Heraclitian dynamics in the Antigone and the fallacy of the right of the strongest (original) (raw)
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A Justification of Creon- Antigone by Sophocles- Shaheer Liaqat
The Emancipation of Creon, 2020
Sophocles’ Antigone is a complex exploration of the concept of justice with morally conflicted characters. In modern discourse, Creon is usually portrayed as the antagonist in the play. This is largely because of his position of relative privilege and authority as compared to Antigone. However, Creon is not a one-dimensional character and many justifications of his actions may be presented. This essay presents the case that Creon's acts are a response to certain circumstances and he has legitimate reasons for his actions.
Caliope, 2021
Particularly in Creon’s debate with Haemon, and from then on, Sophocles shows distinct aspects of how anger acts on the tyrant’s ability to judge and how this can be related to inextricable familial and political ties. Given that every modern reading of the play applies a philosophical conceptualization for understanding emotions and thus suffers the consequences of a historical gap between interpretative and original vocabularies, this paper argues that the Aristotelian conceptualization of emotions is a relevant philosophical tool to better contextualize Creon’s anger in Sophocles’ Antigone. The essay discusses Creon’s thymetic responses in the face of Haemon’s admonition and Antigone’s oligoria, and offers two examples of Aristotelian readings of Creon’s thymetic akrasia. One of the possible readings considers the specific role of phantasia in Creon’s understanding of reality. This philosophical explanation of a revengeful tyrant reveals important connections between psychology and politics in the government of the city.
Sophocles’ Antigone and the promise of ethical life: tragic ambiguity and the pathologies of reason
Law and Humanities, 2017
This article aims to demonstrate that works of art and literature can provide important insights in law and justice that are hard to grasp by one-sidedly rationalist methods of academic analysis. It takes Sophocles' Antigoneperhaps the most classical text of law and literature's familiar catalogueas a case in point, drawing attention to some important aspects of that play's legal epistemic relevance that are still largely overlooked. Arguing that the widespread view on the confrontation between Antigone and Creon as a clash between 'divine' and 'human' law is mistaken, the article builds on Hegel's view that the positions of both protagonists are likewise incomplete, denying elements of law and justice that are equally essential, the one being no less divine than the other. However, it departs from Hegel's analysis in maintaining that the play does not entail the promise of 'ethical life' (Sittlichkeit) as some synthesis that recognizes the specific value of both Antigone's and Creon's stances on law and justice but takes away their incompatibility. Instead, it is argued that the play teaches us that such harmonization is unattainablea no less valuable lesson indeed.
The prudent dissident: unheroic resistance in Sophocles' Antigone
The Review of Politics, 2011
Most contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles' Antigone have focused on the fearsome clash between Antigone and Creon. The relationship between Antigone and her weaker, more cautious sister Ismene has not garnered similar attention. This essay addresses this gap by revisiting the tantalizing possibility that Ismene played a more significant role in resisting Creon than has often been assumed. The essay shifts the analysis of Antigone, first, by illuminating the complex and fraught relationship between two women and emphasizing the political and legal challenges that they face together as women. Second, the essay shifts focus from vertical power relations—that is, between the individual and government—to horizontal power relations between disempowered outsiders. On this reading, Antigone reveals less about the downfall of a character than it does about the political power of the weak and disadvantaged.
Out of measure. A reading of Sophocles' Antigone
2022
Sophocles' Antigone has been understood by many as the archetypal account of the eternal conflict between the universal value of natural laws and the contingency of law enacted by those in power. The present article challenges this rather widespread reading. Rather, it emphasizes that the tragic nature of the conflict between Antigone and Creon resides in the radical incommensurability of their discourses: both discourses are irreducible to a common sphere-be it that of law, ethics or politics.
‘The Crown of Virtue’: Justice in Aristotle and Antigone
In contrast to the “neat” illustration of justice one receives from Aristotle's ethics and politics, I pose Greek tragedy as encapsulating the “messiness” of justice—the tribulations of paying what is due and the anguish in the irreconcilability of action and intention. Sophocles’ Antigone in particular is a tragedy in which one witnesses the augmentation of Aristotle’s conception of justice in the Ethics and Politics. Not only does Antigone problematize the relationship between justice and law, but in many ways the play represents what is at stake in justice distinguished from all other virtues, while tragically reframing the notion of equity and the difficulty of situating justice in the rich life of the community. In this paper I wish to explore the way that justice is operative in the corpus of the law of the political community, according to Aristotle, and examine the same complications through the lens of Antigone. In particular, I argue that by reading Sophocles’ Antigone as a response to Aeschylus’ The Eumenides (or The Oresteia trilogy, broadly), one is confronted by Sophocles’ reprisal of questions concerning justice and just relations—i.e. responsibility, rulership, obligation, rectification, absolution—indicating that these questions do not cease to be necessary with the institution of the polis and civic law. Quite the contrary, Antigone shows us how taking for granted that what is lawful is necessarily what is just, and consequently failing to cultivate the virtue of justice in one’s character, is not merely reprehensible, but can have tragic consequences.
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 54:5, 2011
Sophocles’ Antigone contains the first recorded instance of the word αuτoνoμoς, the source for our word “autonomous”. I argue that reflection upon the human aspiration toward autonomy is central to that work. I begin by focusing on the difficulty readers of the play have determining whether Antigone’s actions in the play should be considered autonomous and then suggest that recognizing this difficulty is crucial to a proper understanding of the play. The very aspects of Antigone’s character that seem to militate against understanding her actions within the play as autonomous—her rejection of life, her intimacy with death and the way she seems defined by her incestuous heritage— serve to illustrate the inherently problematic character of a moral ideal that we can provisionally call Antigone’s autonomy. I show how the movement of the play can be understood in terms of Antigone’s progress from what Kant would characterize as a heteronomous representation of her irremissible duty to bury her dead brother, to a self-conception defined by a recognition and embrace of her autonomy understood as, in Kant’s words, “a respect for something entirely different from life”. Antigone’s autonomy is exemplified by her choice to be dead, the choice to bear the burden of responsibility to her own. This choice, I argue, must be understood as the choice of herself as defined by her obligation to her own. Sophocles’ Antigone suggests that the moral ideal Antigone represents is unliveable, but that this ideal is nonetheless essential to human moral aspiration.
Antigone as Jurisprudence; Antigone's Death as the Origin of Human Rights
2018
Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone articulates the morass of a series of unwinding conceptual juxtapositions, symbolised by the two diametrically opposed protagonists; Antigone and Creon. This key conflict is underscored by the dialectical oppositions of divine and human law, family and state, individual and society, or anarchy and law. In its narrative presentation the two opponents are as much embodiments of irreconcilable principles as of steps in the dialectic of law’s formation. For Costas Douzinas, who views Antigone ‘as a founding text for comprehending human nature’ this is precisely the contention. Douzinas holds that ‘Antigone is as important for the exploration of the origins and force of law and ethics as Freud believed Oedipus was for the foundations of psychoanalysis.’ Thereby, Antigone concerns the interplay of anarchy with law by providing a ‘philosophical foundation of law’. Logically for Douzinas, anarchy is antecedent to law. Because the text is a foundation for law neither protagonist exemplifies anarchy, but instead propound different discourses on law, which becomes the ‘foundation of jurisprudence.’