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The Hegelian Tragedy, Negative Dialectic and Ethical Substance in Sophocles’ Antigone



Author(s)

Ying-shan CHEN

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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2018.04.005

National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan

Breaking with Aristotle’s theory of tragedy in which the grand magnitude of the spirit of the tragic hero somehow trapped and misguided by a certain tragic flaw arouses the audiences’ emotional intensity of pity and fear for the functioning of catharsis, Hegel analyzes the structure of tragedy in terms of the social conflict, in the case of Sophocles’ Antigone, between the ruler Creon and the rebel Antigone, the patriarchal state and the individual woman, the civil codes and the divine law. Rejecting Creon’s dictatorship and performing civil disobedience, Antigone intentionally buries the dead body of her brother Polyneices at the cost of being sentenced to death. Through this sacrifice, Antigone exposes the structural fissure of the civil society embedded in decaying morality for realizing the higher ideal of divine law and ethics. Through Antigone’s sacrifice, the paradox of self-denial and self-elevation manifests the inner principle of dialectic through which the very opposite forces of contradiction engender the dynamic facets of the formation of modern civil society. As Hegelian dialectic is driven by its inner principle of negativity or negation of negation, through self-denial, Antigone transcends the moral codes of the mundane world for reaching the higher divine will. Yet, this dialectical ascending does not indicate a transcendent hero beyond the human world; instead, through the means of self-denying sacrifice, Antigone accomplishes the purpose of the divine will and conveys the divine spirit incarnated in the human flesh. For Hegelian tragic hero, the external and internal conflicts lead to the realization of self-consciousness and the ultimate consummation of heroic identity. Instead of being conditioned by Aristotelian tragic flaw and unconquerable fate, for Hegel, Antigone explicates the modern rebellious spirit of free will, and this martyrdom, not in the sense of scapegoat as the passive substitute for the sin of collective human community, presents a modern sense of tragic hero, an incarnated flesh invested with politically radical spirit. The flesh figure of heroine Antigone exemplifies the immanent power of ethical substance and dialectically transforms the divine will into the earthly spirit. Thus, this paper aims to investigate into the shift from Aristotle’s concept of tragic hero to Hegelian dialectic tragedy and further examines how Hegelian tragic hero engenders the historical move into Western modernity through negative dialectic and accomplishes the self-other positioning of ethical substance presented in Sophocles’ Antigone. 

Sophocles’ Antigone, tragedy, Aristotle, Hegel, negative dialectic, ethical substance