Antigone - Very useful for later essays, professor is Milofsky. PDF

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Very useful for later essays, professor is Milofsky....

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Session 4 Sophocles’ Antigone

In session 1, we saw that Sophocles was an author that lived and wrote during the golden years of Pericles leadership of Athens. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles does not know of the fall of Athens and enjoys the prosperity and peaceful democracy secured by Pericles’ wise ruling. It is in this context that he writes Antigone , a tragedy that fits perfectly in the ancient Greek search for man’s control over his environment. We saw with Plato, that the trust in wisdom was not as secure as we could hope. We are going to see now that fate can have a devastating impact on human control and that neither knowledge nor practical wisdom can always successfully rescue us.

This session will be organised around two themes: Theme 1: Ethic and conflict of values - Civic loyalty (state law) versus kinship (divine law and family honour) Theme 2: Man’s control over nature and fate- Knowledge, practical deliberation and civilisation versus fate and death. Preparation for the session. ● ● ● ● ● ●

Write your own synopsis of the play. Read the text and try to identify passages related to Antigone’s attachment to kinship and her disdain for state laws that contradict religious or family commitments. Identify passages showing Creon’s blind faith in civic order. In the first stasimon, the chorus list men’s accomplishments and victories over nature. List them and evaluate if the chorus’ enthusiasm is legitimate. Describe women’s position in the Athenian society. Describe Creon as a man and as a leader.

Theme 1: Ethic and conflict of values Civic loyalty (state law) versus kinship (divine law and family honour)

Creon’s and Antigone’s conflict illustrates a clash of values between obedience to human/ state laws on the one hand and obedience to divine/ family laws on the other hand. Creon realizes

only after the lost of his loved ones that he has mistakenly placed the law of the state above the laws of the gods. A few modern issues spring from this conflict: ● ●

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To what extent is adherence to the law of the state or to divine law associated with virtue? Can divine law or kinship justify civil disobedience? Think for example of American segregation or the Apartheid: human rights and ‘divine’ law tells us that we are all equal but state law dictates to differentiate between Black and White. What is the nature of our obligation to family, G-d or the state? What are the limits of our loyalty to friends or family? What is a community and what are our obligations to community members? Think of poverty and homelessness.

Practical wisdom and deliberation (phronein) is a central theme to the play. Isn’t it Haemon declaring to his father: “Father, the gods plant wisdom in mankind, and it is the greatest of our possessions” (638-9)? However, as we shall now see it does not help the main characters to make the right ethical decisions. The dangers of simplified ethical deliberation Polyneceis was Creon’s nephew and a Theban citizen. As such, he should have been buried (see note on previous page). However, Creon only concentrates on what he considers as treason. He does not seem to have any ethical conflict between state and family loyalties. For him the well-being of the city comes first and becomes the single intrinsic good, the unique leading value. He classifies good and bad actions (and people) along this single dividing line i.e. what (and who) are for or against the welfare of the city. Honour and respect are given to those who act for the good of the city (Eteocles) whereas those who betray it (Polyneices) or contravene state laws (Antigone) deserve punishment and dishonour, regardless of their relationship to the agent making the decision. “As for a man who considers someone he loves [referring to Polyneices] to be more important than his country, I say he is nothing” (172-174). Talking about Antigone caught burying her brother, Creon insists that she must be punished: “for if I support relatives who are lawless, then truly I must do the same for others outside my family” (619-620) Creon goes even further: he seems to replace family ties with civic friendship. As Nussbaum claims: “City-family conflicts cannot arise if the city is the family, if our only family is the city.” (p57) Bonds are not imposed by blood anymore but chosen. “Whoever is a good man in his house will be shown to be just in the city ... and I would be confident that this man would be both a good ruler and a willing subject; in the storm of spears, he would remain where he was placed, a trustworthy comrade” (620-629) Man’s place is clear, it is with his fellow citizen, his civic friends and against the ones who acts against the welfare of the city, whether blood relatives or not. Nussbaum argues that sexual and marital relationship must too be subjected to civic duties. Creon discourages his son to marry a ‘bad’ woman. A woman was only the producer of future little citizens and Creon claims that sexual pleasure can only be found

in association with civic good. Haemon cannot want to form a family with a woman who has excluded herself from the civic ‘family’ of the city, can he? As we have just seen, Creon has considerably simplified his deliberation process by singling out one value, namely the good of the city, above family bonds and religious commitments. But one could wonder why Creon can put so much faith in that single value. We need to turn to our now well- known city-ship analogy to get an answer: “our city is our safety, and it is only when she sails safely that we can make friendships. By such principles I will make this city great” (178 -180) A good city makes good friendship. More deeply, the city-ship analogy is “something safely water-tight, a barrier against imminent external dangers...the task of the city, as life saving tool, is the removal of ungoverned chance from human life” (Nussbaum, p59). But is it so? Probably not! It is indeed a bit naive to see the city as a uniform whole made of civic friends. We know that individual’s interests, needs and ambitions are a permanent source of conflicts. The danger to the ship is not necessarily coming from the sea and the external elements but also from inside and from the citizens themselves. The other problem of this simplified understanding of the good and the just is that not everybody can identify with it. As Antigone proves it and, with her the people of Thebes (according to Haemon), civic friendship does not compete with religious commitment; the fear of gods’ punishments and reprisals jeopardise this simple view developed by Creon. Creon himself ends up surrendering to the power of family bonds over civic ones. When his wrong-headed deliberation brings about the death of his son, he comes to realise the folly of his simplistic ethical choice. He acknowledges being lost “So what must I do? Tell me! I will obey’ (1061) as well as being solely responsible for his horrible fate “Stubborn and fatal errors of a mind without reason!... Alas for the misery of my decisions!... You are dead and gone not through your folly, but through mine” (1210-1225) Antigone also seems to stick to a single ethical value, namely philia (“Philos is related to the verb philein 'to love' and can be used as we use the word "friend", but also can be applied to a blood relative and therefore often means something like our "loved one"). Antigone appears rather cold and not particularly affectionate. She is guided by her sense of duty to her brother rather than by love or affection. Indeed, she pushes away quite aggressively her sister in the second episode, reproaching her to have defected to her sisterly duty towards Polyneices. She does not have any nice words or thoughts for her fiancé Haemon and she does not seem to fear any punishment. Like for Creon, her deliberation process is simplified around a single value. Hegel provided a well-known and accepted interpretation of Antigone. “He proposed that the sufferings of the tragic hero are merely a means of reconciling opposing moral claims. According to Hegel's account of Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim. The heroes of ancient tragedy, by adhering to the one ethical system by which they molded their own personality, must come into conflict with the ethical claims of another. It is the moral one-sidedness of the tragic actor, not any negatively tragic fault in his morality or in the

forces opposed to him, that proves his undoing, for both sides of the contradiction, if taken by themselves, are justified." Nussbaum agrees with Hegel about the one sided vision of the protagonists but she argues that they simplified their deliberation process for the purpose of elimination of conflicts and as such were wrong headed. She disagrees with Hegel when he argues that the elimination of conflict is “both an acceptable and plausible aim for a human ethical conception” (p67) She rejects his claim that conflicting single ethical stances can be harmoniously resolve in the protagonists’ respective actions. This conflict free harmony among diverse commitments seems to fit the picture of Pericles’ Athens but does not fit Nussbaum’s interpretation.

About civil disobedience

“The term ‘civil disobedience’ was first coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1848 essay to describe his refusal to pay the state poll tax implemented by the American government to prosecute a war in Mexico and to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. On the most widely accepted account of civil disobedience, famously defended by John Rawls (1971), civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies. On this account, the persons who practice civil disobedience are willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions, as this shows their fidelity to the rule of law. Throughout history, acts of civil disobedience famously have helped to force a reassessment of society's moral parameters. The Boston Tea Party, the suffragette movement, the resistance to British rule in India led by Gandhi, the US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and others, the resistance to apartheid in South Africa, student sit-ins against the Vietnam War, to name a few, are all instances where civil disobedience proved to be an important mechanism for social change. The ultimate impact of more recent acts of civil disobedience – anti-abortion trespass demonstrations, the damaging of military property in opposition to the Iraq war, or acts of disobedience taken as part of the environmental movement or the animal rights movement – remains to be seen. Features of civil disobedience: Conscientiousness: This feature points to the seriousness, sincerity and moral conviction with which civil disobedients breach the law. For many disobedients, their breach of law is demanded of them not only by self-respect and moral consistency but also by their perception of the interests of their society. Through their disobedience, they draw attention to laws or policies that they believe require reassessment or rejection. Whether their challenges are well-founded is another matter. Communication: In civilly disobeying the law, a person typically seeks not only to convey her disavowal and condemnation of a certain law or policy, but also to draw public attention to this particular issue and thereby to instigate a change in law or policy.

Non-violence: A controversial issue in debates on civil disobedience is non-violence. ” Many argue that violence would diminish the impact of the action. For the full article read http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/ 1930 Mahatma Gandhi Started the Civil Disobedience Movement Source: http://www.google.fr/imgres?imgurl=http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/force-mp-gandhi%2 520and%2520crowd.jpg&imgrefurl=http://ratevin.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/1930-mahatma-ga ndhi-started-the-civil-disobedience-movement/&h=567&w=721&sz=111&tbnid=bRp1yJjeyI9JgM :&tbnh=110&tbnw=140&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcivil%2Bdisobedience&zoom=1&hl=fr&usg=__ H03BRYTtm_XGRBGq9wFyYg-TdpI=&sa=X&ei=iOFyTKDcM5GQOKPpmYcL&ved=0CD8Q9Q EwAw

Theme 2: Man’s control over nature and fate Knowledge, practical deliberation and civilisation versus fate and death.

A central theme of Antigone is the tension between Man’s power over his environment and his subordination to gods’ will. Man has increased his knowledge, can deliberate and organise his social life but is still unable to control his fate. This tension raises a few questions:

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How does Oedipus fate impacts on his family’s? How much control do they really have? Can practical deliberation help solve human’s individual dilemma? Is human knowledge and ability to deliberate and organise social life such a great help to man in controlling his destiny? If not is it due to their mistake or is it due to fate? In other words, are all our action commanded by luck and determined or do we have free will?

The role of fate and gods in Greek tragedy Cadmus (founder of Thebes) Labdacus (king)

Menoceus

Laius (king) + Jocasta Oedipus (king) + Jocasta

Creon (king) + Eurydice Megareus

Eteocles (king) Polyneices

Haemon Antigone

Ismene

From the beginning of the story, we know that there is a curse on Labdacus family and that the next two generations of Laius are to be blight. (Read background to the story of Antigone  pp vii, viii). Oedipus and Jocasta are dead from horrible death and suicide; their two sons Eteocles and Polyneices have just killed each other in a fight; Antigone and Ismene are the only survivors of Labdacus’ descendants. Greek tragedy seems full of stories where a curse or a prophecy seems to seal the destiny of a family. Men try to advert the happening of the curse but are unsuccessful in their endeavor. Examples: ●

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Laius who is warned that his son will kill him, pierced his son’s ankles, tied his feet together and abandoned him on Mount Cithareon. Despite all these precautions, Oedipus kills his father not knowing who he is. Similarly, Oedipus who finds out from an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother attempts to avoid this destiny by travelling away from Corinth towards Thebes, not realizing that he was heading straight for troubles in doing so. We can also cite the case of Acrisius king of Argos who was told that he would be killed by his grandson. To avoid this tragedy, he locked in his daughter Danae in a bronze chamber. Little does he know that Zeus has decided otherwise and that he laid with the imprisoned daughter and gave her a son, Perseus, who, as announced by the oracle, later kills his grandfather by accident.

Fate and action Now, fate cannot explain it all. Antigone seems to have a choice. She could do as Ismene and abide by Creon’s edict or decide to go against it. Is she victim of Oedipus’ curse or is she in control of her destiny? Given the curse on her family, we can imagine that she would die soon from another death anyway. She is aware of her fate when she speaks to Creon: ‘I knew I must die – how could I not? – Even if you had not made your proclamation.’ (424-426) More striking is the situation of Creon who, at the outset, is not under any oracle’ spell or curse but seems to bring upon himself the end of his lineage with the death of his younger and last son Haemon. Creon seems to have choice and free will. He is given plenty of warnings and opportunities to change his mind before his destiny is sealed. ● ●

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He is spoken to by Antigone who justifies her position to him (417 – 432): his proclamation cannot override religious commands. Then his son, Haemon, tells him that the citizen of Thebes do not approve of his decision. (644 – 650). He also warns him that he will lose him (‘you will never set eyes on my face again’ 713) Then the well-respected Teiresias tries to bring sense to him but Creon stands by his decision. It’s only when Teiresias realizes that Creon’s obstinate decision is not revocable that he warns him of his forthcoming punishment : by refusing to bury a dead

(Polyneceis) and by burying a living human (Antigone), Creon commits a double religious crime that can only provoke the furies of both the worlds of the dead and of the living and will cost him the life of his last son. (1031-1041)

We saw in theme 1 the limits of practical wisdom (phroneis). However, can knowledge save men from their fate? Role of knowledge The first choral ode or first stasimon seems very hopeful indeed. (306-359). It celebrates man’s skills, courage and resourcefulness, reflecting probably the confident mood of the Athenian democracy and the optimistic view on human progress professed by the sophists. (Antigone ’ s note, p 28) ‘There are many wonders in the world, but none is more wonderful than man’. (306-307) Many translators warn us against the word ‘wonders, wonderful or wondrous’ (deinos ) which is ambiguous in its meaning since it can mean wonderful as well as terrible (i.e., "producing fear"). Nussbaum explains: deinon  frequently implies a disharmony; it can be used to praise as well as to disclose something terrible. The ‘wonderful’ man can turn out monstrous in its ambition to simplify and control the world. (p 52-53) This statement is followed by a very anthropocentric vision of man’s domination over nature which has probably some sophist origin. Indeed, men conquered the sea (308-310) and the earth (311- 314), dominated fauna and used it to their benefit (315-326). Even more importantly, ‘man has taught himself speech, and thought, swift as the wind, and the desire to live in a city.’(327-330). Here we are told of the expand of man’s power, speech thought and social organization is probably his most sophisticated achievement in his fight against nature. Even death that cannot be avoided can at least be under some postponing or monitoring through the discovering of cures (335-338). Man’s inventiveness seems responsible for human progress and has achieved it without divine helps, or so it seems. However, this very glorious beginning is not as hopeful as it seems and the ‘terrible’ (deinos ) side of the ‘wonderful’ coin is to be disclosed. The first caveat is the Hegelian belief in a harmony between gods’ laws and state law. ‘When he [man] combines the law of his country with the justice of the gods he is sworn to, his city stands tall. But he has no city at all, who through reckless daring lives with evil’ (342-347) In theme 1 we developed the subject of the conflict between state and divine laws and the problem raised by the Hegelian belief that both can cohabite harmoniously. However, we read one more issue in these lines: the well-being and destiny of each individual seem intricately linked to the harmonious balance of state and divine laws of the city. The threat affects both Creon and Antigone.

Nussbaum reminds us that it was one of Pericles Athens’ prides to have developed a civic order that incorporates and respects the religious obligations but it certainly did not eliminate all possible tensions between the two and the balance was fragile. (p 67-68) With regards to the Chorus glorious ode to man’s domination over nature, Nussbaum also tempers our enthusiasm: ‘the human being is, in fact, a deinon  thing: a wonderful and strange being not at home in, or in harmony with, the world of nature; a natural being who tears up nature to make himself a home, who then modifies its own nature to make itself cities’ (p 73) Nussbaum details: ●

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we conquered the sea but if we follow the now familiar city-ship analogy, we can see that man can find himself in a turmoil torn between his civic, family and religious commitments and the ship is not as easy to stir as the ode let appear; Man has also to do offence to the ‘oldest of the gods’, Earth, to secure his survival. This debate is incredibly mo...