usage of psyche in the Antigone, showing that Creon’s civic epistemology of character-revelation is expressed through this term, which in this context carries meanings of disposition and intent rather than immortal soul.

David B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981aside

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Theseus, despatching his attendants to free Antigone and Ismene, speaks of the… aidos would thus be relevant as an act-description and as a motive.

Cairns notes that Antigone and Ismene appear in the Oedipus at Colonus as recipients of rescue acts framed through aidos, illustrating how the concept operates both as a description of conduct and as a motivating disposition in Sophocles.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993aside

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