Contents:
Guide pratique de l'adaptation des maisons de retraite associatives. Le revenu minimum d'insertion. Bienvenidos 1 - Ejercicios. Le vent sur le chemin. Le guide complet du piratage. L'architecture moderne - Histoire, principaux courants, grandes figures. L'Egypte au coeur du monde arabe - L'heure des choix.
Los hijos de los dias. Faster than a Kiss Tome 7. Discours critique sur le roman - Word pour les filles. Le roman du Cap Horn. Sport, psychanalyse et science. It's So Easy - Et autres mensonges. L'infini des possibles - Connexion. Une partie de campagne - Eli Lotar, photographies du tournage. Le grand livre des petites horreurs du monde microscopique. Architecture rurale en Bretagne - 50 ans d'Inventaire du patrimoine.
Le Tage Mage tout-en-un pour les nuls concours. Sociologie des agencements marchands - Textes choisis. Les Puy-du-Fou Tome 2. Lettres aux hommes de son temps. Le tennis - Comment? Mais diable, que sommes-nous venus faire ici-bas? La boulimie, sortir de l'engrenage.
EAT - Chroniques d'un fauve dans la jungle alimentaire. J'apprends l'anglais avec Martine - A partir de 6 ans. Assurance sur la vie et pratique notariale. Alice au pays des merveilles. Le Nouveau palefrenier - Manuel pratique. Lingua Latina per se Illustrata - Exercitia latina I. La France - Par les fleuves et les canaux. La maison de Salt Hay road. L'oeil et l'appareil - La collection photographique de l'Albertina.
From the Calculus to Set Theory La balade de Yaya Tome 2. L'essentiel de la biologie cellulaire. New Cutting Edge Pre-Intermediate. Les grands gestes la nuit. Pathobiographies judiciaires - Journal clinique de Ville-Evrard. Royaume Kango et la mission catholique, Construire des connaissances en EPS - Programme J'entends le loup, le renard et la belette!
Chaque pas que fait le soleil. Dis maman, c'est encore loin Compostelle? Anglais Go For It 3e professionnelle technologique - Livre du professeur. Marvel Zombies Tome 6. Un amour peut en cacher un autre. Le grand voyage de monsieur Caca. Etude sur Belle du Seigneur, Albert Cohen. SOS mal de dos. Guide comptable professionnel des transports - Tome 1, Nomenclature, Fonctionnement des comptes.
Die brautliche Schwester befreite der Bruder; zertriimmert liegt, was je sie getrennt; jauchzend griisset sich das junge Paar; vereint sind Liebe und Lenz! The sister-bride is freed by the brother; what kept them apart now lies in ruins; the young couple greet one another in delight; Love and Spring are united! Moreover, only one born of the union of brother and sister can bring on the twilight of the gods which is also the morning of man only he can, in Hegelian terms, close history. The existential and literary-artistic documentation is mas- sive.
It is also deceptive. So many biographies and fictions, from c. Consequently, the exaltation of sisterliness has been seen in this pathological perspective. We have no worthwhile evidence as to the actuality or frequency of incest in Idealist and Romantic lives, let alone in society at large. The pressure of meaning which attaches to Shelley's trope, 'Sister-Spouse', is of an entirely different order. No literalism, no psychoanalytic labelling, will elucidate the utter seriousness, the period-magic of Baudelaire's call to 'mon enfant, ma sceur' 'my child, my sister'.
But it is just this magic and this seriousness, irrelevant as they may be to Sophocles' meaning, which must be grasped if we are to make sense of the special lustre of Antigone in nineteenth-century feeling. The co-ordinates of Idealism are exile and attempted homecoming. Thus the epistemology of Kant is one of stoic severance. Subject is severed from object; perception from cognition. Even the imperative of freedom is promulgated at a distance.
Western metaphysics after Kant stems from the negation of this distance or from any attempt to overcome it. In Fichte the negation is made absolute: In Schelling as in Schiller and Holderlin truth and beauty are equated. This radiant tautology invites man, via the conceptual imagination, to grasp, to internalize, the principle of perfect oneness. The pulverization of the world into discrete fragments is a phenomenological illusion. Where it participates in truth-beauty, the individual spirit comes home to a long-lost but primal unity. Hegel seizes upon the forbidding dualism in Kant's ethics and model of perception; he identifies the stasis inherent in aesthetic Idealism.
His dialectic is one of process, of the deployment and self- realization of consciousness in and through history. But here also the teleology is homeward bound: Nothing is more taxing for the modern reader than to seek to recapture the substantive intensity, the almost carnal presentness which these abstract terms carry for the thinkers and poets of the Revolutionary period and nineteenth century.
But it is pre- cisely this lived concreteness in philosophic debate and critique which makes Idealist thought elemental to Romantic art and poetry. The fusion is as vital to Coleridge and Shelley as it is to Holderlin. The causes of exile, of the scission of the subject from the world, are arguable. The Hegelian intuition of a lost at-homeness in existence, of a necessary voyage through alienation and self-division, is graphic but, logically, inde- terminate.
At certain stages in the argument, the source of estrangement seems historical — some secular parallel to the theological fall. At other points, and more challengingly, self- exile seems implicit in the life of consciousness, in the capacities of the human ego to think 'outside' and 'against' itself, to perceive itself in an adversary mode. The great tragic current of 'exilic' sentiment after Kant is summarized in Heidegger's image of man as 'a stranger in the house of Being'.
To this current, the entire Marxist critique of classic individualism is a consequent footnote. To some Romantics, 'sublation' Hegel's Aufhebung from the condition of banishment out of the vital unity of being, seemed possible in moments of illumination. Because he is a compulsive seeker after such moments, soliciting the lightning- bolt, the poet, says Hdlderlin, is the 'homecomef' par excellence and the most vulnerable of mortals. The early deaths, the madness, which ambush so many lives in the Romantic generations, are the price of the poet's impatient odyssey. Another homecoming, though only provisional and immanent, is that of intimacy with another human being, of the rare break out of the solitary confinement of the ego into the total acceptance of or, rather, 'accepting totality' of another.
No philosophic tradition surpasses the wealth and nuance of Idealist reflection on friendship Schiller's 'eines Freundes Freund zu sein' ['to be the Friend of a Friend']. None examines more insistently the unstable wonder of elective intimacy and the knife-edge between the trust of friendship and the final trust of hatred.
Kant's ethical prescript as to the absolute valuation which one human being must assign to another, Fichte's heroic epistemological struggle with the 'counter-presence' of other selves and the paradoxical necessity of this presence to any intelligible system of freedom and society, Hegel's famous dramaturgy of the achievement of self through agonistic encounter with 'the other' — all are derived from the axiom of aloneness and the hope that this axiom can be, partially, rescinded.
The cult of friendship in Romantic lives and literature is a direct echo. As Hegel insists, the roots of exile, of self-division, are internal. They are a fatal constant of self-consciousness. It is to ourselves that we are strangers. However absolute the empathy which knits friend to friend, however symbiotic and self-sacrificial the uses of amity — as they are enacted in the theme of Utopian conspiracy so frequent in Romantic poetry and drama — there can be no true homecoming to the self through another.
Montaigne's definition of friendship, 'parce que c'etait lui, parce que c'etait moi' 'because it was he, because it was I' , keeps its distance.
In this, it is the counterpart to the Idealist ontology of fusion. Rigorously considered, such fusion, such re- entry of the self into 'at-oneness with the world', is the ingathering of Narcissus. Fichte is stringent enough to see this. So, in the humorous vein, is Byron when, in 'Don Juan', he descants on Romantic 'egoism' and 'egotism' as categories of self-love.
Is there, then, no escape from the haunted solipsism, from the conscience malheureuse, of post-Kantian, alienated man? The Romantic answer is an apocalypse of desire, an erotic consummation so complete that it annuls the autism of personal identity: Isolde you, Tristan I, no longer Tristan, not Isolde; without naming, without parting, new recognition, new consuming; endless everlasting single-consciousness. The logic of the equation is that of death. It is the morbid facility of this resolution which vulgarizes Romantic art even at its apex, in Keats, in Baudelaire.
The philosophic objections are even graver. Self- annulment is not self-realization only Schopenhauer will hold it to be so, hence Wagner's adoption of Schopenhauer's doctrine. Apocalyptic eroticism is not a homecoming of and to the self, but a kind of final dispersal, a dissemination of the ego — however compacted the act of love, however unitary — to the bufera, the whirlwind in which Dante encloses lovers. Indeed, the more ecstatic the self-surrender, the more acid are the mechanics of self- and of reciprocal corrosion.
We yield of ourselves essential moral and perceptual components. We take into ourselves the 'otherness' of the beloved, but this incorpora- tion is only falsely analogous with the mystery of incarnation. It is in fact a deeper estrangement and fragmentation in the centre of being. Kierkegaard is the incomparable diagnostician of these 'intimate alienations'.
Contrary to what is superficially supposed, the Idealist critique of the human person is anti- Platonist. The Symposium views eros as a transition to oneness; Idealist psychology sees it as a barrier. Now we are at the nub of the dialectic. There is only one human relationship in which the ego can negate its solitude without departing from its authentic self.
There is only one mode of encounter in which the self meets the self in another, in which ego and non-ego, the Kantian, the Fichtean, the Hegelian polarities, are made one.
It is a relation between man and woman, as it surely must be if primary rifts in being are to be knit. But it is a relation between man and woman which resolves the paradox of estrangement inherent in all sexuality a paradox which incest would only enforce. It is the relation of brother and sister, of sister and brother. In the love, in the perfect understanding of brother and sister, there is eros and ay am. It is here, and here only, that the soul steps into and through the mirror to find a perfectly concordant but autonomous counterpart. The tor- ment of Narcissus is stilled: Thus sisterliness is ontologically privileged beyond any other human stance.
This form receives supreme, everlasting expression in Sophocles' Antigone. Between the s and the start of the twentieth century, the radical lines of kinship run horizontally, as between brothers and sisters. In the Freudian construct they run vertically, as between children and parents. The Oedipus complex is one of inescapable verticality.
The shift is momentous; with it Oedipus replaces Antigone. As we saw, it can be dated c. But it is the earlier paradigm which concerns us now. A fourth, presumably minor, motive suggests itself for the Antigone predominance. The subject of live burial harrows and enthralls late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century imaginings.
It is ubiquitous throughout Gothic fiction and theatre; it is common in the graphic arts and in high and low verse and prose-fantasy again, Poe stands representatively at the meeting-point of these currents. But the topic also turns up, sometimes obsessively, in scientific and philosophic specu- lation. Does the motif of the entombment of living persons codify an awareness of arbitrary judicial power? Is it, in other words, a fictional correlative to the facts of imprisonment in the convents and Bastilles of the old order? The iconography of July-August 1 , with its depictions of the emergence into daylight of the 'long-buried' victims of royal, ecclesiastical, and familial relegation, certainly suggests this overlap.
But an altogether different context may also have been instrumental. It is that of the almost hysterical interest of both educated and popular levels of society, from the s to the close of the nineteenth century, in so-called galvanic phenomena of nervous and muscular 'reanimation', in Mesmerism, in extra-sensory con- tacts with the departed.
The dread of being sepulchred alive may relate to complex uncertainties as to the determination and finality of decease, to widespread intimations of psychic energies still active after clinical demise and burial. The cat's- cradle of meaning and sensibility is one which historians of thought and of letters have not, until now, unravelled satisfactorily. But there is no doubt that it concentrates diverse, deep-seated strands of feeling. These are unforgettably drama- 1 Cf M.
Patak, 'Die Angst vor dem Scheintod in der zwcilen Halfte dcs Here was classical sanction for a present concern. Antigone's descent into living death spoke to Revolutionary and Romantic generations with an immediacy rivalled only by the finale of Romeo and Juliet. Comparison of the two plays in respect of the entombment motif are frequent. But even if we add up the occasional and the internally crucial factors which I have listed, the status accorded to Sophocles' Antigone during more than a century of European thought and literature remains challenging.
Why did Barthelemy choose just this tragedy for seminal reference? Why did Shelley, Hegel, Hebbel see in the mythical persona of Antigone the 'highest presence' to have entered the world of men? What intention attaches to the repeated hints in de Quincey, in Kierkegaard, they are more than hints that Antigone is to be understood as a counterpart to Christ, as God's child and messenger before Revelation? Complete answers elude us. Only the judgement of supremacy is clear.
From it arise some of the most radically transformative inter- pretations and 're-experiencings' ever elicited by a literary text. It is four of these, comprised between the s and the s, which I want to look at now. Much of the work after the Phenomenology has come down to us in the form of lecture-notes imperfectly taken. A good many of the texts which precede , on the other hand, were not meant for publication.
They embody juvenilia, sketches, rough drafts, and fragments of self-address. Their publication is a result of posthumous glory. Yet it is these early, essentially private writings which are now regarded as vital to an understanding of Hegel and subjected to exhaustive commentary. However, even if we had only those works which Hegel himself saw into print, the inhibitions to understanding would be real.
The fragmentary character of the early texts, indeed of the Phenomenology itself, together with the provisional, didactically self-revising format of the Berlin University lectures, are no biographical accident. This refusal is cardinal to his method and makes the notions of 'system' and of 'totality', customarily attached to Hegelianism, elusive. In Hegel, reflection and utterance are in constant motion on three levels: These three conceptual levels interpenetrate this is the case at almost every point in Hegel's readings of Antigone.
Hegel rigorously subverts the naive linearities of common argument in order to communicate the simultaneities, often conflicting, and inward recursions or self-corrections of his proposals. But he did not have available to him those typographical and syntactical dislocations we are familiar with since Mallarme. Hence the tension between vertical, 'chordaP compositions of meaning and the external conventions of an eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century prose. Yet, as we learn to trust Hegel's style, it takes on a paradoxical transparency. But we can go further. Hegel, and this is rare, was able to think against himself, and to observe and record himself doing so.
The essence of Hegel's method and thought is self-polemic. Negation, sublation Aufhebung with its simultaneous reciprocities of dissolution, conservation, and augment, the coil and recoil of the dialectic mode, are the immediate theoretical instruments of Hegel's 1 A. Koyre, 'Hegel a Iena', in Etudes d'histmre dc la pensee philosophiqut Paris, 1 97 1 , 1 52 n This essay first appeared in 1 Together with the 'Note sur la langue et la terminologie hegelienne', first published in and also included in the Etudes, it constitutes the most enlightening discussion we have of the difficulties and virtues of Hegel's style Cf.
Adorno, 'Skoteinos oder Wie zu lesen sei', Drei Studien zu Hegel Frankfurt-on-Main, , for a witty, subtle gloss on Hegel's fundamentally oral techniques of persuasion In approaching the problem of how to read Hegel one cannot, particularly with reference to early writings, overlook a certain deliberate pride in opaqueness. This principle is obsessively at work in Hegel's model of divided consciousness and alienation. Only Plato rivals Hegel as a dramatist and self- dramatist of meaning.
But in the Platonic dialogues it is the tactics of argument which are dramatic rather than the substance. The latter can be, indeed it often has been, presented without its dialectic form. This is not so of Hegel. For Hegel, to think, to realize and articulate the dynamics of identity, is to 'think against'.
It is to 'dramatize' in the root- sense of the verb, which is one of pure action. Spirit is action, proclaims the Phenomenology, action of an inherently agonistic or 'conflictual' kind. A sovereign passage from the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion summarizes the dramatic-polemic ethos of Hegel's method: Ich erhebe mich denkend zum Absoluten iiber alles Endliche und bin unendliches Bewusstsein und zugleich bin ich endliches Selbstbewusstsein und zwar nach meiner ganzen empirischen Bestimmung.
Beide Seiten suchen sich und fliehen sich. Ich bin und es ist in mir fur mich dieser Widerstreit und diese Einigung. Ich bin der Kampf. Through thought, I raise myself to the Absolute above all finality; I am unbounded consciousness and at the same time I am finite self- consciousness, and this in accord with my whole empirical present- ness and constitution. Both sides seek each other and flee from each other. I am, and there is in me and for me, this mutual conflict and this unison. I am the combat. I am not one of the combatants; rather, I am both combatants and the combat itself.
Given this ethos, drama, and tragic drama in particular, occupies a privileged place in the growth of Hegel's thought. A theory of tragedy is not an adjunct to Hegel's construct. It is a testing ground and validation for main tenets of Hegel's historicism, for the dialectical scenario of his logic, and for the central notion of consciousness in progressive conflict. Certain Greek tragedies, the Antigone pre-eminently, are as functional to the Hegelian thought-world as are certain expressionist lyric poems and the odes of Hdlderlin to the ontology and language- mystique of Heidegger.
But one cannot order in any neat'temporal sequence the stages of reflection which lead to the first specific citation of Antigone in the late winter of or early spring of Hegel's nascent thought is a close weave in which multiple strands cross and recross synchronically. Hegel's idealization of ancient Hellas is, as we saw, representative of his generation.
Only amid the 'happy people' of Periclean Athens were political liberty and religious faith concordant. This concordance was not abstract. The young Hegel insists on the singularly 'concrete' and 'immanent' quality of the Attic genius — an insistence in which are implicit the first moves in the Hegelian critique of Kant.
The Greek A1C will never signify for Hegel a contingent moment in human affairs. The ideal which the ttoAic embodied, and the problem of the inadequacies or inherent self-destructiveness of London, This lecture, together with the principal discussions of tragedy in Hegel's writings, is available in Hegel, On Tragedy, edd, A. Paolucci New York, They have been made available to us by H. Hofl'meister, Dokumentt zu Hegels Entwicklung Stuttgart, Among the most useful elucidations are the following: Negri, Stato e diritto net giovane Hegel Padua, ;J.
M assolo, Prime ricerche di Hegel Urbino, ; A. Gadamer, 'Hegel und die antike Dialektik', Hegel- Studien, i 1 A number of these monographs themselves contain bibliographies of further secondary material. Sichirollo, 'Hegel und die griechische Welt. Janicaud, Hegel et te destin de la Greet Paris, To ask philosophically is as it will be for Heidegger, that great reader of Hegel to ask of Minerva.
But during the Berne period, and certainly in , tne Utopian-lyric image of Athens, which the young Hegel had shared with Holderlin and Sc helling, alters. In early 1 , if Nohl's datings of the theological juvenilia are correct, Hegel perceives the contrarieties latent in what he had taken to be the Attic concordance of the political-civic and the religious-ritual spheres.
At roughly this point, in a threefold, overlapping consideration of the life of Christ, of the persona of Socrates, and of the oligarchic conditions of government in Berne, Hegel is possessed, to use Lukacs's striking phrase, by 'the contradictoriness of being itself'.
In a text written at the beginning of , Hegel designates religion as 'the nurse' of free men and the state as 'their mother'. It is in this specific context, in Nohl's fragment , that Sophocles' Antigone is first invoked. But the duality between religion and state is itself the consequence of an earlier alienation.
There is, as Rousseau had seen, a tragic, though necessary and progressive, mechanism of rupture in the origins of the body politic: It is this estrangement which contains the source of ethical positivity. Contra Fichte, Hegel argues for the fundamentally social condition of the integral human individual, for the vanity of moral self-fulfilment in isolation from a social-civic fabric of values and options. Against Kant, Hegel is beginning to emphasize the concrete historicity and 'collective' character of the ethical choices which the individual is compelled to make, a compulsion which divides and, therefore, advances con- sciousness on its teleological path.
Rosenzweig assigns this phase in Hegel's development to the Frankfurt period, He points to the influence of Montesquieu and to Hegel's strained attempts to combine a qualified Kantian idealism with a 'Jacobin-absolutist' model of the nation-state. Man can attain no authentic ethical and self-conscious posture outside the state. But the latter is a 'thought totality', a totality conceived and inhabited by the intellect, almost in the sense of Kant's praktische Vernunjt 'practical reason or understanding'. Religion, on the other hand, derives its vitality from the human imagination, 'als ein lebendiges, von der Phantasie dargestellt' 'as' a living presence, represented by fantasy'.
There need be no conflict. Interwoven with these concerns, in chronologically opaque fragments, are the germs of a theory of tragedy. One of these, which will become vital when we come to Kierkegaard's 'counter-Hegelian' Antigone, relates to the figure of Abraham. Abraham has cut himself off from his homeland, from his kindred, from nature itself. His monotheism is alienation and the blind acceptance of dictates whose moral imperative and rationale is wholly, inaccessibly external to himself again, there is here a polemic against Kant.
Judaism incarnates this abandonment of man's inmost 'to an alien transcendence'. It is, in consequence, the antithesis to the Greek ideal of 'unison with life'. In particular, Abraham's concept of destiny is antithetical to that of the ancient Greeks fragments in Nohl's edition. It is a destiny which comports the pathos of sterile alienation, not the essential fruitfulness of tragedy.
Hence the arresting fact that Judaic sensibility, with its millennial immersion in suffering, does not produce tragic drama. The latter hinges on certain particular, Hellenic concep- tions of Gesetz 'law' and Strafe 'punishment' , conceptions grounded in the uniquely agonistic relation of Athenian man to himself, to nature, and to the gods.
It is in the period from 1 to late 1 , in such fragments as N. It is to fiolpa, with its dynamic impersonality but existential immanence, that Hegel seems to attach the paradoxical but decisive category of 'fated guilt', of an order of culpability in and through which an individual the tragic hero comes wholly into his own — comes home fatally to himself without relinquishing, as does the Jewish sufferer, his at-oneness with life.
It is difficult to schematize successive moments or motifs in Hegel's thought at this stage. The principal points are these: Conflict and collision are necessary attributes of the deployment of individual and public identity. But as 'life' cannot, finally, divide itself, as unity is the goal of authentic being, conflict causes tragic guilt. For a time the notion dates back to Berne , Hegel seems to suggest that this inevitable culpability can be transcended by 'die schone Seele' 'the beauteous soul' , of which Christ or Hblderlin's Hyperion are exemplary. In the 'beauteous soul', conflict and suffering even unto death do not comport an alienation from existential unity.
But Hegel soon relinquishes this suggestion. If it is to find self-realization, human consciousness, certainly in the 'heroic' and, therefore, historically representative man or woman, must first pass 'par ce crepuscule du matin qu'est la conscience malheureuse' 'through that morning twilight which is the unhappy conscience and consciousness'.
In the midst of 'the silence of the oracles and the chill of the statues rises the voice of tragedy'. It is an indispensable moment in the self- realization of Spirit in history. Though in a more tentative formulation, these appear to be the lineaments of a theory of tragedy as Hegel sketches it immediately before and during the start of his Iena period.
Almost self-evidently, they point to Aeschylus' Eumenides. It is, in fact, this play which Hegel refers to in his first more extensive text on tragedy. The passage is to be found in the treatise Ueber die wissenschaftliche Behandlung des Naturrechts of It seems to reflect that 'apocalyptic sense of contemporary events' which Rosenzweig ascribes to Hegel's thought between and Napoleon's temporary destruction of Prussia in The fundamental issue is plain enough: Kant and Schelling had remained in the 1 J.
Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophe de Hegel ;Paris. Butby , in the Schrift ueber die Reichsverfassung, Hegel had come to identify the highest human freedom with the most comprehensive and organic form of civic community 'die hochste Gemeinschaft'. But this identification also entailed a polemic, agonistic, self- divisive relation between man as a 'state-being' staatlich and as a 'burgher' or citizen-bourgeois with essentially familial, economic, and self-conservative motivations. How is the philosopher, the thinker of dialectical totality, to integrate these two axes of being?
He does so by looking to Greek tragedy, in which both the conflict and its dynamic resolution are, incomparably, delineated. The internal division of the ttoXlc into colliding interests Stdnde or etats in the sense dramatized by the French Revolution is equivalent to, is the source of, 'the enactment of tragedy in the ethical sphere'.
In this sphere, there must be a staatsfreier Bezirk, a domain free from the absolute authority of the state, though definable and meaningful only within the state's larger compass. The state, which Hegel now sees as a K'riegstaat, a 'war-state', is in creative conflict with the domain of Privatrecht, 'private right', whose primary impulses are not those of war and of civic sacrifice in battle, but of the preservation of the family. Inevitably, the state will seek to absorb this familial sphere into its own governance and order of values. Yet if it did so completely, it would destroy not only the individual but the procreative units from which it draws its military-political resources.
Thus the state, even in the moment of conflict, will 'concede divine honours' to the domestic, ethically private dimension of existence. This is a suggestive and intelligible scheme. Hegel now obscures it to the point of near-impenetrability by attaching it to a tentative metaphysical or ontological design. The division between tto'Aic and individual itself reflects the engagement of 'the Absolute' in temporality and in phenomenal contin- gencies. Of this engagement, the antique deities are, as it were, the vehicle and symbol.
Their implication in human moral conflicts causes a self-scission in the nature of the divine: The convolution of this text results not only from the imposition of an essentially immanent-political discourse on a transcendent symbolism awkwardly poised between strands in Hegel's thought which go back to Berne and even Tiibingen on the one hand, and the as yet diffuse idiom of his mature philosophy on the other. The obscurity results from the interference-effects of two very different literary sources. The ontological-symbolic nebulosities and the motif of divine commingling in human polemics a motif central to Hblderlin do point to the Eumenides.
The scenario of collision between Kriegstaat and Privatmensch springs directly from Antigone. It is the latter, moreover, which pervades the context of Hegel's discussion and which is ubiquitously implicit even where Aeschylus' drama is alluded to. Immediately prior to the passage we have been looking at, Hegel makes a major point: Sittlichkeit 'ethics', 'morality grounded in custom' concedes an important portion of its own rights to 'the subterranean powers, relinquishing something of itself to them, and offering them sacrifice'.
This concession and offering fulfils a complex dual function: Somewhat later in Hegel's essay, we learn that the family is the highest totality 'of which nature is capable', that the generation of children within the family is the modus of reproduction of 'totality' itself, a modus con- stantly and legitimately challenged by the bellicose ideals of the state. All this directs us not to the Eumenides but to Antigone. As does the proposition, at the most opaque point in the passage cited, that only the death of the tragic hero can make intelligible can bring about?
And it is in Sophocles' Antigone that these conflicts are, primordially, set forth. It may be, as Lukacs argues, 1 that the Eumenides reference and the related darkness in the text represent a last attempt to 'dehistoricize' the political issues, to establish a continuity between antique and modern as Holderlin was striving to do. After , however, no such 'dehistoricization' is possible for Hegel.
The Napoleonic adventure, to which Hegel assigns an absolute metaphysical singularity, has made of the new nation-state the Apollonian Lichtgott, 'the Light-god' who must find fulfilment and self-renewal in war. But what, in this imperial scheme, are the rights of the subterranean and nocturnal agencies of familial kinship and of death?
Tragedy stems from the pos- tulate and sublation of these antinomies. In Antigone the logic of revelation in tragic form is consummate. Thus the passage from the Eumenides to Antigone is neither accidental nor, in any primary sense, autobiographical. It articulates the essential step from Hegel's juvenilia to the Phenomenology.
Yet it constitutes no less remarkable an incorporation of a work of art into a philosophic discourse than does that of Homer in Plato or of Mozart's operas in Kierkegaard. As such, Hegel's uses of Sophocles are not only immediately pertinent to a study of the 'Antigone' motif in western thought; they document the whole central issue of hermeneutics, of the nature and conventions of understanding.
Here, in the face of a rarely equalled force of appropriation, we can attempt to follow the life of a major text within a major text and the metamorphic exchanges of meaning which this internality brings about. If the Phenomenology itself is, notably in its first six sections, dramatic- ally constructed, it is, in significant degree, because it has great drama as its core of reference. Rosenzweig, Hegel und der Stoat, pp. Remttrprelation, Texts and Commentary New York, , But beginning with section V c, a , her presence is vivid.
It is in this segment that Hegel spells out the axiom of existentialism. Being is a 'pure translation' reines Uebersetzeri of potential being into action, into 'the doing of the deed' das Tun der Tat. No individual can attain an authentic knowledge of himself 'ehe es sich durch Tun zur Wirklichkeit gebracht hat' 'until it has brought itself into actuality through action'. The translation is one from 'the night of possibility into the day of presentness'; it is an awakening into the dawnlight of the deed of that which was the latency, the slumber of the self.
This is the break of morning and of action for Antigone. The purpose of the existential act must be that of a total 'coming into being', of an accomplishment so central that it cannot be mere external 'facticity' eine Sache. If the deed is merely self- interested, if to act is only to 'busy oneself, 'others will hasten to it as flies to a freshly set out bowl of milk' with which image Ismene seems to enter the argument.
The authentic act of self- realization is equivalent to 'die sittliche Substanz' — the 'ethical substance' or 'morality as substantive performance'. To en- quire of the justification or compass of this ethical substance, to challenge its enactment in the name of external criteria, is vanity. Yet, 'in its purest and most meaningful form', in its most evident rationality, ethical action is the 'intelligible, general doing of the state' das verstandige allgemeine Tun des Staats. The result is an ambiguity of necessary guilt.
Translation into authentic individual being demands the existential deed. Man is nothing but Tceuvre qu'il a realisee' 'the work he has fulfilled'. In its fragmentary form — the text, though massive, is made up of the notes taken by members of Kojeve's famous Hegel seminars between and — this master- piece represents both an acute commentary on and a virtual parallel to the Phenomenology. A further attempt at 'counter-statement' in the guise of marginal commentary is made by Jacques Derrida in Glas Paris, Often wildly self- indulgent and arbitrary, Derrida's 'gloss' does, at several points, otter important insights.
Together, these three books, and the reticulations of their positions towards Hegel, almost make up a history of post-war French philosophic and stylistic sensibility. Kojeve, Introduction a la lecture de Hegel t p Being quintessentially his, the deed of the individual will bring him into collision with the rational norm of realized purpose 'policy' in the state. In riposte, the latter will oppose law 'Gesetz' to inner imperative 'Gebot'. Where this opposition is forced to extremity, there will be a violent emptiness or 'formality' in the law and a self- destructive autonomy', an imperative of and for the self alone, in the individual.
Let Sophocles' play begin. The collision has its concrete source in two dialectical moments. The one is 'the tyrannical blasphemy or sin which makes of wilfulness a law' and which would compel the ethical substance to obey this law. The second moment is a subtler evil: Note the deliberate ambi- valence of Hegel's formulation.
If the first moment applies unmistakably to Creon, the second tells of both Creon and Antigone, though the verb rdsonieren points to Creon rather than to Antigone. This pointer becomes a brilliant stab of light in the portrait of Antigone with which section V of the Phenomenology closes. Ethical substance can only be grasped by self-consciousness; it can only become self-substance, in the individual human person.
Ethical substance and personal being are made tautological in men or women who are 'lucid unto themselves, who are unriven spirits'. Such men or women are 'makellose himmlische Gestalten, die in ihren Unterschieden die un- entweihte Unschuld und Einmiitigkeit ihres Wesens erhalten'. The sentence is of an exalted density and theological tonality which makes translation halting: Now, for the first time, Hegel names and cites the play lines —7.
The section closes imperatively: Antigone stands before us as she had not done since Sophocles. She is, of course, a Hegelian Antigone. Pellucid to herself, in possession of and possessed by the deed which is her being, this Antigone lives the ethical substance. In her, 'the Spirit is made actual'. But the ethical substance which Hegel's Antigone embodies, which she is purely and simply, represents a polarization, an inevitable partiality. The Absolute suffers division as it enters into the necessary but fragmented dynamics of the human and historical condition.
The Absolute must descend, as it were, into the contingent, bounded specificities of the individual human ethos if that ethos is to attain self-fulfilment, if the journey homeward and to ultimate unity is to be pursued. Because he is the medium of this scission, man must undergo the agonistic character of the ethical— dialectical experience and be de- stroyed by it. Yet it is precisely this destruction, Hegel reminds us, which constitutes man's eminent worth and which allows his progression towards the unification of consciousness and of Spirit on 'the other side of history'.
Hegel's next step is not primarily logical; it is a conjecture essential to his poetics of individuation and historicism. The division between divine and human laws does not assume the form of a direct confrontation between men and gods, as it may be said to do in Aeschylus' Prometheus or Euripides' Bacchae.
Because it is now entirely immanent in the human circum- stance, the ethical substance polarizes its values and its impera- tives as between the state and the family.
It is in the family that divine law has a threefold status: This status is unavoidably adversary to that of the divine law as it functions in the religion of the noXtc. It is around this motif, and its dramatization in Antigone, that Hegel now concentrates the existential dualities of man and society, of the living and the dead, of the immanent and the transcendent, which underlie the Phenomenology.
Within the family, the commanding agencies of conscious- ness are those of relationship to individualized particularity.
It is the specific persona which is conceived as totality. To it is assigned a weight of presentness denied to the 'generalized individuality' of the citizen in the perspective of the state. Death, as it were, 'specifies this specificity' in the highest degree. It is the extreme accomplishment of the unique as in the Kierkegaardian-Heideggerian postulate of one's own death, inalienable to any other. As we shall see, this 'achieved totality' may be, indeed ought to be, expressly civic, such as is death in the war-service to the nation.
But in death, the individual reverts 'immensely' — the epithet is meant to suggest the radical vehemence of Hegel's vision — to the ethical domain of the family. The rroXic, moreover, 's'interesse au Tun, a Yaction de l'individu, tandis que la Famille attribue une valeur a son Sein, a son etre pur et simple' the state 'concerns itself with the deed, with the action of the individual, whereas the family attributes value to his being, to his existence pure and simple'.
In this primacy, the question of the actual preservation of the body from physical decay Polyneices' unburied corpse takes on a fundamental role: The dead individual, by having detached and liberated his being from his action or negative unity, is an empty particular, merely existing passively for some other, at the level of every lower irrational organic agency.
The family keeps away from the dead the dishonouring of him by the appetites of unconscious organic agencies and by abstract [chemical] elements. It sets its own action in place of theirs, and it weds the relative to the bosom of the earth, the elemental presence which does not pass away. Thereby the family 1 A. Kojeve, op cit 1 This final duty thus constitutes the complete divine law or positive ethical act towards the particular individual. The esoteric concreteness of Hegel's vision reanimates, as does almost no other commentary on Antigone, the primal dread of decomposition, of violation by dogs and birds of prey, central to the play.
It knits the family to precisely the two sources or moments of Antigone's deed: It is that between brother and sister. Again, Hegel's contracted, lyric argument is shot through with the presence of Antigone. Brother and sister are of the same blood, as husband and wife are not. There is between them no compulsion of sexuality or, if there is such compulsion Hegel implicitly concedes the possibility , it has been overcome. In the relation between parents and children there is reciprocal self-interest — the parents seek a reproduc- tion and continuation of their own being — and inevitable estrangement.
This relation, moreover, is ineluctably organic. Brother and sister stand towards each other in the disinterested purity of free human choice. Their affinity transcends the biological to become elective. Femininity itself, urges Hegel, has its highest intimation, its moral quintessence, in the condition of sorority Das Weibhche hat daher als Schwester die hbchste Ahnung des sittlicken Wesens. The sister's view of her brother is ontological as no other can be: Correspondingly, there can be no higher ethical obligation than that which a sister incurs towards her brother.
But in fulfilling his identity as citizen, in performing the deeds which realize his manhood, the brother must leave the sphere of the family. He leaves the hearth oikoc for the world of the ttoXlc. Woman stays behind as 'head of the household and guardian of the divine law' in so far as this law is polarized in the household gods, the Lares and Penates.
The ethical kingdom of woman is that of the 'immediately elemental'. La loi humaine est la loi de l'homme. Human law is man's law. It is of the night. It is only on the 'historical' level that the agonistic encounter is between 'human' and 'divine' laws. The polarization merely 'phenomenalizes' the self-scission of the Absolute.
If there is divinity in the household gods, under feminine guard, so there is also in the gods of the city and in the legislature which masculine force has established around them. Hence the tragic ambiguity of collision. Hegel is now ready to take his final dialectic step. In death, the husband, son, or brother passes from the dominion of the 7ro'Aic back into that of the family.
This homecoming is, specifically and concretely, a return into the primal custody of woman wife, mother, sister. The rites of burial, with their literal re-enclosure of the dead in the place of earth and in the shadow-sequence of generations which are the foundation of the familial, are the particular task of woman. Where this task falls upon a sister, where a man has neither mother nor wife to bring him home to the guardian earth, burial takes on the highest degree of holiness.
Brother and sister are of the same blood, as husband and wife are not. The conflict staged by Sophocles was of a timeless urgency. Yet it constitutes no less remarkable an incorporation of a work of art into a philosophic discourse than does that of Homer in Plato or of Mozart's operas in Kierkegaard. Yet at the trial itself and throughout his imprisonment, Socrates has maintained his innocence. But man's defeat crystallizes his freedom, the lucid compulsion to act, to act polemically, which determines the substance of the self.
Antigone's act is the holiest to which woman can accede. It is also ein Verbrechen: For there are situations in which the state is not prepared to relinquish its authority over the dead. There are circumstances — political, military, symbolic — in which the laws of the noXic extend to the dead body the imperatives of honour ceremonious interment, monumentality or of chastisement which, ordi- 1 J Derrida, Olai. Hence a final, supreme clash between the worlds of man and of woman. The dialectic of collision between the universal and the particular, the sphere of the feminine hearth and of the masculine forum, the polarities of ethical substance as they crystallize around immanent and transcendent values — is now compacted into the struggle between man Creon and woman Antigone over the body of the dead Polyneices.
The mere fact that such a struggle takes place defines the guilt of woman in the eyes of the ttoXic. L'ennemi interieur de l'Etat antique est la Famille qu'il detruit et le Particulier qu'il ne reconnait pas ; mais il ne peut se passer d'eux' 'Woman is the concrete embodiment of crime. The family is the internal foe of the antique state; the family which this state destroys and the private person which it does not recognize; but it cannot do without them'. Creon's edict is a political punishment; to Antigone it is an ontological crime. Polyneices' guilt towards Thebes is totally irrelevant to her existential sense of his singular, irreplaceable being.
The Sein of her brother cannot, in any way, be qualified by his Tun. Death is, precisely, the return from action into being. In taking upon herself the inevitable guilt of action, in opposing the feminine-ontological to the masculine-political, Antigone stands above Oedipus: It is an act of self-possession even before it is an acceptance of destiny. Schicksal fatum now enters Hegel's reading of the play. Antigone and Creon must both perish inasmuch as they have yielded their being to the necessary partialities of action.
It is in this exact sense that character, that individuation is destiny. The victory of one power and its character, and the defeat of the other side, would thus be only the partial, the unfinished work which progresses steadily till equilibrium is attained. It is in the equal subjection of both sides that absolute right is first accomplished, that the ethical substance — as the negative force consuming both 1 A Kojcve, op cit 36 ANTIGONES parties, in other words, omnipotent and righteous Destiny — makes its appearance.
Nevertheless, we recognize in this metaphysics of fatal equilib- rium the essence of the Hegelian concept of dialectic, of historical advance through tragic pathos. Kojeve's summation renders the poignant rigour of Hegel's 'Antigone': C'est le conflit entre deux plans d'existence, dont l'un est considere comme sans valeur par celui qui agit, mais non par les autres. L'agent, l'acteur tragique n'aura pas conscience d'avoir agi comme un criminel ; etant chatie, il aura l'impression de subir un "destin", absolument injustifiable, mais qu'il admet sans revoke, "sans chercher a comprendre"' 'Tragic conflict is not a conflict between duty and passion, or between two duties.
It is a conflict between two planes of being, which one of those who acts regards as valueless, but which is recognized by others. The tragic agent, the tragic actor will not be conscious of having acted as a criminal; being punished, he will have the impression of suffering a "destiny" which is absolutely un- justifiable, but against which he does not rebel, which he accepts "without seeking to understand"'. But the equation is not one of indifference. Antigone possesses an insight into the quality of her own guilt which is denied to Creon. The body of Polyneices had to be buried if the ttoXlc of the living was to be at peace with the house of the dead.
Derrida's conjecture, so far as it bears on the Hegel of the Phenomenology, is tempting: Derrida, op cit It is later readings which achieve notoriety and which initiate debates that continue to this day. These later readings are, doubtless, related to the Phenomenology. But they represent a more abstract, silhouetted mode of understanding.
The canonic text comes in Part Two n. Fatum is that which is stripped of thought, of the concept; it is that in which justice and injustice disappear in abstraction. In tragedy, on the contrary, destiny operates within a sphere of ethical Justice.
We find this expressed in its noblest form in the tragedies of Sophocles. In these both fate and necessity are at issue. The fate of individuals is represented as something incomprehensible, but necessity is not a blind justice: Just for this reason, these tragedies are the immortal 'works of Spirit' Geisteswerke of ethical understanding and comprehension, and the undying paradigm of the ethical concept.
Blind fate is something unsatisfying. In these Sophoclean tragedies, justice is grasped by thought. The collision between the two highest moral powers is enacted in plastic fashion in that absolute exemplum of tragedy, Antigone. Here, familial love, the holy, the inward, belonging to inner feeling, and therefore known also as the law of the nether gods, collides with the right of the state [Recht des Staats.
Creon is not a tyrant, but actually an ethical power eine sitthche Macht. Creon is not in the wrong. He maintains that the law of the state, the authority of government, must be held in respect, and that infraction of the law must be followed by punishment. Each of these two sides actualizes verwirklicht only one of the ethical powers, and has only one as its content.
This is their one-sidedness.
The meaning of eternal justice is made manifest thus: Both are recognized as valid in the 'unclouded' course and process of morality im ungetrubten Gang der Silthchkeit. Here both possess their validity, but an equalized validity. Justice only comes forward to oppose one-sidedness. It is from this passage that derives the notion of tragedy as a conflict between two equal 'rights' or 'truths' and the belief that Sophocles' Antigone illustrates, in some obvious way, the dynamics of collision and 'synthetic resolution' in the Hegelian 38 ANTIGONES dialectic.
The flat proposition, moreover, that 'Creon is not a tyrant', that his person and conduct embody eine sittliche Alacht, is often cited to evidence Hegel's turn to an etaliste or 'Prussian' philosophy of the nation-state. The text is highly condensed resulting, as it does, from the transcription of lecture-notes.
It presumes knowledge of the symbolic ontology of the self-scission of the Absolute as it is expounded in the Phenomenology, and of Hegel's early theory of punishment as a 'tragic necessity' in the dialectic of heroic self- fulfilment. And if there is, undeniably, a turn to authoritarian prudence in Hegel's personal-philosophic stance, there is, also, an attempt to articulate a logic of active poise, of what Kierkegaard will call 'motion on one spot'. Napoleon's defeat or, rather, self-defeat, Napoleon's reces- sion from a metaphysical into a political-contingent force, signifies the adjournment the end?
Spirit and history are not yet are never? Man cannot pass from the realm of the state to the realm of the Spirit. It is within the realm of the state that he must pursue his homeward journey. But the impulse to this pursuit is, as we know, polemic. It is solely in and through conflict that heroic man or woman initiates those explorations of moral values, those sublations Aufhebungen of rudimentary con- tradictions into subtler, more comprehensive dissents, which alone activate human ethical advance. Antigone must chal- lenge Creon if she is to be Antigone, if he is to be Creon.
Her 'ethical superiority', in respect of the immediacy, of the primal character and purity of familial-feminine law, must both be made manifest and destroyed by the law of the state. There could, quite simply, be no locale for meaningful, which is to say tragic, collision.
The young Hegel had perceived the inherent contradictori- ness of being itself. After the Phenomenology and in the years of self-debate which lead to the Heidelberg Encyclopaedia of , Hegel centres this general concept of internal contradiction in the notion of the state and in that of the relations between state and individual. It is only within the Staat and by virtue of tragic conflict with the state — the two being logically bound — that 1 Cf G Lukacs, op cit 51 1 ANTIGONES 39 external and internal morality can be defined, actualized, and thus brought nearer to the unity of the Absolute.
Rosenzweig's formulation is rhetorical but accurate: If he did not incarnate an ethical principle, his defeat would possess neither tragic quality nor constructive sense. In Sophocles' exemplary rendition, this defeat, in exact counterpoise to Antigone's, entails progress. After the deaths of Antigone and of Creon, new conflicts will spring from the division within the ttoXlc of the 'ethical substance'. But these conflicts, so far as they concern the private and the public, the familial and the civic, the prerogatives of the dead and those of the living, will be enacted on a richer level of consciousness, of felt contradic- tion, than that which arose from the corpse of Polyneices.
He seeks to articulate the device of a conflict in extremis which, at the same time, vitalizes, strengthens the object of its mortal provocation the state. He is trying to preserve two opposing categories indispensable to the dialectic: The result is a deceptively brutal reading.
The formal and structural compulsions which underlie this reading translate readily into aesthetic judgement. In the Aesthetik Part Three, m, ch. The context makes plain that this supremacy stems directly from the precise equipoise of motive and destiny as it is realized in the executive form and content of the play.
Like no other text, Antigone makes 'actual and true' the symmetries of significant deaths. But despite its logical and aesthetic strength — a strength which will make of it the official Hegelian interpretation — this whole analysis is radically at odds with the sensibility of the later Hegel, with the bias of spirit which he brings to the play. The sentiments voiced about the fate and stature of Antigone herself in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy i.
They hint at emotional identifications irreconcilable with the dialectic impartiality of the canonic gloss. Hegel is considering the phenomenological meaning and role of Socrates. He finds a contradiction in Socrates' attitude towards his own death. The sage has refused the possibility of escape because it seems preferable to him to submit to the laws of the 'Aic. Yet at the trial itself and throughout his imprisonment, Socrates has maintained his innocence.