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. 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.
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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.
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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. In fact, he accepts neither the legitimacy of the sentence nor of the judicial proceedings against him. Antigone's response to her doom is altogether higher.
It enacts the homecoming of individual, fragmented consciousness to the coherence of the Absolute. Hegel cites lines The sacramental overtones in Hegel's idiom are unmistakable. Antigone is set above Socrates, a formidable elevation if we bear in mind the literally talismanic status of Socrates as the wisest and purest of mortals throughout Idealist thought and Romantic iconography.
But 'the most resplendent figure ever to have appeared on earth' takes us further. The phrasing 'makes it almost impossible not to think of Jesus, and to note that Antigone is here placed above him'. This much is clear: Hegel's exaltation of Antigone, whatever its covert 'autobiographical code', what- ever its covert affinities to the lasting ambivalence with which W Kaufmann, Hegel, p ANTIGONES 4' Hegel treats Christian revelation, goes beyond even his aesthetic celebration of the play. And it undermines thoroughly the dialectic of perfect equilibrium between Creon and Antigone.
However, it is the latter which achieves rapid and com- manding influence. In substance, both the theory of tragedy and the specific analyses of Antigone as we know them after the mid-nineteenth century derive from the debate on Hegel. To be more precise: Schlegel when he sees Antigone as making 'visible' the divine agency in human guise and by A. Schlegel when he pronounces Creon to be criminally at fault on the one hand, and Hegel's symmetrical reading on the other the latter becomes generally available after the publica- tion of the third part of the Aesthetik in It is massively expounded in Fr.
Vischer's celebrated Aesthetik, oder Wissenschaft des Schbnen The Hegelian apologia for Creon will not be fundamentally challenged before O. Ribbeck's Sophokles und seine Tragodien of and Wilamowitz-Mollendorff 's desig- nation of Antigone's death as that of a religious martyr in his studies of Greek tragedy towards the end of the century. Modern scholars incline to reject Hegel's interpretation in the seemingly dogmatic, simplified form in which most of them have come to know it.
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They find it discordant with the spirit of Sophoclean drama and with the literal meanings of the Greek text. A number of the most penetrating of recent studies of Antigone are couched in the very terms of the Hegelian scenario. Creon is 'no old fox using his cunning on behalf of might and raison d'etat' — he is a man 'entranced' begeistert and wholly possessed by a vision of civic law.
Vidal- Naquet in the most influential of recent readings, 'aucune ne saurait en elle-meme etre la bonne sans faire a l'autre sa place, sans reconnaitre cela meme qui la borne et la conteste' 'of the two religious attitudes which Antigone sets at odds, neither could by itself be the right one without reserving a place to the other, without acknowledging the very thing which constrains and opposes it'.
Max Scheler's well-known state- ment of the insolubility of essential conflicts within the texture of reality itself and his definition of the tragic are Hegelian to the core: When we experience tragic drama, an ineluctable constituent 'of the World — and not of our ego, of its feelings, of its encounters with pity and fear' is revealed to us.
When Scheler speaks of the 'radiant dark which seems to encircle the head of the "tragic hero'", he is echoing Hegel's image of the 'elect of suffering' and of Antigone in particular. Thus we find in Hegel's successive and, at decisive points, internally contrasting interpretations of the Antigone of Sophocles one of the high moments in the history of reading.
Here 'response' to a classic text engages 'responsibility' 'answerability' of the most vivid moral and intellectual order. The Hegelian Antigone s stand towards Sophocles' heroine' in a relation of transforming echo.
Sub topics
It is this relation, with its paradox of fidelity to the source and autonomous counter-statement, which constitutes the vitality of interpre- tation. On this rare level one can, without irony, compare the hermeneutic with the poetic act. Goethe's literary criticism and interpretation are almost invariably practical. Their occasion, their field of reference relate directly to the needs of his own production. The latter, in turn, will often in- corporate movements of theoretic and functional discourse. The celebrated considerations on Hamlet are integral to the fic- tion of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.
The most penetrating of Goethe's reflections on the spirit of classical art and litera- ture are set out, in scenic form, in the 'Helena Act' of Part II of Faust. It is cardinal to Goethe's sovereign pragmatism, as it is to the epistemology of Kant, that critique is action and that action interprets. Goethe's initial reading of Greek tragedy, with the aid of Latin and of German translations, goes back to He extends his knowledge of the tragedians in the summer of 1 and the autumn and winter of It is, probably, at this time that he read Sophocles.
He rereads him, thoroughly, and with a new German version to hand, in the late summer and autumn of Shakespeare und kein Ende contains a magisterial comparison between classical and modern drama and dramaturgy. The period from to sees Goethe closely concerned with the theory and practice of Greek tragedy in the light of Aristotle's Poetics and of his own attempts to solve the formal problems posed by Faust 1 1.
The dramatic torso Elpenor and the Helena fragment written in September are among the most inward pastiches of Greek tragedy in modern western literature. But any such register trivializes the main point. Goethe's life and work are inseparable from the informing authority of the antique and of Attic art and letters in particular. His remark to F. W Schadewaldt, Goethesludien Aatur und Attertum 'Zurich and Stuttgart, 1 , , for a shorthand but acute survey of the whole vast topic The relevant texts are masterfully assembled in E Grumach, Goethe und die Antike.
In the essay of on 'Winckelmann and his Century' Goethe had crystallized his sense of the Greek paradigm though 'crystal- lized' is the wrong word; because there are centrai fibres of Winckelmann's personal existence which Goethe chooses to disguise, this great essay remains at once, and characteristic- ally, both translucent, and hermetic. Of the races of men, only the ancient Greeks achieved natiirliches Gliick, a 'native, an organic felicity'.
They realized their potential for action on both the personal and communal planes. For the ancient Greeks, actuality was the criterion of worth; for the moderns, values reside solely in what has been thought and felt. For the ancients even 'imagi- naries' Phantasiebilder are 'of bone and marrow'.
Sensibility and concept are not fragmented, they are not severed from the daylit fact. A 'scarcely curable' dissociation between reality and perception mars the modern temper. With it has lapsed the 'naive' presentness of supreme art. The terms of Goethe's dichotomy and of the sorrow which attends them are very nearly Hegelian. It is precisely a concordance between internality and the world which gives to Homer and the three tragedians their exemplary pre-eminence. In the Iliad and in Greek tragedy, word and world are fused under pressure of clear action. If Homer is the sun of all western poetry Goethe will never waver from this conviction , the three tragic poets are the ranking planets.
Goethe's judgement as to their respective magnitudes is not uniform. He finds in the Oresteia an incomparable, a primal immensity of poetic means. Euripides is the principal source for modern experiments in lyric pathos and subtlety of motivation. In the last analysis, however, and just by virtue of his harmonic, median position in the triad, he is the most 1 From to , Goethe is actively engaged in a possible restoration of Euripides' Phatthon.
He will return to this project in He publishes observations on the Cyclops in and ; on the Bacchat in S 45 satisfying of the three. It is in the Philoctetes that tragic pathos is most perfectly rendered. The final transfiguration of Faust is closely modelled on that of blind, aged Oedipus.
In his person, moreover, in his civic eminence and poetic mastery, Sophocles embodies Goethe's own ideal of the concordance of thought and deed. And it is because it explores the rare quality of this concordance that Torquato Tasso seems so Sophoclean. Apparently, the Antigone plays only a muted part in Goethe's argument on tragic drama. One might suppose that the relentless catastrophe of the play repelled Goethe, that what is involved is the notorious question of Goethe's avoidance of conclusive tragedy.
This supposition would, however, be shallow. Goethe saw deep and unflinchingly into human disaster. He did feel that Versohnung 'reconciliation', 'the making of amends' on an almost cosmic scale of values was the most mature outcome of tragic drama.
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Aristotle, for one, had shared this sentiment. But it could, it often had to be, reconciliation at the cost of human immolation and self- immolation. Goethe's formulation in the Nachlese zu Aristoteles Poetik is uncompromising. Versohnung may have to wait on 'eine Art Menschenopfer' 'a kind of human sacrifice' either direct or by surrogate, 'as in the case of Abraham and of Agamemnon'. There is no bridling at terror here.
No, the seeming absence of Antigone from Goethe's explicit comments before 1 8 1 8 reflects, paradoxically, the centrality of the play in one of Goethe's own foremost dramas. The background to Iphigenie , is manifest. Goethe's observations on the treatment of the Philoctetes theme in Sophocles as compared with that in the lost plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and the Latin tragedian Accius Boyd, Iphigenie auf Tauris: Stahl, Iphigenie auf Tauris London, 1 96 1.
Petersen, Goethe und Euripides: Untersuchungen zur Euripides-Reteption in der Goelheteil Heidelberg, , for a thorough investigation of the status of the Iphigenia motif at the time. Rehm, Griechentum und Goetheteit. Geschichte eines Glaubtns 3rd edn. Yet the fabric and spirit of Goethe's play are neither Aeschylean nor Euripidean. The presiding genius is that of Sophocles. Central to the drama is the collision between archaic immediacies of human reflex and the didactic sophistications of the civilizing process.
If 'civilization' prevails over barbaric innocence or the irrational, it can do so only by recognizing the impurities of motive and the part of illusion in itself. In Ajax and Philoctetes, as in Goethe's Iphigenie, reason and civic humanism resort to tactics which are mendacious. The dialectics of the collision, the parity of bias and self- deception as between antagonists, strongly suggest the Hegelian contour of tragic form, a contour, as we saw, patterned on Sophocles.
The stature of Iphigenie largely transcends the duplicities of the conflict in which she is enmeshed; more exactly, Iphigenie enforces on these dupli- cities ethical insights of a rare, Kantian order. This enforce- ment refers us, repeatedly, to the precedent of Antigone.
It is Iphigenie who proclaims the quintessential Sophoclean belief that Gotter sollten nicht Mit Menschen wie mit ihresgleichen wandeln: Das sterbliche Geschlecht ist viel zu schwach, In ungewohnter Hohe nicht zu schwindeln. Gods should not Wander among men as with their peers: The race of mortals is far too weak Not to grow dizzy upon unaccustomed heights. It is from this fatal neighbourhood, of which Holderlin will make the focus of his image of Antigone, that sprang the horrors suffered by Tantalus and his lineage. When Thoas, alert to the inspired interest of Iphigenie's narrative, cautions: This challenging essay, with its emphasis on the Hegelian quality of Goethe's treatment of the collision between 'barbarism' and 'civilization', first appeared in When in compliance, my soul is most at ease and liberty.
But neither in Argos nor here have I learned to bend to the crass fiat of a man. Iphigenie's answer is Antigone's: Wir fassen ein Gesetz begierig an, Das unsrer Leidenschaft zu Waffe dient. Ein andres spricht zu mir: We seize eagerly upon a law Which serves as weapon for our passion. Another ordinance speaks to me, bids me Oppose you. A more ancient law: Which holds every stranger to be holy.
In the moment of supreme bewilderment, knowing her own values compromised by tactical falsehood, Iphigenie turns inward, to the threatened sanctuary of the moral self, as does Antigone: Do I appeal to the goddess for a miracle? Is there no strength in the depths of my soul? The Parzenlied the 'Song of the Fates' is not only one of the summits of Goethe's art. It is a metamorphic re-creation of the choral odes in Antigone. In it are fused the celebrated first stasimon on the vulnerability of man and the chorus's later reflections on the legacy of ruin in the high house of Laius. Goethe elicits the heart of meaning in Sophocles; he communicates the sum of vision beyond the literal parts.
Writing to Goethe in January , Schiller commented that the primary action in Iphigenie was that of das Sittliche, of ethical consciousness. This was Hegel's express term in relation to Antigone. Goethe himself, in Shakespeare und kein Ende, saw in the determinism of ethical consciousness, in the imperative of moral choice das Sollen the root of Greek tragedy.
This imperative, he added, had been most finely articulated in the person of Antigone. Antigone and Goethe's Iphigenie are sisters in spirit. Between ar, d 1 8 1 8, Goethe recast the Latin and German versions of a text of the third century ad, 'The Paintings of Philostratus'. The original consisted of a description of a gallery of antique paintings in a Neapolitan villa. Goethe's motive was frankly didactic. By evoking the mythological depictions in Philostratus, he would furnish contemporary artists with exemplary subjects and conventions of represen- tation.
One of the antique works shows Antigone: Mit einem Knie an der Erde umfasst sie den toten Bruder, der, weil er seine Vaterstadt bedrohend, umgekommen, unbegraben sollte verwesen. Die Nacht verbirgt ihre Grosstat, der Mond erleuchtet das Vorhaben. Mit stummen Schmerz ergreift sie den Bruder, ihre Gestalt gibt Zutrauen, dass sie fahig sei, einen riesenhaften Helden zu bestatten. In der Feme sieht man die erschlagenen Belagerer, Ross und Mann hingestreckt. Ahndungsvoll wachst auf Eteokles' Grabhiigel ein Granatbaum; ferner siehst du zwei als Totenopfer gegeneinander iiber brennende Flammen, sie stossen sich wechselseitig ab; jene Frucht, durch blutigen Saft, das Mordbeginnen, diese Feuer, durch seltsames Erscheinen den unausloschlichen Hass der Bruder auch im Tode bezeichnend.
Translation is by no means easy. Goethe's idiom here is oddly statuesque. Internals moderately toned quite clean no markings of any kind. First printing thus paperback. Fine in illustrated wraps. Grendel Books namus [Books from Grendel Books]. Del Prado Publishers, Part of The Miniature Classics Library series. Translated from the Greek. First edition thus miniature - measures roughly 2" x 2. Fine in a red leather binding. Washington Square Press Inc.
Binding is tight; no creases to spine covers or corners; very slight edge wear; age tanning pages are not brittle; owner information on top edge otherwise pages are clean no marks to text gift messages store stamps remaimder marks stains or moisture damage. Will gift wrap no charge just state the occasion. Illustrated by Demetrios Galanis. Translated into English verse by Francis Storr. Introduction by Thornton Wilder. Quarto, fully bound in burgundy leather with gilt lettering and design, raised bands along spine, all edges gilt, silk moire endpapers, sewn-in ribbon book mark.
With an Introduction by David Grene. First Edition; First Printing. Book condition is Very Good; with a Good dust jacket.
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Toning and edgewear to jacket including a few chips and tears. Corners of flaps are slightly clipped not price clipped. Text is clean and unmarked. Oedipus Rex is the greatest of the Greek tragedies a profound meditation on the human condition. The story of the mythological king who is doomed to kill his father and marry his mother has resonated in world culture for almost years.
The actors spoke in pulsing rhythms with hypnotic forward momentum making it hard for audiences to look away. Interspersed among the verbal rants and duels were energetic songs performed by the chorus. David Mulroy's brilliant verse translation of Oedipus Rex recaptures the aesthetic power of Sophocles' masterpiece while also achieving a highly accurate translation in clear contemporary English. Speeches are rendered with the same kind of regular iambic rhythm that gave the Sophoclean originals their drive.
The choral parts are translated as fluid rhymed songs. Mulroy also supplies an introduction notes and appendixes to provide helpful context for general readers and students. David Mulroy is professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is believed to have written plays but only seven have survived in a complete form.
Mulroy's translation is far superior to other available English verse translations. Some corner edge wear. Notation inside cover back. Parts 1 - 7 in 7 volumes. In fair condition suitable as a study copy. Gilt lettering on spine. Rubbed boards and spine. Internally clean and tight. With An Introduction by Henry Morley. From Morley's Universal Library, uniformly bound with others in the series. Gilt lettered faux vellum spine over blue gray linen boards. Spine very slightly darkened.
Henry Morley was a popular lecturer and prolific writer who did more to promote education and love of literature than any other person in the Victorian era. Illustrated by the author. 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.
- SEN Differentiations: leading to positive interventions.
- Sama Xarit (French Edition).
- Full text of "Steiner, George"?
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- CBT for Psychosis: A Symptom-based Approach (The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis Book Series);
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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.