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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
27Antigone.mp3
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'Antigone'
Having presented this positive picture, Hegel now proceeds in the next subsection to examine why a balance of this kind could not be sustained, in order to show why 'Spirit . . . must leave behind it the beauty of ethical life'. He attempts to bring this out by focusing on the story of Antigone, as told by Sophocles in one of his Theban plays. Hegel expressed his admiration for this drama in many places; for example, in his Lectures on Aesthetics he called it 'one of the most sublime and in every respect most excellent works of art of all time', and it formed an important part of his theory of tragedy; his influential treatment of the play remains a matter of interpretative controversy (see Donougho). In the Phenomenology, however, his concern is not so much aesthetic as cultural–historical: he uses the play as a key to diagnose the failure of Greek ethical life, where the ground has been prepared in the themes already emphasized (the brother–sister relationship, the role of the family in burial, the role of the divine law, and the significance of war), all of which are central to Sophocles' drama, as Hegel's plot-summary from the Lectures on Aesthetics makes clear:
Everything in this tragedy is logical; the public law of the state is set in conflict over against inner family love and duty to a brother; the woman, Antigone, has the family interest as her 'pathos', Creon, the man, has the welfare of the community as his. Polynices [Antigone's brother], at war with his native city, had fallen before the gates of Thebes, and Creon, the ruler, in a publicly proclaimed law threatened with death anyone who gave this enemy of the city the honour of burial. But this command, which concerned only the public weal, Antigone could not accept; as sister, in the piety of her love for her brother, she fulfils the holy duty of burial. In doing so she appeals to the law of the gods; but the gods whom she worships are the underworld gods of Hades . . ., the inner gods of feeling, love, and kinship, not the daylight gods of free self-conscious national and political life.
Hegel thus introduces the story of Antigone at this point in the Phenomenology, because he believes it tells us much about why Greek ethical life was unsustainable. However, while this much is clear, it is less clear exactly how Hegel wants us to understand the play, and thus exactly what lesson he wants us to draw from it. Some have argued that on Hegel's reading of the play, we are meant to side with Antigone over Creon, in so far as she represents the emerging modern sense of individuality that will ultimately undermine the kind of authoritarian Greek state represented by Creon. Thus, on this account, we are told that 'according to Hegelian hermeneutics, Antigone represents the eternal conflict between the individual and the State' (Pietercil), where it is Antigone as such an individual who brings down the harmony of Greek ethical life (Fleischmann, '[Hegel] shows, primarily with the example of Greece (here Antigone, elsewhere Socrates), that the questioning by individuals of established injustice is the end of an epoch and the beginning of another, more just, age.'). Now, it is certainly true that Hegel was impressed by Antigone as a tragic figure, and in this sense viewed her sympathetically, famously calling her 'the heavenly Antigone, that noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth'. However, it seems wrong to infer from this that Hegel therefore thought Antigone was 'right', and in particular that she was 'right' because she acted as a modern individualistic consciousness, out of personal conviction and conscience in opposition to the tyranny of the state. In fact, Hegel simply took Antigone to be representing her social sphere, and in that sense as no more 'modern' than Creon, who represented his. As Hegel makes clear, he thinks that it was Creon's tragic mistake to take Antigone to be acting out of merely self-righteous indignation, when in fact she was acting out of respect for traditional values: 'Since it sees right only on one side and wrong on the other, that consciousness which belongs to the divine law [Antigone] sees in the other side only the violence of human caprice, while that which holds to the human law [Creon] sees in the other only the self-will and disobedience of the individual who insists on being his own authority'. Taken in this way, Hegel's position is also arguably closer to a proper understanding of the play itself, which is only anachronistically treated as a study of 'the individual' against the state, many contemporary productions notwithstanding. However, once his position is no longer understood in these terms, it may seem that Hegel took the play to show that Greek ethical life was unsustainable because it could not accommodate the kind of secular, rational state represented by Creon, and thus it may seem that Creon is the hero in his eyes (Solomon, 'Antigone represents the losing battle against the breakdown of the most elementary and “natural” Sittlichkeit and the hegemony of “civil society”.'). Now, Hegel is certainly less obviously critical of Creon than many commentators on the play, who take it as unquestionable that (in Richard Jebb's words) Sophocles means 'us to feel that, in this controversy, the right is wholly with [Antigone], and the wrong wholly with her judge [Creon]' (Jebb). Those hostile towards Hegel expect him to respond to the play in this idiosyncratic way: for (to these critics) it is clear that Hegel would prefer the authoritarianism of Creon to the individualism represented by Antigone, so that 'it is easy to see how Hegel, with his semi-mystical worship of the state, could take Creon as representing “genuine ethical pathos”'. I think this second account is as mistaken as the first, however. First, it ignores the way in which Hegel presents Antigone in a positive light (as we have seen). Second, while Hegel may not favour Antigone over Creon in the way that many commentators on the play suppose we should, it does not follow that he believed Creon's position to be right, or superior to Antigone's. And third, those who take Hegel to be an admirer of Creon because his own political philosophy was authoritarian are misguided, as no proper reading of Hegel can support the claim that he went in for a 'semi-mystical worship of the state', and no proper reading of the play can treat Creon as a mere tyrant. (For a helpful discussion of Hegel's political outlook, see Houlgate) In fact, it seems to me, the mistake both these accounts make is to look for evidence that Hegel wanted to 'take sides', and to show that either Antigone or Creon were representative of the 'forces of modernity' which the Greek world could not accommodate, and which therefore brought it down. A better account is that Hegel used the play to argue that the tragedy shows how in the Greek world each side (Antigone and Creon) had fixed allegiances to one sphere or the other, so that when these spheres came into conflict (through the figure of Polynices, who was significantly both a male political figure and thus part of the polis, and a dead brother and thus part of the family), this conflict could not be resolved in any way. As I understand it, in Hegel's view the central reason why this opposition was inevitable was the fact that in Greek ethical life, each individual (man or woman, brother or sister) had their 'station', and saw their duties defined for them in these terms. Hegel refers to this aspect of Greek ethical life when he declares that: 'in this ethical realm . . . self-consciousness has not yet received its due as a particular individuality. There it has the value, on the one hand, merely of the universal will [Creon, as a man], and on the other, of consanguinity [Antigone, as a woman]. This particular individual counts only as a shadowy unreality'. There is, then, a sense in which the Greek ethical world collapsed because it had insufficient space for 'the individual': it is not because Antigone represented this individualistic rebellion against the state, but because neither Antigone or Creon were able to rise above their social spheres and see value in the position of the other. As a result of this socially defined self-conception, Antigone felt that she had no choice but to bury her brother when called upon to do so, since this was her role within the scheme of things; likewise, as head of state, Creon felt equally obliged to forbid the burial and so to punish Antigone for her disobedience. It is because each individual identifies him or herself wholly with one overriding ethical imperative that Hegel characterizes the clash between Antigone and Creon as tragic. Neither is able to step back from the obligations that go with their naturally determined place in the ethical order:
In [this ethical consciousness] there is no caprice and equally no struggle, no indecision, since the making and testing of law has been given up; on the contrary, the essence of ethical life for this consciousness is immediate, unwavering, without contradiction. Consequently, we are not faced with the sorry spectacle of a collision between passion and duty, nor with the comic spectacle of a collision between duty and duty . . . The ethical consciousness . . . knows what it has to do, and has already decided whether to belong to the divine or the human law. This immediate firmness of decision is something implicit, and therefore has at the same time the significance of a natural being as we have seen. Nature, not the accident of circumstances or choice, assigns one sex to one law, the other to the other law; or conversely, the two ethical powers themselves give themselves an individual existence and actualize themselves in the two sexes.
Thus, as soon as an issue arises in which the duties of the man and the duties of the woman pull in opposite directions, the individuals concerned could only find themselves in conflict, as neither could see how any other course of action was open to them: Antigone must bury her brother, Creon must uphold the law of the state. Neither can therefore feel any real guilt for what they have done, as each believes they have done what was required of them, even if the result of so acting has been disastrous; neither do they feel any fear or any personal animosity towards their opponent:
It is not this particular individual who acts and is guilty; for as this self he is only the unreal shadow, or he exists merely as a universal self, and individuality is purely the formal moment of the act as such, the content being the laws and the customs which, for the individual, are those of his class and station . . . Self-consciousness within the nation descends from the universal only as far down as mere particularity, and not down to the single individuality which posits an exclusive self, an actual existence which in its action is negative towards itself. On the contrary, its action rests on secure confidence in the whole, unmixed with any alien element, neither with fear nor hostility.
On this picture, therefore, individuals simply act in the way they feel obliged to by their social responsibilities; in finding their action leads to suffering, they realize that what they were called upon to do was ethically inferior to what others were called upon to do, whilst still feeling that this was due to fate, rather than ethical misjudgement on their part.
This then explains why on the question of 'Antigone or Creon?', Hegel most often adopts a balanced view. (Kaufmann, 'Hegel's understanding of Greek tragedy far surpassed that of most of his detractors. He realized that at the centre 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.' For a similar view, see Shklar) So, rather than taking either to represent any sort of progressive modern standpoint (either individual conscience in the case of Antigone, or the secular state in the case of Creon), he sees them both as typical of their Greek world, a world that has no method for overcoming its underlying dualisms. He thus does not condemn either of them, but rather sees each as a victim of their limited social and moral conception, where it is the limitedness of that conception that brings about the collapse of the Greek ethical world:
The collision between the two highest moral powers is set forth in a plastic fashion in that supreme and absolute example of tragedy, Antigone. In this case, family love, what is holy, what belongs to the inner life and to inner feeling, and which because of this is also called the law of the nether gods, comes into collision with the law of the State. Creon is not a tyrant, but really a moral power; Creon is not in the wrong; he maintains that the law of the State, the authority of government, is to be held in respect, and that punishment follows the infraction of the law. Each of these two sides realizes only one of the moral powers, and has only one of these as its content; this is the element of one-sidedness here, and the meaning of eternal justice is shown in this, that both end in injustice just because they are one-sided, though at the same time both obtain justice too. Both are recognized as having a value of their own in the untroubled course of morality. Here they both have their own validity, but a validity which is equalized. It is only the one-sidedness in their claims which justice comes forward to oppose.
Thus, as one commentator has observed, 'For Hegel, it is not an unfortunate contingent fact that humans must leave the harmonious Garden of Eden in which they are at home in the world; instead, it is conceptually necessary that this moment of immediacy be overcome' (Stewart). Now, characteristically, Hegel does not really tell us in the Phenomenology how it might be possible for us to go beyond this 'one-sidedness' in a way the Greeks could not: this positive task is largely left to the Philosophy of Right, where tensions between family and state, and the human and divine law, are treated at length, and supposedly resolved. So, to take one example, while for the man in the Greek world there existed a sharp division between family and state, in Hegel's view of the modern state, there is no such sharp division, in so far as man is both part of the family and part of the state, where, for example, he represents the family in the state as head of the house-hold. It is an interesting question, but one we cannot consider further here, how far Hegel succeeds in overcoming the further dualisms he has diagnosed in his discussion of Greek ethical life; it is also an interesting question, which we cannot dwell on either, how far such overcoming is even desirable (Nussbaum). Following his discussion of Antigone in the Phenomenology, Hegel then looks again at the Greek social world, showing how the latent tensions between the spheres of men and women, state and family, became explicit once their ethical differences brought these spheres into conflict. On the one side, the state tried to undermine the 'separatism' of women and their particularistic allegiance to the family, while on the other side 'womankind – the everlasting irony [in the life] of the community' became a source of intrigue and corruption in the life of the state, encouraging the young to challenge the authority of their elders, who could then only reassert their position by sending the young to war. In this constant battling of city states, all satisfaction for consciousness in Greek ethical life has been lost; individuals are shaken free of their social identities, as the 'living unity' of the polis 'shattered into a multitude of separate atoms'.
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