"Tragedy and Philosophy"

a j cascardi

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Tragedy and Philosophy

by Anthony J. Cascardi

© Anthony J. Cascardi

 

            In a famous passage of the Republic, Plato refers to an “ancient quarrel” between literature and philosophy.  More specifically, it is epic poetry and its close relative, tragedy, that concerns Plato, and tragedy because it is perceived as posing a threat to the integrity of the polis.  If Plato’s critique of tragedy is embedded in a theory of politics, this is because tragedy is itself political, although not necessarily in the ways that have often been imagined.  To say this is hardly to deny that tragedy’s implications go well beyond any narrow definition of politics, or that Plato’s Republic deals with matters that bear on nearly every aspect of philosophy.  At least one important line of interpretation argues that philosophy’s response to tragedy turns on questions of ethical and existential concern.  Indeed, philosophy may help rule out the fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability to accident and misfortune on which tragedy seems to insist. 

Such things affect individual human lives as well as the life of the polis.  Plato himself seems to argue for a form of self-sufficiency, one that is consistent with the Enlightenment’s later interest in autonomy.  “The good man’s life,” Plato  says in Republic, III, is “the most complete in itself and the least dependent on others.”¹  Justice itself, Plato says, is concerned “with a man’s inward self,” which ought to comprise “a single controlled and orderly whole.”  The just individual will be insulated against any great emotional upheavals and unexpected changes in fortune and so will be “ready for action of any kind, whether personal, financial, political or commercial” (Republic, 443, pp. 196-97).  So too with the state.  Parts of the Republic are conceived as an extended analogy in which character and polis serve as figures for one another.  Constructing a stable platform for the soul helps insure a stable platform for the state, and vice-versa, such that, in Plato’s words “there will be no difference between a just man and a just city” (Republic, 435, p. 185).

            The best-known features of Plato’s critique of tragedy can all be understood in relation to this schematic theory of soul and state.  They are consistent with what Plato believed was at work in the tragedies that preceded him, though not necessarily with what I would argue is central to the genre, or with what lies at stake in tragedy’s political import.  Thanks nonetheless to Plato’s enormous influence, his vision of tragedy became a central part of subsequent philosophical engagements with it, including for philosophers and critics who would oppose Plato on some fundamental points.  The relatively recent work of Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity and, more emphatically, Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness, are good examples of this.²  The central elements of the Platonic critique to which they are responding are both thematic and formal:  some have to do with the plots and characters of ancient tragedies, while others have to do with the nature of tragedy as a form of dramatic poetry, as representation or “imitation.”  They comprise four elements, and since most of these are familiar I simply note them here so as to be able to address what this picture leaves out. 

            The first element of the critique concerns poiēsis as the production of inferior or degraded artefacts that are distanced from the truth of ideas, which by contrast are stable and eternal; tragedy is a form of mimesis and is faulty because it proliferates unreliable and untruthful entities.  Second, and related to this, mimesis in tragic drama falters because it involves what early modern writers called “personation.”  Tragedy is dangerous (as all drama is) because in it characters speak in the voice of others and not as themselves (Republic, 398, p. 137).  The third of Plato’s objections to tragedy involves the way in which it presents the gods.  Because tragedy shows the gods as having imperfections, and as involved in sometimes irreconcilable disputes, and as the source of unhappiness and injustice, Plato argues that it ought to be rejected.³  For Plato, the true and just thing is to affirm that the gods insure the possibility of perfection and underwrite the good: without them–without the “metaphysical comfort” they provide—there could be no possibility of human happiness.  The fourth component of Plato’s objection to tragedy involves the passions that tragedy arouses, which encourage an unstable disposition and cultivate “unmanly” responses.  (One wonders what Plato might have thought about the defiance of Antigone.)  Tragedy indulges our vulnerability to forces beyond our control.  In Plato’s ideal state poetry would be bereft of pitiful laments; the fear-inspiring names of underworld places would be erased, or changed to more euphemistic ones; even the laughter that comedy provokes would be silenced.  Moreover, the suffering that comes with tragic grief, which cultivates a “womanish” character, would be suppressed; if and when it arises, it would be borne by the virtuous man in stoic silence.⁴

            I am interested in the alignment of all the points just mentioned with the larger goals of the Republic, an alignment that works, in fact, toward a synthesis of justice and happiness.  Indeed, there is in Plato’s view something terribly wrong about the very premises that spark tragic grief, for it seems that the tragic poets would have us believe that just human beings may be unhappy even while those who are unjust can live in bliss.  In Nussbaumn’s plausible account in The Fragility of Goodness, Plato aims to immunize the individual and the state against the kinds of turmoil and injustice to which tragedy exposes us, and hopes to set in place a framework for ethics that will avoid both inner and outer forms of strife.  Plato’s Republic is a “theory” in this respect:  it presents an idea of the individual and the state which, while not guaranteeing goodness or virtue, nonetheless imagines them as co-conditions of happiness and the state.  “Perhaps,” he says, “[this state] is laid up as a pattern in heaven, where those who wish can see it and found it in their own hearts.  But it doesn’t matter whether it exists or ever will exist; it’s the only state in whose politics [the intelligent man] can take part” (Republic, 592, p. 369). 

            Philosophers beginning immediately after Plato, with Aristotle, have responded to some of the shortcomings of Plato’s views on tragedy.  Nussbaum’s own recent work has helped articulate a stance that shifts emphasis from Plato’s conception of the good toward the more sympathetic view of the virtues of tragedy developed in the Poetics and, along with it, toward the more flexible vision of practical reasoning elaborated in Arsitotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. While I concur with Nussbaum that Plato’s view of character and polis fall especially short when measured against the insights that tragedy can provide, my agreement with her ends roughly where my reservations about Aristotle begin.  Her aesthetic defense of tragedy as a source of ethical insight rests largely on the belief that tragedy, unlike philosophy, gives us “complex characters” and tells “whole stories” about vulnerable individuals.⁵  If this is true it would seem better said of the novel than of tragedy.⁶  To claim in addition to this that tragedy shows human life as beautiful because it is vulnerable seems, moreover, to place an aestheticized and romantic “overlayment” on top of what is a very un-romantic genre.  Characters like Oedipus or Philoctetes, to take but two examples, hardly strike us as beautiful, least of all in their suffering.  There is horror in Oedipus’ fate, and the wound from which Philoctetes’ suffers is irreducibly stinking and ugly.  Something has gone awry, I would suggest, in the ethical aestheticizing of tragic pity and fear.

            These differences of opinion about tragedy reflect a series of doubts about whether Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical “responses” to tragedy in fact reflect a genuine hearing and seeing of it, or whether they are, rather, avoidances of it.  Indeed, I would suggest that these views preclude a reading of tragedy as responding to philosophy and likewise that they tend to obscure the fact that philosophy’s counter-tragic impulse is rooted in the methodological commitments philosophy makes.  The counter-tragic impulse of philosophy is embedded in the very procedures and presuppositions endemic to its self-understanding, which in turn have implications in the political and ethical domains.  Indeed, Plato’s methodological commitments are at least as deep as his ethical and political ones, though in a work like the Republic they may be somewhat concealed.  This counter-tragic impulse becomes especially salient when viewed against the backdrop of a play like Oedipus Tyrannus, for the method of Socratic dialogue and the procedures of open inquiry to which Plato is committed are opposed in a nearly systematic way to what we see in Sophocles’ play.

            First, Plato’s conception of philosophy is inextricable from a particular way of speaking.  The principle (or at least the pretense) of the dialogues is that of free and open speech, in which the participants can attend to the stimulating and difficult questions that Socrates typically poses and in which they are unconstrained in their response.  To say “unconstrained” means that the interlocutors consent to be led wherever the pursuit of the truth along any given line of questioning may take them.  Notwithstanding the sometimes rather forceful “leading” that Socrates engages in, the idea is that the powers of articulation and utterance, of criticism, agreement, objection, insight, and judgment, are to be vested in the interlocutors themselves and in their capacity to recognize the truth.  The prior condition for this procedure is an agreement among the participants in the dialogues to free themselves from all pre-determining utterances.  It is not inconsistent with Plato’s more general interest in un-encumbering the interlocutors in the dialogues.  In this vein Heidegger, for instance, notes that the turn away from the world of appearances is not just a conclusion of Plato’s dialectic but a procedural means by which the interlocutors in the dialogues can unfetter themselves from substantive knowledge: “dialectic runs best when unencumbered by substantive knowledge.”⁷  As for language, the premise of the dialogues is that there is no prior form of speech that ought to constrain whatever responses the interlocutors might give.

            We can appreciate the degree to which Plato’s Republic is a counter-tragic text if we focus on the question of speech in Oedipus Tyrannus.  Sophocles’ play hinges in part on what might be called the “conditions of enunciation,” which is to say, on the fundamental constraints that govern all language: in this case, the fact that any given utterance is dependent upon prior enunciations, and that the very possibility of speech itself depends upon what has already been said.⁸  Indeed, one of the chief insights of Oedipus Tyrannus has do with the force of an oracular utterance that exists prior to all inner-worldly forms of speech.  Within these circumstances are set the various speech-acts of the play, including the acts by which speech is forced from various interlocutors--as Oedipus tries to force Tiresias to speak the truth, for instance, and later as he forces the herdsman to render up whatever he might know about his origins.  “If you do not talk to gratify me, you will talk with pain to urge you,” he says to the old shepherd; “here, one of you, twist his hands behind him;⁹” (cf. Oedipus to Tiresias: “You would provoke a stone [to anger]!  Tell us, you villain, tell us, and do not sit there unmoved and balking at the issue,” v. 335-37).  In spite of these forceful, even violent, articulations of authority, none of the speech-acts within the play is able to be effected from a standpoint as powerful or encompassing as that which is claimed by the prior speech of the oracle.  This includes the speech-acts that are crucial to the founding and governing of a state: commanding, promising, ordering, establishing laws, making decrees, pursuing inquests, punishing criminals, and the like.  Oedipus Tyrannus reveals itself as a political play in the more or less ordinary sense from the very start, where Oedipus the Tyrant (or “King”—both terms are inadequate)  is confronted with what seems to be a practical matter: how to bring an end to the plague afflicting Thebes.  But Sophocles’ interest in politics ultimately revolves around the tragically structured conflict between the force of an utterance (a law) that precedes all inner-worldly speech and the institutionally-grounded utterances through which a legislator attempts to bring health and order to the polis.

            Plato’s attempt to avoid such potentially tragic circumstances is rooted in a commitment that underlies the dialogues both conceptually and methodologically: the principle of unconstrained speech.  As a matter of political theory, free speech is intrinsic to the operations of the dialectic, which can be characterized as the comprehensive “science of free men.”¹⁰  To be sure, the dialectic implies quite a bit more than this principle suggests.  In Plato’s words, the dialectic is “the only activity whose method is to challenge its own assumptions so that it may rest firmly on first principles” (Republic, 533, p. 302).  Dialectic rests on a commitment to the critical self-questioning of a free mind as well as on what Plato describes as the ability “to give an account of the essential nature of each particular thing” (Republic, 533, pp. 302-3).  The dialectic requires, in other worlds, that the interlocutors say not only freely and openly but also specifically and positively what any particular thing is.  The principal conceptual instruments for this task are diarēsis, or the separation of kinds according to their likenesses and differences, and definition, which involves delimiting the scope over which particular concepts hold sway.  Both of these instruments have implications that are deeply counter-tragic. 

            In the Sophist, diarēsis is characterized (oddly, it first seems) as a method of hunting; incidentally, it is not unlike Oedipus’ hunt for the murderer of Laius in Sophocles’ play.  (And recall in this regard that in the Republic, IV, the characters say that they are searching for justice like hunters going after quarry.)  But if we look at the Sophist, it is clear that diarēsis is a very special variety of hunting, one that proceeds by sorting and separating.  For Plato it involves the division and collection of beings according to kinds.  The word itself is part of a family that means “to cleave,” “to take apart,” and “to split.” As Heidegger commented in his lectures from 1924-25, the process of diarēsis is linked to dichotomization, cutting, and dissecting.¹¹ Diarēsis serves as a method of purification, notably one less bloody than the ritual purification associated with the elimination of the criminal from the midst of the city in Oedipus Tyrannus.¹²  It performs tragedy’s work of eliminating confusion and contamination, but by “clean,” intellectual means.  At stake in this process of intellectual purification is the identity of the true philosopher, which is established by clarifying the difference between the philosopher and the sophist.  Since these two—philosopher and sophist–so closely resemble one another, this process necessarily involves distinguishing like from like, or, perhaps more accurately, establishing difference where there is an appearance of likeness. 

            It is nonetheless difficult to predict the success of this attempt to eliminate the confusing conflation of identities.  We have a method and no guarantees.  This may be one of philosophy’s concessions to tragedy.  Moreover, it could be said of Plato’s writings überhaupt that nowhere does he offer a non-metaphorical account of diarēsis as the essential method of philosophy.¹³  And this might well be one of philosophy’s concessions to literature at large were it not for the fact that diarēsis and dialectic are linked with the more “positive” ambitions of definition:  not merely to distinguish one thing as a function of its difference from another, or to eliminate false semblances, but to say concretely and positively what a thing essentially is. 

You agree that dialectic ability can only be acquired after the course of study we have described, and in no other way? . . .  And it can’t be denied that it’s the only activity which systematically sets out the definition of the essential nature of things.  Of other activities some are concerned with human opinions or desires, or with growing or making things and looking after them....  Dialectic, in fact, is the only activity to challenge its own assumptions so that it may rest firmly on first principles.... So you agree in calling the ability to give an account of the essential nature of each particular thing Dialectic; and in saying that anyone who is unable to give such an account of things either to himself or to other people has to that extent failed to understand them (Republic, 533, pp. 302-3). 

            A long and involved philosophical dispute has evolved around the question of whether in saying these things Plato pursues a form of “fundamental ontology” that is anything like the modern conception of that term.  Suffice it to say that Plato’s interest in definition was considerably expanded by Aristotle, and that it was, not surprisingly, a strategy of Aristotle’s Poetics to deal with the complex question of tragedy by the procedure of definition.  (In fact, Stephen Booth has cogently argued that the pursuit over the centuries of a definition of tragedy has been more assiduously undertaken than any other non-religious quests for definition–being outranked in all categories only by the quest for a definition of God!¹⁴ )  The point is that the effort to define, and in Aristotle’s case to define tragedy, is one of the principal means by which the Poetics is able to contain the terrible insights that tragedy presents.  Recall that the centerpiece of the Poetics is in fact a definition, one that Aristotle repeats, once in chapter VI and again in chapter VII.  I quote the second of these passages because it elaborates on the components of action as Aristotle understands it:  “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, whole, and of a certain magnitude . . . .  A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle and an end.  A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.  An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.  A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it.”¹⁵ 

If, however, one in fact looks at dramatic tragedies, including the tragedy that Aristotle himself chooses to exemplify the genre, Oedipus Tyrannus, it turns out that things are hardly so neat and well-defined.  Indeed, it seems that in tragedy there is no category that will stay firmly fixed around any object, at least not for long.¹⁶  Whereas definition for Aristotle is closely bound up with the clear and unequivocal assignation of predicates to subjects—and even a cursory glance at his work, the Categories, suggests that it is—there is a crossing of categories that affects (one wants to say “afflicts”) Oedipus Tyrannus.  That is, Oedipus is both king and criminal; he is both son of and husband to Jocasta; he is the one entrusted to save Thebes and the source of the pollution in the city.  Oedipus is the one who issues the command to seek out the murderer of Laius and also the object of that search.  He is both the speaker and the addressee of his own utterances.  Moreover, the plot in Oedipus Tyrannus turns on certain “grammatical” questions that can hardly be answered in the way that Aristotelian logic would lead us to desire, if not expect.  For example, the question “Who is the murderer of Lauis?,” understood by Oedipus as a question asked about a third person, some “he” or a “she,” turns out to be answerable only in and by the first person, not the third.  The answer redounds to the one asking the question and can only be phrased in the form of a grammatical contradiction:  “he is I,” or “I am he.”  Oedipus’ identity is revealed only as a function of a question that seems to be about something or someone else.  Thus, for Oedipus to say that “I am the murderer of Laius” means effectively just what Iago says in Act I of Shakespeare’s Othello--namely “I am not what I am” (Othello, I. I. 64).¹⁷  Moreover, it turns out that in Oedipus Tyrannus the question of self-knowledge on which philosophy insists is accessible only in indirect terms, as the pursuit of a question about someone or something else and moreover, that comes too late.  Before the action of the play itself, Oedipus had famously solved the riddle of the Sphinx, which presents itself as an encrypted definition of man.  But to identify and define Oedipus as “the murderer of Laius” misses the point that Oedipus does not fully coincide with the definition of himself until he able to recognize who he is; a true identification of Oedipus would have to account for his widening scope of awareness, and of the tragic implications that follow from it. 

            As if to deny these very things–not to mention the horror of their consequences—the pursuit of definition in its positive, direct, and simply “assertive” forms is the means by which two of the fundamental principles of Aristotle’s Metaphysics bear on his theory of tragedy:  by saying what tragedy is (“the imitation of an action…”), and by defining its central component, action, as an integrated whole.  The principles I am referring to are the law of the excluded middle and the rule of non-contradiction.  Recall that the rule of non-contradiction has it that opposing statements cannot be true at the same time true and in the same respect, that contradictories cannot both at the same time be said of a given thing.  Likewise, the law of the excluded middle requires that it is necessary either to affirm or deny in asserting one thing about another, that we cannot stand, as it were, between affirming and denying.¹⁸  These are Aristotle’s “logical” transpositions of the still more fundamental metaphysical assertion of the priority of being over non-being.

            Stephen Booth’s work on definition mentioned above presents a host of examples of the ways in which Shakespearean tragedy—Macbeth and King Lear in particular—relentlessly resists definition, confounding and confusing categories in such a way as to render the very notion of a “clear and distinct concept” untenable.  The work of definition, which derives both lexically and conceptually from the notion of end (finis) implies placing limits.  What Booth doesn’t explain is the degree to which the counter-Aristotelian strategies of Macbeth and Lear in fact continue the work of Oedipus Tyrannus–in confusing fair and foul, for instance, or in the sustained ambiguity that, in Macbeth, surrounds the witches themselves:  whether they are natural or supernatural, and if they are natural are they are male or female—all of which is further complicated by the theatrical conditions of Shakespeare’s stage.  As Booth notes, the actors that Shakespeare’s audience saw play the parts of the witches were undisputably male, but what of the bearded women those actors play?¹⁹  (“You should be women, / And yet your beards forbid be to interpret / That you are so,” I. iii. 45-47).

            One might well object that a work like Aristotle’s Categories can handle the problem of definition in (and of) tragedy perfectly well, and that Oedipus can be “defined” as the King of Thebes who has also murdered Laius, as the ruler who is also the source of the miasma afflicting Thebes, as both son of and husband to Jocasta, and so on.  But no degree of definition will be able to portray the tragic consequences these contradictions have—tragic for Oedipus.  That is, it will not adequately define him as a tragic subject.  Nor will it explain the terrible irony of the fact that while Oedipus has solved the riddle of the Sphynx and attempts to find out everything he can about the murder of Laius he makes no inquiry into the oddness of his own name.  As Jonathan Lear remarked, “Suppose your name were Abandoned Smith.  Would you be able to get through life treating your name as just a name, without a serious wonder whether it had descriptive import for you?”[1]   One might likewise argue that Aristotle’s account of peripety, as elaborated in the Poetics, is perfectly able to explain the fact that Oedipus suffers because he experiences a “reversal of fortune.”  But the theory of peripety is bound to Aristotle’s notion of action, and in Sophocles’ play the principal change of fortune has to do not with action but with what Oedipus comes to realize about what he has already done. Aristotle’s conception of the form of tragic action as bounded, integral, and, in his words, “complete” is designed to place bounds around connected events, to delimit them as a relational whole (the parts of which--beginning, middle, end—are defined strictly in terms of one another). This concept of action allows for the analysis of tragedy as a well-contained form, but tragedies themselves tend to present actions that are messy and unbounded, that spill over their limits.  In Oedipus Tyrannus scarcely anything happens that is contained within the bounds of the play.  The crucial action, the murder of Laius, takes place before the play begins; and the consequence of the events we see reach well beyond the borders of this play to affect Oedipus’ children (especially the daughters, less clearly the sons).  The dramatized events are situated very much in the middle of some other action; the play occurs both before and after the fact one might say.  Indeed, there is an overarching story, a mythos about Oedipus that is widely known and in circulation, so that the dramatic action itself has very much the character of a twice-told tale.  Likewise, one might cite the references to Lady Macbeth’s mysteriously missing children and to the allusion to a time ominously, unknowably, and yet undeniably before the “beginning” in the case of Shakespeare’s play.²⁰ Doubling and repetition pervade tragedy and help further explain why tragedy was a literary thorn in Plato’s philosophical side.  Aristotle, by contrast, explained mimesis by naturalizing and instrumentalizing it:  “The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and gthrough imitation learns his earliest lessons” (Poetics, 6, p. 55).  The problem of the copy, which greatly worried Plato, was of relatively little concern to Aristotle, at least in aesthetic and dramatic terms.  Moreover, the Poetics theorized how it is that the emotions tragedy leaves uncompensated, which tend to provoke the greatest suffering among the characters on stage, can be marshaled to productive ends for the audience:  the work of tragic drama is affective and theatrical, and theatre is for Aristotle a place where something worthwhile can be made of suffering, a place where the powerful emotions of pity and fear can be summoned up and purified of their harmful effects.  For the tragic hero or heroine, however, suffering is literally “to no end.”

            Antigone is, of course, a continuation of the messiness begun in Oedipus in spite of the fact that it pre-dates Oedipus Tyrannus.  The play opens with a reminder of the suffering that Oedipus’ daughters will have to bear.  Dramatically, however, this play is quite different.  The action of Antigone turns on a deed that is minimally performed: it is a mater of just the handful of dirt that Antigone throws over the body of her dead brother Polynices.  The deed is important enough, nonetheless, for Antigone to reinforce and repeat it when it is undone, and likewise for her to make a public proclamation of it.  When Ismene urges her not to speak of the act to anyone and to bury Polynices in secret, Antigone replies “Oh, no!  Shout it out.  I will hate you still worse / for silence–should you not proclaim it / to everyone.”²¹  The public assertion that follows her action, her “yes, I did this,” is set starkly against the force of Creon’s injunction, his official “thou shalt not.” 

            The first point that Sophocles makes through Antigone involves the irreducible fact that action involves something external, that it implies some material change, however minimal, in the world.  It would not be enough for Antigone simply to mourn her brother in silence.  Something must be done.  Moreover, action, human action, implies responsibility.  It is integral to Antigone’s act that she also accept responsibility for it.²²  Hegel cites Antigone in the translation by Hölderlin that had been published just a few years before the Phenomenology of Spirit: “‘Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred’” (par. 470).  Moreover, Antigone’s action is unlike Oedipus’ in that it follows from a choice made deliberately and directly, in light of Creon’s prohibition, and not in ignorance or by mistake.  Hegel is again insightful in pointing out that, in a figure like Antigone, “the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable, [since] it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, it takes them to be violence and wrong, to be ethical merely by accident, and, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime” (470).  For Hegel, this form of commitment and choosing epitomize the “ethical order.”  “The ethical consciousness ... knows what it has to do, and has indeed already decided whether to belong to the divine or the human law” (465).    

And yet there is tragic conflict, which Hegel hopes to see resolved in his further account of the ethical order.  The conflict stems from the fact that a resolute decision acknowledges only one law and excludes or opposes others.  Characters are established through their adherence to a given law, and these oppose one another as do the dramatis personae of a tragic drama: “the ethical order essentially consists in this immediate firmness of decision, and for that reason there is for consciousness essentially only one law, while, on the other hand, the ethical powers are real and effective in the self-consciousness, these powers acquire the significance of excluding and opposing one another . . . . The ethical consciousness, because it is decisively for one of the two powers, is essentially character” (466).  The central tragic conflict that is played out through the characters roots in the irreconcilability of two spheres of value, and it pits two forms of obligation and their associated spheres–family, state; divine law, human legislation—against one another: “If both powers are taken according to their specific content and its individualization, we are presented with the picture of the conflict between them in their individual forms . . . .  On the side of content, it is the clash between divine and human law” (473).  And yet for Hegel these tragic conditions provide the ingredients for reconciliation within the ethical order.  He acknowledges that “we do indeed see [the ethical realm] divide itself into two essences and their reality,” but he goes on to say that “their antithesis is rather the authentication of one through the other, and where they come into direct contact withe each other as real opposites, their middle term and common element is their immediate inter-penetration” (463, p. 278).

            I will explain below how Hegel envisions this reconciliation through the “interpenetration” of elements.  But first I would note that, if we consider Antigone more closely, what we see is not so much a struggle between two sets of laws, or between two conflicting sets of claims (family, state), but a tragedy that revolves around a political question, namely Creon’s attempt to extend the laws of the polis in such a way that they apply universally.  One could of course understand Creon’s efforts as the marks of hubris and pride, but “hubris” here indicates an attempt to reach too widely and to equate the polis with the whole, rather than an attempt to attempt reach too “high.”  Antigone is a tragedy that roots in the temptation to take the polis not as an image of the whole but as the whole itself.

            Antigone’s commitments bring this to light.  Were it not for her, there would be every reason to think that the polis is indeed the whole.²³ And already in Plato it might seem as though the polis is not just figured by the soul or a figure for it, but that it is  encompassing and integrated, that it is indeed the, whole.  (If it is, then the crucial question is how we might gain knowledge of the whole.)  But in the political context that Hegel was addressing, which he saw presaged in Creon’s rule, the polis has a more specific set of connotations and historical references; it refers to an order in which the commands of government have “a universal, public meaning open to the light of day.”  Antigone’s duty to her brother would seem to stand outside of it.  Indeed, Hegel characterizes the force of her obligations to the dead as deriving from “the darkness of the nether regions” (466).  It may well be that the weakness of Antigone’s position stems from the fact that, in contrast to the power and authority of publicly manifest law, it has only what Hegel calls “the bloodless shade to help it in actually carrying out its law” (474).  Therefore it succumbs to “the powerful law of the upper world, for the power of the former is effective in the underworld, not on earth” (474). 

            What, more specifically, must be given up in order for the state to fashion itself as a totality, with laws that pretend to apply to one and all alike?  The answer for Hegel is clear.  The “living spirits” perish in a community whose “simple universality” seems soulless and dead: “The universal unity into which the living immediate unity of individuality and substance withdraws is the soulless community which has ceased to be the substance . . . of individuals, and in which they now have the value of selves and substances . . . .  The universal being is thus split up into a mere multiplicity of individuals, this lifeless Spirit is an equality, in which all count the same, i.e. as persons.  What in the world of the ethical order was called the hidden divine law has in fact emerged from its inward state into actuality; in the former state the individual was actual, and counted merely as such, merely as a blood-relation of the family.  As this particular individual, he was the departed spirit devoid of a self; now, however, he has emerged from his unreal existence” (477).

            With this, Hegel leads us out of tragedy and into the realm where persons have what he calls “legal status.”  Here, the possibility of tragedy is denied by the equality of individuals; tragedy is likewise averted by the transformation of ethical “characters,” who deeply adhere to well-defined values, into legal “persons,” who are to be treated as identical under the law.  With this political institution of the principle of identity–call it the “regime” of identity–tragedy is defeated.  And yet even Hegel recognizes that there is a price to pay for this, insofar as the legal order produces a community bereft of life and soul; the universal state is, furthermore, unstable for reasons intrinsic to its formation.  This publicly manifest, “official” form of Spirit has not completely severed its ties to the “nether world” that it had hoped to exclude.  The problem is that the dead remain with us, while there is no longer any effective form, once tragedy is overcome, by which to honor their claims.  Plato objects to plays that encourage us to weep for the dead, but Hegel warns that the dead in turn find “instruments of vengeance” through “other communities whose altars the dogs or birds defiled with the corpse;  [the corpse] ... remains above ground in the realm of outer reality” (474).

            Tragedy, for its part, tries to make a place for the dead among the living, and not only for the work of revenge, by denying the impulse to divide the states of human being categorically between “living” and “dead.”  I think of three particular instances where Shakespeare’s characters seem as if to oscillate between these two states.  The first is in Romeo and Juilet, and helps make the point that some of what tragedy knows was learned from comedy.  At the end of the play, Juliet drinks a potion given to her by an apothecary and falls into a death-like sleep.  This sleep-like appearance of death is enough to drive Romeo to take his own life. Whereupon Juliet awakes and dies again, this time for “real,” (or for as “real” as the conventions of drama, which keep “real” death from happening in any final way will allow).  The second instance is in Othello, where Desdemona seems to die not once but twice.  First, Othello smothers her but she seems, in his words, “Not dead? Not quite dead?” (V, ii. 86).  She then appears to lie as “still as the grave” (V. ii. 95).  But Desdemona is in fact not yet dead, or if she is she comes to life again just long enough to give Othello an alibi and say that it was not he who killed her.  Whereupon she dies (dies again?) and Othello brands her as “a liar gone to burning hell” (V. ii. 130).  The final instance is from King Lear.  The example is, again, from the end of a play that seems not to want to end.  Cordelia appears as dead, and Lear is carrying her in his arms, as if to suggest the image of an inverted pietà:  instead of a mother bearing her son we see a dead or dying daughter in her father’s arms.  And although Cordelia may be dead, the power of Lear’s wishing it otherwise is so strong that she is imagined as brought to life:

Lear:    I know when one is dead, and when one lives;

            She’s dead as earth.  Lend me a looking glass;

            If that her breath will mist or stain the stone,

            Why, then she lives . . . .

            This feather stirs; she lives! If it be so,

            It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows

            That ever I have felt. (V. ii. 259-265)²⁴  

 

            We should not miss the degree to which all of these examples draw out the powerful ambiguity that is frozen in Antigone’s fate, which is to be entombed alive. But what to say about this ambiguity in light of philosophy’s hope, that the difference between the living and the dead could be settled as if it were a matter of definition?  Insofar as philosophy seeks to overcome tragedy, or to deny it, to refuse its preconditions and to guard against its outcomes, it will always be faced with the problem of the unmourned.  It will be at a loss about what to do about the dead.  But this suggests that tragedy ought to be regarded as an indispensable element in the construction of the state, and that excluding tragedy (and, by extension, poetry too) in the interests of sustaining a polis that is integral and whole, in fact produces a deficient idea of the state, one that is, furthermore, liable to forget just what it has lost in the course of imagining itself as invulnerably whole.