Charen Hegel Reading Antigone Monatshefte

We can make better sense of Hegel’s ethics by being precise in the distinctions he makes between the normative and descriptive views of Sittlichkeit (the central concept in his ethical theory), and the corresponding views of the individual, the universal, subjectivity, and the authority of the law or state. The result of these distinctions is a clearer understanding of the differences between the Philosophy of Right view of Sittlichkeit and the Phenomenology of Spirit view. It also gives us a foundation for explaining why in the latter context Hegel seems to equate Sittlichkeit with life in the ancient Greek polis, while the former text appears to offer substantially difference construction of the concept. Elsewhere I have argued that this distinction resolves two apparent difficulties with the sort of harmony that Hegel claims is fundamental to Sittlichkeit. By being precise about the development of the individual, and the individual’s relation to the universal, we can show Hegel’s view of harmony to be essential to understanding both Sittlichkeit and its development, along with the development of the individual. Furthermore, given the historical context of Hegel’s argument, Sittlichkeit and harmony provide evidence that Hegel both maintains a distinction between the ancient and modern views of the self and the role of the self in ethics, and that this distinction plays an essential role in his own ethical theory. In this paper I apply the above distinctions to the case of Antigone. There are several reasons motivating the case. First, it is the example Hegel uses in the Phenomenology in the critical passage that shows the rupture of Greek ethical life. That is, it presents the “fall” from Sittlichkeit, or the way in which it fails to preserve the harmony that Hegel’s ethical theory has as its primary goal. Second, it does so in a way that presents a problem for any ethical theory that attempts to overcome the ancient-modern divide that is the foundation for my overall argument. Third, this rupture introduces the individual as the foundation to Hegel’s ethical theory (a surprising development if one is familiar with the usual critique’s of Hegel’s ethics as one which devalues the individual). Finally, Hegel’s interpretation of Antigone is famous, influential, and controversial in its view of the central characters and their roles. Thus a clearer understanding of why Hegel interprets the drama as he does will allow us to consider the merits of his interpretation in comparison to others. I will argue that it is Hegel’s clear view of the differences between the ancient and modern views of the self and role of the self that show his interpretation of Antigone to be a favorable reading of the text.

International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Science, 2021

This essay aims to examine a number of theoretical issues related to the philosophical and literary interpretations of the Sophoclean tragedy of Antigone. The main focus is Hegel's comments on the tragedy, as his comments have played a significant role in the discussions surrounding the drama and its interpretation during the twentieth century. Following the examination of Hegel's comments, and in order to elucidate the poetic structure of the play within a broader contemporary context, the essay, in its second and third sections, tries to uncover the limitations of interpretative efforts that concentrate on the juxtaposition of two main protagonists of the play, Creon and Antigone. Instead, the tragedy is argued to depict impasses that marked individual desires and citizenry life in the Greek polis.

Paragraph, 2016

In Glas, Derrida focuses his attention on a question regarding the family, on the unintelligibility of familial love for which Hegel makes Antigone representative. The account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the family differs in several crucial ways from the standard account of how Hegelian self-consciousness is constituted in the master-slave dialectic. Most notably, the achievement of self-consciousness through familial love involves no risk of life, no struggle to the death, no conflict. While Derrida refrains from interrogating the relation between the master-slave dialectic and sexual difference directly, he interrogates the peaceful recognition that Hegel says occurs between Polynices as brother and Antigone as sister. I explore the silences that punctuate Derrida's discussion of Antigone, especially his silence on Hegel's twofold elision of the master-slave dialectic with the husband-wife relation, and of Antigone with the figure of the wife. By symbolically marrying her off, Hegel subordinates Antigone to a symbolic husband.

Law and Humanities, 2017

This article aims to demonstrate that works of art and literature can provide important insights in law and justice that are hard to grasp by one-sidedly rationalist methods of academic analysis. It takes Sophocles' Antigoneperhaps the most classical text of law and literature's familiar catalogueas a case in point, drawing attention to some important aspects of that play's legal epistemic relevance that are still largely overlooked. Arguing that the widespread view on the confrontation between Antigone and Creon as a clash between 'divine' and 'human' law is mistaken, the article builds on Hegel's view that the positions of both protagonists are likewise incomplete, denying elements of law and justice that are equally essential, the one being no less divine than the other. However, it departs from Hegel's analysis in maintaining that the play does not entail the promise of 'ethical life' (Sittlichkeit) as some synthesis that recognizes the specific value of both Antigone's and Creon's stances on law and justice but takes away their incompatibility. Instead, it is argued that the play teaches us that such harmonization is unattainablea no less valuable lesson indeed.

2020

Hegel’s approach to tragedy is innovative and impressive, putting such a tremendous impact on the ethical canons that has been unprecedented since Aristotle. Hegel studies both the modern and the Greek classic tragedies, concluding that the Greek tragedy, in particular, Sophocles’ Antigone is superior to all the masterpieces of the classical and modern world… the most magnificent and satisfying (Aesthetics II 1218). Resorting to his dialectics, he declares that Antigone is a brilliant demonstration of what he names the ethical substances, the universal pathos or divine wills of the Greek mythological gods incarnated in the particulars, that’s is, the human beings that consciously choose to actualize them. Hegel thus illustrates that in Antigone the characters’ wills and actions are counterpoised by the unseen and intangible ethical substances just to confirm the triad of the Dialectal method where the thesis and anti-thesis’s dispute will subside down at the reconciling synthesis. J...

2011

In this project I explore the work of caring for the dead through the work of Hegel and Irigaray. My work demonstrates both that this work is indispensable for fostering and sustaining political subjectivity and that it is distributed along gendered lines. My analysis focuses on the figure of Antigone, whom Hegel takes as the exemplar of familial ethicality through her work of caring for her dead brother. Irigaray interprets Antigone's care of her brother as containing the trace of a repressed, maternal ethical principle that she metonymically calls blood. Irigaray's reading, with Hegel's, describes the importance of the care of the dead for sustaining subjectivity as well as the way that this work is historically appropriated to the ends of the patriarchal state. I argue that her reading also gestures toward the limitations and precariousness of Antigone's political agency, an aspect that has been elided by much of the feminist political theory that lionizes Antigone. Through a close reading of Antigone's lamentation in Sophocles' play (a section that is ignored by most readers), I develop a reading of Antigone's lament as a lucid acknowledgment of the limits of her political subjectivity, which is threatened by her lack of mourners. Through the paradoxical work of lamenting herself, Antigone works to resist the abjecting machinations of Creon, who wishes to elide her death as an apolitical and ethically neutral event. While this lament necessarily negates Antigone's political subjectivity, it also demonstrates the power of mourning as the work of resistance. As a result of her precarious subjectivity and what I will describe as a partial and distorted ethical practice, I take Antigone to be a useful figure for feminist theory but by no means an exemplar. I argue that the work of caring for the dead deserves recognition as a crucial means of sustaining political subjectivity, and that this work should be read as contiguous with other forms of care work. In fact, one of the limits of Antigone's exemplarity is her exclusive focus on the dead. Antigone's broken relations with her To Electra,

The Owl's Flight Hegel's Legacy to Contemporary Philosophy, 2022

In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel wrote that Sophocles' Antigone is one the most remarkable works of art of all time.2 One of the reasons that may explain his admiration for this piece is how it shows the power of negativity acting within the sphere of ethical life: it addresses the immediacy of normative content and internal dialectic by which social practices can acquire a more rational shape. Nevertheless, Hegel's interest in Antigone goes beyond the tragic logic of the Greek ethical world. Instead, he takes the play as a representative of the insufficiencies of Greek ethical life, which eventually brought about its collapse.

Hermeneutica Intercultural, 2024

We usually understand tragedies as dealing with situations in which a person must choose between two things that represent an ethical value and therefore dilemma, in which any decision will unfold in a tragic way. But sometimes tragedies unfold in situations where apparently there are no competing goods. That something omitted was not considered central or relevant for an ethic conscious, but peripheral. And therefore, an awe-inspiring action is carried with full conviction of doing goodness. It is precisely this narrow vision of goodness that unfolds into tragedy as an omission of complex and conflicting reality that seemed evident and coherent. Thus, our hypothesis is that tragedy presents itself as a critique of a form of pathology of reason where catharsis represents the moment of becoming conscious of a need of wider practical reason that Hegelian interpretation of Antigone tragedy understood as a passage from a particular consciousness to the universal. And thereby potentially enriching the critical concept of pathology of reason developed by Critical Theory through a new reading of the problem of tragedy in Hegel and the German romanticism.

2005

Antigone, Medea, Selma Jezkova, Mary Kay Letourneau, Andrea Yates... Žižek has over the years utilised a number of characters, both fictional and existent, and usually female, to illustrate various aspects of his Lacanian-derived conception of ethics. The contexts in which these characters are to be located and the actions they engage in determine them, for Žižek, as suitable ethical examples. This article will focus on one such example, perhaps the most obvious; Antigone. For Žižek, the crucial aspect of both Sophocles’ Antigone, the play, and Antigone, the character within the play, lies in what he, following Lacan,1 terms her ‘act’.2 The term ‘act’, in Lacanian theory, is differentiated from the sense of “mere behaviour”3 by the location and persistence of desire. This is to say that the act is necessarily a subjective undertaking and that it can be understood to be coterminous with the assumption of subjectivity and the responsibility entailed in such an assumption, the Freudian...