THE TRAGEDY OF LAW AND THE LAW OF

TRAGEDY IN SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE

MARK S. HOWENSTEIN*

The aura of Antigone envelops law as no other work of art in the

history of Western civilization. In no other work of art are so many
divergent understandings of law to be found in such direct, dynamic
opposition to one another. In no other work of art are the mysterious
depths of law probed more deeply, passionately or reverently-leaving
the spectator in awe and wonder, and in complete bewilderment
regarding the meaning of it all. In no other work of art is law treated
with such clarity and precision in such a profoundly mystical way.
Antigone stands at the height of Greek tragedy and at the origins
of legal philosophy. Hegel deemed it to be "one of the most sublime,
and...consummate works [of the aesthetic spirit],"' and legal thinkers
continue to be inspired by Antigone's "unflinching firmness [which]
shakes the entire foundation of arbitrary government."2 In this great
work, the tragedy of law and the law of tragedy come together in a
distressingly all-too-familiar way.
Sophocles wrote Antigone in 442 B.C. Although it was the first
completed work of his Oedipus Cycle, it recreates the final events of the
saga. The first two plays disclose the central themes that draw the
trilogy to its tragic conclusion: the driving inevitability of fate, the
devastating divisiveness of hubris, and the redemptive possibilities of
suffering. These three forces of fate, hubris, and redemption pervade
Antigone-definingthe dialectic of law and tragedy that lies at its core.
Oedipus the King, the first play of the trilogy, depicts the downfall
of Oedipus, king of Thebes, as he comes to realize the underlying horror
of his existence. Throughout the play his insatiable hunger for
knowledge propels him down a dreadful path of self-discovery. His
relentless inquiry into the causes of King Laius' death reveals that he
has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and has
incestuously begotten four children by her. Overcome by disgrace, he
gouges out his eyes and goes into exile, attempting to escape the misery
that he alone has wrought.
So Oedipus falls-from revered king of Thebes and solver of the
riddle of the sphinx to a self-blinded, thoroughly degraded parricide,
who is banished from Thebes and driven into exile. The tragic

Associate Professor of Law and Society, Ramapo College of New Jersey.

1 G.W.F. Hegel, 2 THE PMILOSOPHY OF FINE ART 215 (New York: Hacker Art Books,
1975) (Osmaston trans.).
2 David Daube, CIvIL DISOBEDIENCE IN ANTIQUITY 8 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1972).
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

devastation of this fall is rivaled only by the peaceful resignation

through which he reconciles himself with his fate and reaffirms his
humanity in Oedipus at Colonus.
For years Oedipus silently endures his suffering, probing ever
further into the depths of his guilt. After years of wandering with only
his daughter Antigone by his side, he comes at last to his final resting
place at Colonus, a sacred grove dedicated to the Furies-a most
appropriate place to make peace with his tormented soul. During the
course of this work, Oedipus is transfigured and resurrected. The
desperate self-renunciation with which he went into exile gradually
evolves into a transcendental reaffirmation of life through which he
comes to embrace his fate. He stands: cursing Creon's attempts to lure
him back to Thebes; condemning his two sons, who are vying for his
kingdom, to die by one another's hands; and consoling his two daughters
as he triumphantly approaches his death.
Oedipus the King depicts man's insatiable striving to know that
drives him to the abyss of his being, from which he recoils in horror.
Incessantly conscious activity consumes itself, leaving only passive
resignation in its wake. In this regard, it is the great archetype of
Schopenhauer's sense of tragedy as the representation of the
overwhelming misfortune and terror of life--"the unspeakable pain, the
wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the
scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the
innocent'-from which the only possible escape is consummate self-
renunciation.4
In contrast, Oedipus at Colonus portrays the serenity that may yet
come after years of thoughtfully enduring the suffering which flows
from this terrifying human experience. At Colonus, Oedipus is
regenerated to act anew in a transcendentally recreative way. A higher
form of activity emerges out of such solemn perseverance, one which
overcomes, however momentarily, the tragedy of human existence.
According to Nietzsche, "[tihis activity (so different from his earlier

Those spirits of retribution to whom all wrongdoers must inevitably pay their due.
'Arthur Schopenhauer, 1 THE WOELD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION 253 (New York:
Dover Publications 1966) (Payton trans.). Though Schopenhauer linked the tragic with
the sublime, the former demanded a willful negation of the will before the omnipotence
of fate, while the latter engendered a suspension of the will before the awesome splendor
of the sublime. Both experiences affect the will, but in radically opposing ways-one of self-
renunciation, the other of open receptivity.
2000 Antigone

conscious striving, which had resulted in pure passivity) will extend far
beyond the limited experience of his own life."5
Oedipus at Colonus follows Oedipus the King with a reaffirmation
of life that surpasses mere self-renunciation-providing the basis of both
Hegel's and Nietzsche's criticisms of Schopenhauer's understanding of
tragedy. Together, the Oedipus plays depict the tragic progress of all
great human action: the destructive conflict that inspires synthetic
recreation.
The profound poet tells us that a man who is truly noble is incapable
of sin; though every law, every natural order, indeed the entire [moral
world, may] perish by his actions, those very actions will create a circle
of higher
6
consequences able to found a new world on the ruins of the
old.
These two tragedies form the ground from which Antigone arises.
The driving inevitability of fate marches through them, while the ever
present temptation of hubris threatens to level every call to greatness.
Although this collision between will (hubris)and world (fate) prepares
the way for Oedipus' mysterious redemption, these plays do not
culminate in a final reconciliation of these tragic forces, but rather with
a sense of foreboding-of collisions yet to come, and higher orders yet to
be attained. The Oedipus plays reveal, but do not resolve, the dialectic
of law and tragedy. It is left to Antigone to fully develop this theme, and
to effectuate its proper resolution.

I. THE TRAGEDY OF LAw

Although Antigone and Ismene hasten from Colonus to Thebes to

try to stop their brothers from fighting over the kingdom, they are too
late. Oedipus' curse unfolds: Thebes has repelled Argos, and Polyneices
and Eteocles have slain one another in mortal combat. Creon, their
uncle and next of kin, succeeds to the throne, which he had so
emphatically disowned in Oedipus the King, yet now seizes with such
fervor.
He issues his first command-a proclamation which will prove as
fateful as that of Oedipus to uncover the murderer of Laius at any cost.
Eteocles is to be given a sacred burial due a hero, while the body of

' Friedrich Nietzsche, THE BIrTHOFTRAGEDY 60 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday
& Company, 1967) (Golffing trans.)
6 Id. at 60.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

Polyneices is to be left exposed to the elements to rot and to be eaten by

wild beasts-a punishment befitting a traitor.7
Eteocles, who died as a man should die, fighting for his country, is to
be buried with... all the ceremony that is usual when the greatest
heroes die; but his brother, Polyneices, who broke his exile to come
back with fire and sword against his native city and the shrines of his
fathers' gods ... is to have no burial: no man is to touch him or say the
least prayer for him; he shall lie on the plain, unburied; and the birds
and the scavenging dogs can do with him whatever they like.'
Creon's edict triggers the downfall of each of Antigone's four main
charactersjust as Oedipus' decree in Oedipus the King drove him to his
own demise. This law, which Creon willfully commands, Ismene
submissively obeys, Haimon rationally contests and Antigone resolutely
defies, propels the action of the play to its tragic conclusion, in which
both Antigone and Haimon have killed themselves, and Creon and
Ismene are left utterly broken and alone.
Antigone raises two fundamental questions: What is law? And what
is the appropriate standpoint to be taken toward law? It does so by
presenting four distinct standpoints toward law in a series of three
interdependent, mutually destructive conflicts, each of which regards
law in a substantially different way. These three conflicts reveal
Antigone's overwhelming devastation as well as its transcendent
possibilities.

A. The CentralConflict of Law

The central and most apparent conflict in Antigone is a conflict of

laws-a mutually destructive collision between positive, man-made law
and the eternal laws of the gods. This is most clearly seen in the initial
encounter between Creon and Antigone following her thwarted burial
of her brother and subsequent arrest. This confrontation is the focal
point of the tragedy, for here Antigone takes her stand, one which will
ultimately claim her life, but in the process will devastate Creon as well.

' The Greeks believed that unless the body of the dead was given appropriate burial
rites, the spirit would suffer a torturous and restless afterlife and would wreak revenge
upon those who had neglected their duty to provide such a burial.
s ANTIGoNE at 193. Faintly, in the background of this first lawgiving, one can hear the
Chorus' prior admonition of Oedipus: 'Judgments too quickly formed are dangerous."
OEDIPUS THE KING at 31. Of the many versions of The Oedipus Cycle, I have chosen to
use the Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald translation (New York. Harcourt Bruce
Jovanovich, 1977) (1939) because of its simplicity, directness and poetic flow which tends
to highlight, rather than to obscure, the dramatic conflict seething within this great work.
2000 Antigone 497

All of the preliminary dialogues of this work set the stage for this
confrontation, while all of its subsequent action is directly determined
by it.
Creon:
And yet you dared defy the law.
Antigone:
I dared.
It was not God's proclamation. That final Justice
That rules the world below makes no such laws.
Your edict, King, was strong,
But all your strength is weakness itself against
The immortal unrecorded laws of God.
They are not merely now: they were, and shall be
Operative for ever, beyond man utterly.
I knew I must die, even without your decree:
I am only mortal. And if I must die,
Surely this is no hardship: can anyone
Living, as I live, with evil all about me,
Think death less than a friend? This death of mine
Is of no importance; but if I had left my brother
Lying in death unburied, I should have suffered.
Now I do not.
Already in this initial exchange, it is obvious that there will be no
reconciliation between these two antagonists so long as they remain so
recalcitrant to one another. It becomes ever more apparent that there
is no common ground between them. Creon's outraged accusations
collide with Antigone's defiant justification, driving them both to their
inevitable doom.
This dialogue sets the unequivocal boundaries of the ensuing
conflict. Where Creon sees only blatant guilt in Antigone's "breaking the
given laws and boasting of it," Antigone claims that "there is no guilt in
reverence for the dead." When Creon demands punishment for her
insolent deeds, Antigone claims: "I should have praise and honor for
what I have done." And while Creon distinguishes between the wicked
traitor and the just hero, arguing that no death rites are due the enemy,
Antigone questions: "Which of us can say what the gods hold wicked?",
asserting that "there are honors due all the dead." In her most revealing
self-assertion, Antigone declares: "It is my nature to join in love, not
hate" 0 -a remark that not only discloses the extent of their

9 ANTIGONE at 203.
'0 ANTIGoNE at 204-6.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

estrangement from one another, but opens a possibility for their

reconciliation as well.
Although it is quite apparent from this dialogue that Antigone and
Creon hold substantially divergent understandings of law, the depth of
this divergence is only intimated by the degree oftheir acrimony toward
one another. Neither of them truly understands the other. Indeed, it is
probable that mutual understanding is not possible at all.
Understanding, like communication, is grounded in commonality.
As Nietzsche has noted, what is not common cannot be communicated,
or understood. "To understand one another, it is not enough that one
use the same words; one [must] also use the same words for the same
species of inner experiences; in the end one [must] have one's experience
in common.""
Although both Antigone and Creon are of the nobility, they by no
means share common life-experiences. Antigone's accursed lineage and
incestuous birth isolate her from all others (with the possible exception
of Ismene, her sister). Of Creon's origins, little is known. As a woman
in ancient Greece, Antigone is thoroughly marginalized, as Creon so
often maintains. Furthermore, for an untold number of years, Antigone
wandered with Oedipus in exile, suffering fully the misery of his
horrible deeds, while Creon enjoyed all the luxuries of palace life in
Thebes. Antigone's return to her devastated homeland, the war torn
city of Thebes, and to her two deceased brothers contrasts sharply with
Creon's sudden rise to power. (Of Creon's origins, little is known.) Such
uncommon life-histories generate substantially divergent inner life-
experiences which tend to exacerbate their underlying lack of
commonality, and inhibit their ability to mutually understand, or
communicate with, one other. Creon and Antigone talk past one
another, becoming ever more adamant in their positions and ever more
infuriated by the other's lack of understanding.
In a peculiarly modem way, this initial confrontation between
Creon and Antigone represents a conflict of laws-a collision between
two standpoints regarding the essence of law. According to Creon, who
stands as the autocratic ruler, law is the product of his willful
command. 'This is my command .... That is my will. Take care that you
do your part." Throughout the play, Creon calls his law: "my command,"
"my will," "my voice" and "my right"'2 -always focusing on law as a thing
of his own making, in accordance with his rights and powers as king.

" Friedrich Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 216 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)
(Kaufinann trans.).
12 ANTIGONE at 193 and 215.
 2000 Antigone 499

This law "must be obeyed, in all things, great and small, just and
unjust. 18
In contrast, according to Antigone, who stands as the autonomous
subject, law is a gift of the gods and of one's tradition-a gift that one
receives as one's own. Throughout the play, Antigone calls the law that
she obeys: "the demands of the dead," "the laws of the gods," "the final
Justice that rules the world below" and "the laws of heaven."14 The law
that moves her is not of her own making, but is rather a law that has
been given to her and that she has made her own. This law is supreme,
and all kingly edicts to the contrary15
are "weakness itself against the
immortal unrecorded laws of God."
Both of these standpoints toward law are more fully developed in
two other conflicts that compose this play. Both of these encounters
occur between primary family members-settings that promise slightly
less antagonism, as well as prior common ground, for the confrontations
to come. These supplementary collisions serve to temper these two
antithetical standpoints, thereby revealing what is at issue in their
opposition to one another.

B. The Problem ofLawful Rule

Creon's standpoint toward law is further developed in his con-

frontation with his son, Haimon. After Creon has condemned Antigone
to die for her defiant deed, Haimon, Antigone's betrothed, challenges
the wisdom of his father's decree. The conflict that follows concerns the
essence of ruling-primarily, the proper standpoint of the ruler toward
law. The relationship of father to son provides a particularly conducive
context in which to grapple with this issue, since its ambience of
subservience and power is so evocative of that between a ruler and his
subject about which they so adamantly disagree. 6
According to Creon, ruling is grounded in the incontestable power
of the sovereign and the absolute subservience of his people.

I'll have no dealings

With lawbreakers, critics of the government:

's ANTIGONE at 212.

14 ANTIGONE at 188, 203, 222.
ANTIGONE at 203.
z In ancient Greece, the power of the father over his son was quite despotic, though
it was limited. A father could expose his son on a distant mountaintop (as Laius had done
to Oedipus), but he could not enslave him, and a son upon marriage was freed from his
father's rule.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

Whoever is chosen to govern should be obeyed-

Must be obeyed, in all things, great and small,
Just and unjust!...
The man who knows how to obey, and that man only,1 7
Knows how to give commands when the time comes.

Unconditional obedience and unbridled command are mutually consti-

tutive of this type of ruler. Both must be secured by the sovereign by
neutralizing every form of opposition to his rule." The power of this
sovereign necessarily rests upon a public order that establishes his
unopposed command by way of unconditional obedience, and vice versa.
Haimon is only too aware of this frightful truth and its imminent
dangers. His beloved Antigone has been sentenced to death for violating
this public order. So he challenges his father, proposing certain limits
on his power to rule. According to Haimon, ruling is grounded in reason,
morality, the good of the city and the laws of the gods, and the ruler
must act accordingly.
Yet Haimon is in an awkward position to assert himself.As Creon's
unmarried son, he is subject to his father's will. Therefore he begins by
invoking public opinion, but soon his deference fades and he admonishes
his father openly.
Reason is God's crowning gift to man...
I beg you, do not be unchangeable:
Do not believe that you alone can be right.
The man who maintains that only he has the power
To reason correctly, the gift to speak
... turns out to be empty.
It is not reason never to yield to reason!
In flood time you can see how some trees bend,
And because they bend, even their twigs are safe,
While stubborn trees are torn up roots and all....
... [Ideally] men should be right by instinct;

17 ANTIGoNE at 212. See also, Friedrich Nietzsche, "Of Self-Overcoming," in Thus

Spoke Zarathustra,an insightful allegory regarding the mutual interdependence of
obedience and command, as well as the inherent impediments of commanding itself.
" Hence Creon's concern about Antigone's "anarchy":

Anarchy, anarchy! Show me a greater evil!

This is why cities tumble and the great houses [fall].

ANTIGONE at 212.
2000 Antigone

But since we are all too likely to go astray,

The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.19

However, what appears to be a direct challenge to his father's

authority is only a fervent plea for him to be flexible in his judgement,
to be openly receptive to change should change be in order, and to listen
and learn "from those who can teach." Unfortunately, this plea falls on
deaf ears. Creon is incapable of heeding anyone-overwhelmed as he is
by his overpowering will.
Nevertheless, deep within this plea lies a premonition and a
warning to his father: to beware of the crime of hubris. The man who
maintains that he alone is right, "that only he has the power to reason
correctly, the gift to speak...turns out [to be] empty." According to
Aristotle, hubrisis the great sin of the unrestrained will, and the tragic
flaw (hamartia)in Creon's character. It ultimately alienates him from
all those he should, but cannot, love-from his son, from his niece, and
even from the gods. This warning, like the plea that contains it, goes
unheeded by Creon. And so father and son collide on the way to their
tragic demise.
Creon:
And the City proposes to teach me how to rule?...
My voice is the one voice giving orders in this City!

Haimon:
It is no City if it takes its orders from one voice.

Creon:
The State is the King!

Haimon:
Yes, if the State is a desert....

Creon:
So? Your "concern"!
In a public brawl with your father!

Haimon:
How about you, in a public brawl with justice?

'0 ANIGONE at 212-14. In Haimon's plea, one can already hear the desperate cry of the
ancient Greeks for salvation from a degenerating world-the cry which so moved Socrates
to raise the rule of reason over the tyranny of the passions! Creon, as much as any other
Sophoclean character, represents the instincts gone awry, and the desperate need for
reason to control them.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

Creon:
With justice, when all I do is within my rights?
Haimon:
You have no rights to trample on God's right.'
What a contrast to the stand that Creon had previously taken, when
he was accused of treason!2 1 How quickly has he forgotten those costly
lessons regarding such hasty and unbridled judgement.
In the final analysis, Creon and Haimon collide over two radically
divergent understandings of the essence of ruling which are grounded
in two antithetical standpoints of the ruler toward law. Creon asserts
the power of authoritarian rule, while Haimon upholds the justice of
rational rule. Creon's rule is that of a close-minded despot, whereas
Haimon envisions a ruler who is an openly receptive subject as well.
According to Creon, law is the product of the ruler's willful
command. Law is the ruler's creation, an assertion of his will. Thus, the
proper relation between this ruler and the law is one of a creator to his
creation-evoking a standpoint of willful closure. As Nietzsche so clearly
perceived, this type of ruler must foreclose any opposition that
challenges the authority of his will, even his own creation,since his all-
powerful will must overcome every obstacle that comes before it,
including the very laws of its own making. "Whenever the living
commands, it hazards itself. Indeed, even when it commands itself, it
must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge, the
avenger, and the victim of its own law."' In this sense, ruling is willful
self-assertion and the imposition of law upon one's subjects, and the
inevitable attitude of this ruler to the law so created is one of arrogance,
adamance and eventual repulsion.
According to Haimon, law is given to the ruler-a gift that he passes
on to his people. Thus, the proper relation between this ruler and the
law is one of a receiver of a gift to the gift so received, necessitating a
standpoint of open receptivity. This ruler must be ever open to his
tradition, listening attentively to the voices of custom, reason and
justice, and especially the gods, to be able to receive and convey such a

" ANTIGONE at 214-15.

2' See OEDIPUS THE KING at 31-32.
2 Friedrich Nietzsche, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA (imTHE PORTABLE NIETZSCHE) 226
(New York: Viking Press, 1968) (Kaufmann trans.).
2000 Antigone

gift. In this sense, ruling is attending to the law and sharing it with
one's subjects, and the appropriate attitude of this ruler to the law so
received is one of wonder, thanks and humble obedience.'
Ultimately, Creon stands as the classical tyrant, who is neither
bound by his own law, nor by any other criterion outside of his all-
powerful will. His law is a law of willful assertion and of appearance-of
manifest power, and of'orders backed by threats.' Creon is haunted by
appearance, specifically by any appearance of weakness in himself or
instability in his governance. He maintains order and commands the
obedience of his subjects explicitly by way of threats, which need only
appear to be real. However, such a law of pure self-assertion verges on
hubris, and a law of threat must be apparent to instill obedience, since
compliance can only be coerced through the threat-value of this law.
In other words, if Creon's subject does not believe that a threat will
be executed, she will not obey the law. Therefore, he makes his threats
clear and imminent. But what if the threat does not appear as a threat
to this subject? What if the subject is not afraid to die (Creon's typical
threat)? Law as threat relies upon fear, as well as belief. If the subject
is not afraid, the threat cannot compel her obedience. This is yet
another reason why Creon's law never reaches Antigone or Haimon.
Neither of them is afraid of his threats, because neither of them is
afraid to die.
I knew I must die, even without your decree:
I am only mortal. And if I must die, ....
[I say that this crime is holy.]
This death of mine
Is of no importance; but if I had left my brother
Lying in death unburied, I should have suffered.
Now I do not.'
Indeed, Creon's understanding of law and of the proper standpoint of
the ruler toward law requires a specific type of subject-one who will
cower before, and submit to, these orders backed by threats. Ismene,
unlike Antigone, represents such a subject.

The ambiguity of obedience permeates Antigone. Here, it retains much of its root
meaning [fr. L. ob-audire: to listen to].
4 See H.L.A. Hart, THE CONcEPT OF LAW, ch. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1961) for a critique of this concept of law.
n ANTIGONE at 203, and 188. Haimon concludes his confrontation with his father in a
similar vein-threatening to take his own life should his father not change his course.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

C. Lawful Obedience and Being Subject

Antigone's standpoint toward law is further developed in her

confrontation with her sister, Ismene. After Creon has prohibited
Polyneices' death rites, Antigone solicits her sister's support to bury
their brother in violation of Creon's law. The conflict that follows
concerns obedience-primarily, the proper standpoint of the subject
toward law. Sisterhood provides a particularly conducive context in
which to grapple with this issue, since its intimate atmosphere of
bonded subordination evokes the fraternity of equal subjects under the
law in which they so adamantly disagree.
Antigone opens with the two sisters thrown into a abysmal
situation. Besides losing both of their brothers in mortal combat with
one another, they have now been forbidden to fulfill their duty to bury
one of them. And so their suffering mounts.
Ismene, dear sister,
You would think that we have already suffered enough
For the curse on Oedipus:
I cannot imagine any grief
That you and I have not gone through. And now-
... Creon has sworn
No one shall bury [Polyneices], no one mourn for him,
But his body must lie in the fields, a sweet treasure
For carrion birds to find as they search for food.
...and the penalty-
Stoning to death in the public square!26
A mood of desperation engulfs them, one which pervades the entire
play. Through their plight, the sisters confront the underlying horror of
their existence: that they alone are responsible for the evil and the
injustice into which they have been thrown: that no matter how helpless
they may feel before the forces which have befallen them, they must
respond accordingly. The ensuing dialogue presents the collision
between their conflicting responses to their common tragic fate.
Out of the depths of her desperation shines the resolution of
Antigone's response. "Ismene, I am going to bury him. Will you come?"'
There is no question about what she will do. Her action is absolutely
predetermined from the beginning. Although Antigone does justify her
action, she does so out of a prior conviction to act and only in response
to the provocation of others. The only question is whether Ismene will

21 ANTiGoNE at 185-86.
27 ANTIGoNE at 187.
2000 Antigone 505

join her. But though Ismene will falter, Antigone is desperately

determined to act.
I will bury him; and if I must die,
I say that this crime is holy: I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.

It is the dead,
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die forever...
I am only doing what I must.'
Antigone's resolve is striking. She fully embraces this action as her
own-maintaining throughout the play the same resolute purpose that
originally moves her to act. But while her determination is so evident,
her identity (who she is) remains concealed in the mysterious depths of
her fateful deed. This is rather unsettling, since her resolution
emanates precisely from who she is, and this identity is bewildering
indeed.29
Antigone is Polyneices' loving sister, whose duty it is to administer
the sacred burial rites to her brother. As the last descendant in the line
of Laius, the final burden of this accursed lineage has fallen on her
alone. As this ancient curse presses to its conclusion, she hastens to
bury her brother and to snatch him from the clutches of his tragic fate.
Antigone is the chosen one, the champion of the gods, who must
right the wrong inflicted upon her brother at any cost. Her disgust with
this injustice and her obsession to remedy this wrong drive her on. She
cannot wait for divine intervention-whether by fate, the Furies or the
gods themselves. She alone must right this wrong! Is it her duty which
calls her so? Or has she fallen into temptation to be a god herself?. Is her
self-righteous resolve simply another insidious form of hubris,the great
flaw of the tragic hero?
Antigone is a terribly impatient human being... -whose thirst for
justice, whose passion for the ideal, are such that they cannot wait
even for God.... [By plunging] ahead alone [to set things right] ... ,
she challenges more than Creon, who is only a despicable human agent

ANTIGONE at 188-89.
"Antigone is a classic example of the fundamental identity of character, thought and
action, which according to Aristotle is one of the essential foundations of tragedy.
Aristotle, POETICS, VI, 2-17.
506 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

She becomes an inspired 'anti-god', who challenges the gods themselves....

And thus she is destroyed.'"
Yet Antigone is also the sister-daughter of Oedipus, for whom death
is no longer a threat but a long-awaited solace. She alone attended to
her self-blinded father during his long years in exile. She alone suffered
with him through all the horrors of his abominable deeds. She alone is
so painfully aware of the tragic fate that hovers over her
family-drawing them all to their doom. She alone remembers, as no
other possibly can. In her god-forsaken solitude, she cries out in agony
of her incestuous birth to the only being who can truly appreciate and
harbor her horrid secret.
Unspeakable horror of son and mother mingling:
Their crime, infection of all our family!
O Oedipus, father and brother!
Your marriage strikes from the grave to murder mine.
I have been a stranger here in my own land:
All my life
The blasphemy of my birth has followed me.31
Can one plagued by so much misery and enclosed in such solitude
not yearn for the solace of a peaceful death, especially when her only
confidants lie waiting there? In several crucial passages, Antigone
explicitly embraces her impending death.32 Is she merely prepared to die
to assure her brother's burial? Or is she resolved to sacrifice herself for
the sake of an ideal? Or rather is she simply seeking the one place
where she may still feel welcome and at home?
[Antigone] provokes the death sentence [compelling Creon] to send her
to the one house upon this earth in which she can speak freely of who
she is[-Ithe tomb of her father. Thus she forces Creon to bury her alive.
For in her live burial she can... cry out the truth of her identity ....
She is the bride of death and Creon has merely been the vulgar
instrument of her will and of her solitude.'

so George Steiner, ANTIGONE 8-9 (Williton, Somersett: Messrs. Cox, Sons & Co., 1979)
(The Twelfth Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, delivered at the University of Exeter,
March 2, 1979). This interpretation is based on Friedrich Holderlin's translation of
Antigone, specifically 921-23: "Could it be that I have sinned against the gods? Why is it
that they now leave me all alone?"
31 ANTIGONE at 220.
See id. at 208,221: "0tomb, vaulted bride-bed in eternal rock, Soon I shall be with
my own again... [my father, my mother, and dearest Polyneices]."
3 Steiner, supra note 30, at 7. This interpretation is based on Soren Kierkegaard,
EITHER/OR, vol. I, "The Ancient Tragic Motif as Reflected in the Modem."
2000 Antigone

Antigone's action is not only one of self-affirmation and self-

fulfillment, it is also one of self-consummation. It is the ultimate
actualization of her most fundamental commitments and con-
victions-the great deed in which she literally consumes herself.Who she
is has determined what she will do, and what she will do will be to enact
the totality of her being.
The contrast between Antigone's embrace of her action and Ismene's
rejection of it could not be greater. Ismene responds to Antigone's
proposal with a list of excuses for not joining in this action-for not
actingat all: because the law forbids it; because the personal danger is
too great; because she is a woman; and because she is helpless before
the power of this law.
Bury him! You have just said the new law forbids it.
... think of the dangerl Think what Creon will do!...
Think how... terrible...
Our own death would be if we should go against
Creon
And do what he has forbidden! We are only women,
We cannot fight with men, Antigone!
The law is strong, we must give in to the law
In this thing, and in worse. I beg the Dead
To forgive me, but I am helpless: I must yield
To those in authority....
They [the laws of the gods] mean a great deal to me;
but I have no strength
To break laws that were made for the public good."
Each of these excuses is grounded in the overwhelming power of
Creon's law, rather than in its inherent justice. Ismene is caught in a
moral dilemma. More than any other character, she suffers the injustice
of Creon's law, since she knows this law to be unjust and yet succumbs
to it. Thus, she begs for forgiveness from the dead.
Ismene refuses to join in Antigone's action, because she is
persuaded by external coercion, rather than by internal conviction.
Creon's edict is strong. The danger is evident. The coercion is
overwhelming. And the obstacles are great. So she falls before the
apparent impossibility, as well as the imminent dangers, of this action.
"But can you do it? I say that you cannot. ... Impossible things should
not be tried at all."' For Ismene, what is has come to govern what ought
to be.

ANTIGONE at 187-88.
s ANTIGONE at 189.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

Ismene's tragedy lies in the choice she has made. Through this
fateful choice, she does not affirm or fulfill herself, but rather resigns
herself to Creon's law, and therefore, to Creon's will and to Creon's
world. Who she is has become totally determined by that law.
Ismene has made her choice, and Antigone leaves her with it. Here
the sisters partq-victims of their divisive responses to their common
tragic fate. Yet, as incompatible as these two standpoints may be, they
do belong together, for only in contrast to one another is the depth of
their divergence fully appreciated. Antigone's resolution is most striking
in contrast to her sister's submission and her self-affirmation shines
like a star in the night against the impenetrable darkness of Ismene's
self-resignation.
Unlike Antigone, who enters the play completely predetermined,
Ismene is trapped in a moral dilemma which unfolds as the play pro-
ceeds. Unlike Antigone, who is who she must be, Ismene is who Creon's
law says she must be; and unlike Antigone, who stands by her deed
until her death, Ismene recants her inaction when she discovers how far
she has fallen and how alone she will be. 7 Alas, it is too late!
Antigone and Ismene collide through their conflicting responses to
their common tragic fate. Their fate has driven them to confront their
mutual responsibility for the evil and the injustice into which they have
been thrown. Ismene recoils in horror, only to fall into the depths of
Creon's law, while Antigone embraces the opportunity to act and to be
who she must be. Ismene's resignation (Schopenhauer) and Antigone's
reaffirmation (Hegel and Nietzsche) represent the two classic responses
to the tragedy of being human. Together, they reveal what it means to
obey the law.
In the final analysis, the sisters collide over two radically divergent
understandings of obedience, which are grounded in two antithetical
standpoints of the subject toward law. Antigone embraces the burden
of her autonomy, while Ismene cowers before Creon's law.
According to Antigone, law is a gift of the gods-a gift that is given
to every subject to be received and to be made one's own. Thus, the
proper relation between this subject and the law is one of a receiver of
a gift to the gift so received, necessitating a standpoint of open
receptivity. This subject must be ever open to receive such a gift-

'a At this rupture (In. 71-81), the Greek "dual-form" which has literally bound the
sisters together is abandoned. See Gisela Dibble, "Antigone: From Sophocles to Holderlin
and Brecht," in Karelisa V. Hartigan (ed.), LEGACYOFTHESPIS: DRAMAPASTANDPRESENT
(Lanham, Maryland: University Press of American, 1984).
37ANTIGONE at 206-7.
2000 Antigone

waiting patiently and attentively for its bestowal, and in turn,

appropriating what is given as one's own. In this sense, obedience is
attending to the law and acting accordingly, and the appropriate
attitude of this subject to the law so received is one of wonder, humility
and grateful appropriation.
According to Ismene, law is imposed upon the subject to compel her
compliance with its commands. Thus, the proper relation between this
subject and the law is one of a slave to her master-evoking a standpoint
of subservient enclosure. This subject is enslaved by the will of her
sovereign. In this sense, obedience is submitting to the will of another,
and the attitude of this subject to the law imposed upon her must be one
of fear, helplessness and resignation.
Ultimately, Antigone stands as the autonomous subject, who is
bound to a law that is given to her and that she makes her own. Any
law to the contrary must be defied. Her law is a law of open receptivity
and appropriation-of committed and responsible self-rule. And yet, she
becomes absolutely closed to Creon's law.
Antigone is plagued by the burden and ambiguity of her autonomy,
for though the law that she receives requires her open receptivity, the
law that she makes her own invites her willful closure. Thus, Creon's
law never reaches her. Antigone, paradoxically no less than Creon, is
adamantly closed to any law other than her own.
In other words, Antigone's resolute determination may be her most
tragic flaw (hamartia),as well as her greatest strength-especially in
her confrontation with a willful ruler such as Creon. Adamant
antagonism can only lead to mutual destruction. Indeed, Antigone's
understanding of law and of the proper standpoint ofthe subject toward
the law envisions a certain type of ruler-one who receives and
appropriates law in a similar way to his subjects. Haimon, unlike Creon,
represents such a ruler.

D. Perspective,Appearance and Possibility

Is law merely a matter of perspective? Or is one of these standpoints

the right one? According to most scholars, Antigone's standpoint is the
proper one. After all, both the conversions of Creon and Ismene point in
this direction. But if this is so, why is Antigone destroyed, as well as
Creon and Ismene? Indeed, why are all four characters mutually
destroyed? If there is one correct standpoint, why is there no clear
victor?
Antigone is a tragedy of appearance-full of characters who are
overly concerned with appearance, and those who appear other than
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

who they are. This is particularly true of the two main characters.
Creon constantly asserts the power of his law-not out of any authentic
sense of his overwhelming majesty, but because he so fears any sign of
weakness in his rule. In contrast, Antigone projects an affirmative
assertion of her will before the tragic inevitability of her fate, but one
which is pervaded by hubris, as well as an underlying renunciation of
the will to live. What originally appears as praiseworthy, zealous
resolve begins to show signs of excessiveness, bordering on outright
hubris; and what once appeared as authentic self-affirmation fades
away into the self-renunciation of a death wish. Nothing is quite as it
seems.
Antigone encompasses both of the great classical responses to the
tragedy of being human. The key to her universal appeal lies in this
uncanny, Janus-like identity, for she is a unity of opposing forces that
eventually tear her apart, and yet in the very process mysteriously
redeem her. InAntigone, self-affirmation collides with self-renunciation
exposing the groundlessness of the human condition. Antigone's
impatience before the gods reflects her ethical one-sideness through
which she violates the absolute justice that she claims to represent,
while her death wish reveals the inherent fatality of her obsessive
idealism: there is no place in this world for uncompromisable ideals.
However, such tragic rupture alone cannot sustain the alleged
propriety of her standpoint toward law, and her autonomy, though
laudable, is a two-edged sword that isolates her, while claiming to 'join
together in love." Though Creon's law clearly prompts the tragic
progress of the play by severing those who belong together, polarizing
them in response to its divisive command, Antigone's standpoint toward
law subtly completes this process by offering its promise of union in the
midst of the disintegration that it has fostered.
In the end, there is nothing so destructive as the power, the
injustice and the ramifications of Creon's law. This law provokes every
major collision that occurs in the play, triggering the downfall of each
of the main characters. The magnitude of the devastation is
overwhelming-beginning with the deaths of Polyneices and Eteocles,
and culminating with those of Antigone, Haimon and Eurydice, as well
as the total collapse of Creon and Ismene. With Antigone, the Oedipus
Cycle reaches its tragic conclusion-an utter wasteland! Only Creon's
conversion and Antigone's law of love offer any hope of a possible
recreation "of a new world on the ruins of the old"-a hope that is as
fraught with problems as it is pregnant with possibility.
2000 Antigone

II. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY

While the tragedy of law is so conspicuous inAntigone, the law of

tragedy-what it all means-is cloaked in a veil of mystery. The
devastation is unequivocal, and yet its significance remains cryptic at
best. Antigone's tomb and Creon, "the walking dead man," are striking
images that haunt the spectator with their semblance of finality.
Nevertheless, such destruction is not the culmination of tragedy, but
rather only its beginning.
Many great thinkers have pondered the meaning of tragedy, but few
have uncovered its truth. Few thinkers have fully appreciated its latent
mystery. Aristotle, Schopenhauer," Hegel and Nietzsche offer diverse
viewpoints regarding the essence of tragedy. Together these theories
illuminate the possibilities and inherent limitations of Creon's
conversion and Antigone's law of love, while pointing beyond them to
their problematic ground. Ultimately, the meaning of tragedy lies
here-caught in the collision between will and world, among the clashing
forces of fate, hubris and redemption.

A. Hegel's Tragic Optimism and the Limits of Creon's Conversion

Antigone is the archetypal Hegelian tragedy. More than any other

work of art, it manifests the tragic progress that, according to Hegel,
moves human history-the process of destructive conflict (Kollision)
followed by synthetic recreation (Reconciliation) through which all
progress of the human spirit must pass. Such tragic progress, though
inherently destructive, is essentially preservative and ultimately
transformative of what has been. 9 Thus for Hegel, in contrast to
Schopenhauer, all tragedy is necessarily a step forward. All tragedy is
progressive regarding the possibilities that lie before it. This spirit of
tragic optimism pervades his entire work.
According to Hegel, past, present and future are fused together in
the tragic moment. In this moment the past is preserved, while the

' Though Schopenhauer presents an insightful counterpoint to the theories of Hegel

and Nietzsche, his tragic pessimism will only be treated peripherally in contrast to these
other thinkers. The self-renunciation with which his theory culminates is too mired in the
present-specifically its inability to change or transcend the past due to its limited horizon
of future possibilities.
' Hegel called this process au/hebung-a German term that defies precise English
translation. Though often translated as "overcoming", an unfortunate choice of words that
connotes mastery and conquest, this term must suffice so long as the preservative and
transformative aspects of such tragic destruction are retained.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

future presents its profuse possibilities, even as the present is brought

to ruin. This coalescence of time is crucial to the Hegelian project which
promotes possibility as the horizon in which actuality occurs. The
destruction of what is and what has been occurs within the context of
what will be, and this actual destruction is a necessary condition for
such possibility to come to be. Such temporal fusion discloses the limits
of Creon's conversion, as well as its transcendent possibilities.

1. Kollision

Antigone and Creon collide with one another, because they re-
present two fundamentally incompatible standpoints toward law-one
of autonomous reception and the other of unbridled assertion. But what
aggravates this conflict and makes it so devastating is the obsessive
idealism with which they are both possessed.
According to Hegel, both Creon and Antigone are possessed by the
ethical principles that they claim to represent. Their collision reaches
such tragic proportions, precisely because they so embody the ethical
one-sidedness of their particular standpoints toward law. In the process,
they become so identified with the principles grounding these
standpoints that their confrontation becomes one of clashing forces,
rather than merely of conflicting characters. 0
For Hegel, Creon personifies the positive forces of public law and
order, while Antigone personifies the eternal principles of familial love
and duty-both of which are essential aspects of the absolutejustice they
each claim to represent. Nevertheless, they push their partial positions
to the extreme. Such fanaticism not only negates the ideal of the other,
but transgresses this absolute ideal as well.
As a result of their obsessive idealism, neither Antigone nor Creon
grants any legitimacy to the standpoint of the other. Antigone not only
disobeys Creon's law, she contemptuously defies it. She acknowledges
only the power of Creon's law, never its justice, and holds this power to
be "weakness itself against the immortal unrecorded laws of God"-its
threat of death unmoving to one who "thinks Death a friend."4 1
Similarly Creon never acknowledges Antigone's law throughout
their initial confrontation with one another. Apparently, he never hears
her law, since he talks only of her "breaking the given laws and boasting

0 Following Aristotle's subordination of character to thought and action, Hegel finds

the obsessive identification of the tragic hero with the finite cause or principle which he
represents to be the basis of his tragic flaw (hamartia).
41 ANTIGONE at 203.
2000 Antigone

of it." 42 Only in subsequent dialogues with Haimon and Teiresias does

Creon acknowledge Antigone's law at all-initially by deprecating it, but
eventually, by submitting to it.4
Although Antigone hears Creon's command, this law never speaks
to her. She acknowledges his law as a coercive fact, but never as an
obligation to which she is bound. In contrast, Creon, who has been deaf
to Antigone's law, gradually comes to hear it-initially hearing only its
demands which he ignores, but eventually hearing its truth as well. It
comes to speak to him, but though he obeys, it is too late!
The great mystery of this collision between Antigone and Creon is
that they are both equally right and equally wrong. Although Antigone
rightfully buries her brother according to the customary laws of the
dead, Creon rightfully prosecutes her for violating his edict. Although
Antigone rightfully claims the supremacy of the divine law over Creon's
law, Creon rightfully asserts the necessity of his law for the
preservation of the polis, in and through which the laws of the gods are
kept." As Steiner has noted,
both Antigone and Creon... are right. This is the very substance of a
tragic collision. Antigone is right when she says that she must bury her
brother, that the laws of blood and of the family, the ancient archaic
rights of kinship, cannot be altered by political decree. Creon is right
when he proclaims that the law of the city must overrule individual
feelings, that there can be no security for human conscience outside a
polis, outside the discipline of a body-politic, and that finally, the
interests of the body-politic must supersede those of the individual."'
However, as much as Antigone and Creon may differ, they
essentially belong together-both as catalysts for, and as complements
to, one another. Their reciprocal antagonism pushes them to the
extremes from which they negate one another-thereby revealing their
underlying partiality and mutual transgression of the ethical ideal.
Although this common transgression condemns them both, it is only
through such mutual destruction that absolute justice can be vin-

42ANTIGONE at 204.
4 ANTIGONE at 218, and 228-29 respectively.
" This claim that public law and order depends upon the implementation of public
justice is one that Socrates will repeat in the Crito. Sophocles, like Plato, was well aware
that there was no possibility of order outside the polis: that only anarchy, barbarism and
chaos ruled the hinterland, however virtuous the individual.
' Steiner, supra note 30, at 5.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

dicated, and Creon's positive law and Antigone's familial love be thereby
reconciled with one another."

2. Reconciliation

This triumph of absolute justice is manifest in Creon's conversion.

Contrary to many interpretations of Antigone, Creon's conversion does
not signal the final victory of Antigone's standpoint toward law. In the
end she is destroyed as well as Creon. Nor does his conversion stand for
some sort of compromise victory of positive law, since he too is
devastated, even though he has renounced his wrongdoing. Rather,
Creon's conversion presents a possibility for reconciliation between
these two divergent standpoints-an opening for the reintegration of the
principles of familial love and duty with the dictates of positive law and
public order.
Toward the end ofAntigone, Creon asserts his most radical defiance
of the gods-clearly showing the depths of his fall into hubris. After
Teiresias, the soothsayer, has cautioned him to mend his ways and
beware of excessive pride, Creon proclaims,
No, Teiresias:
If your birds-if the great eagles of God himself
Should carry him [Polynieces] stinking bit by bit to heaven,
I would not yield. I am not afraid of pollution:
No man can defile the gods.4
Teiresias predicts that the king will pay dearly for his pride-corpse
for corpse: one for Antigone whom he has buried before her time, and
another for Polyneices to whom he has denied a proper burial. This
prophecy haunts Creon. In a sudden reversal, he renounces his
wrongdoings.
Oh it is hard to give in! but it is worse
To risk everything for stubborn pride....
... I will not fight with destiny....
My mind misgives-

This vindication brings the spectator before the awesome power of the absolute. In
this way, Hegel refocuses Aristotle's catharsis away from the tragic hero to those grand
forces that loom over him and finally destroy him. This reinterpretation of catharsis
opens a clearing for Nietzsche's understanding of tragedy.
41 ANTIGONE at 226.
2000 Antigone

The laws of the gods are mighty, and a man must

serve them
To the last day of his life!"8
But it is too late! Antigone has already hung herself in the solace of her
tomb, and in despair at the loss of his beloved Antigone, Haimon kills
himself in front of his father. Finally Eurydice kills herself, cursing
Creon for killing their son. Though repentant, Creon is left absolutely
broken and alone.
I look for comfort; my comfort lies here dead. Whatever my hands have
touched has come 49
to nothing. Fate has brought all my pride to a
thought of dust.
Why is Creon's conversion too late? On its surface, Creon's
conversion seems to be shamelessly inauthentic. He does not repent
because of any sudden insights into the laws of reason, justice or the
gods, as his conflict with his son makes perfectly clear. Nor does he
repent because of Teiresias' status or the truth of what he says, as his
rebuking of the prophet attests. Only after Teiresias has threatened
that he will suffer corpse for corpse for his crimes does Creon repent.
Creon repents because he is afraid that Teiresias' prophecy may
come true. Fear motivates him to repent to avoid these dreadful
consequences. It is the power and might of the laws of the gods, not
their justice or holiness, which holds him in awe, and he repents
because he is intimidated by them.
Creon stands before the laws of the gods in the only way he
knows-as a slave before his master. These laws are not gifts. He does
not openly receive them, and he does not make them his own. These
laws are imposed upon him, coercing him to act according to their will.
His conversion will waver accordingly.
Creon's conversion appears shameless and inauthentic-purely a
matter of convenience. Unfortunately, it comes too late, and he suffers
the ravages of his fate despite his change of heart.' Thus, his
conversion is ineffectual as well. Whether he will emerge from his

0 ANTIGONE at 228-29.
49 ANTIGONE at 238. The final lines of Antigone depict the horror and desolation that
now descend upon Creon-"the walking dead man." [1167] The eerie similarities between
this ending and that of Oedipus the King invoke images of Nietzsche's eternal return and
amor fati-opening another gateway into the mystery of this tragedy.
I Creon's linear conception of time makes any conversion already too late, especially
in so far as it attempts to "mwill" 'what has been'-an attempt that is destined to fail. This
past is forever beyond his reach. See Friedrich Nietzsche, "OfRedemption," in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra,and Phillippe Nonet, What Is Positive Law? 100 Yale L. J. 667 (1990).
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

demise a more hardened tyrant, or will somehow come to learn the

lessons of his tragic fate is the great question that concludes the
tragedy.
Though Creon's conversion opens a clearing for the possible
reintegration of the principles of familial love and duty with the dictates
of positive law and public order, this reconciliation cannot simply reduce
these ethical principles to written, positive law. Such a resolution would
not reintegrate these laws together, but would rather subordinate one
law to the other-inverting the priority of the ideal and the real, and
degrading the eternal, living law to its temporally grounded expression
in positive law.
According to Hegel, this reconciliation must somehow preserve the
essential difference between these two types of law as it reintegrates
them into a greater whole. Antigone is mysteriously silent about this
outcome, leaving its actual form open to speculation. This reconciliation
is best conceived as a possibility that lies before us to infuse the letter
with the spirit of the law-a possibility, the actualization of which
inevitably initiates another dialectical opposition, leading once more to
mutual destruction and further reconciliation. For Hegel, this process
reveals the persistent, progressive self-realization of the absolute ideal.
For Nietzsche, it is quite another matter.

B. Nietzsche's Redemptive Reintegrationand the Limits ofAntigone's

Law of Love

According to Nietzsche, the origins of Greek tragedy lie in the

Dionysian chorus, as both the primal ground of the dramatic conflict
and the source of its resolution. Nietzsche found tragedy to be a
fundamental unity of two opposing forces-the Apollonian and the
Dionysian. The Apollonian represents the forces of order, individuation,
rationality and art, while the Dionysian represents those of primal
chaos, oneness, irrationality and metaphysical truth. Tragedy is
generated through the dynamic interplay of these two antithetical,
though mutually constitutive, forces. For Nietzsche, Dionysian truth
can only be revealed through its concealment in the Apollonian drama,
and its subsequent disclosure by the Dionysian chorus.
We must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which
discharges itself ever anew in an Apollonian world of images. Thus the
choral parts with which the tragedy is interlaced are... the womb that
gave birth to the... entire world of the stage .... In several successive
discharges this primal ground of tragedy radiates this vision of the
drama which... represents not Apollonian redemption through mere
2000 Antigone

appearance but... the shattering of the individual and his fusion with
primal being.51
According to Nietzsche, tragedy throws one before the underlying
horror and absurdity of human existence by forcing one to confront the
essential groundlessness of the human condition. In the work of
tragedy, such groundlessness emanates from the radical individuation
of the tragic hero-the hubris that separates man from man, man from
world and man from the gods. The isolation and alienation into which
he so falls makes the hero, and through him the spectator as well,52
exceptionally vulnerable to those great forces of life that threaten
annihilation-the terrible destructiveness of world history and the
indiscriminate cruelty of nature.
The two classical responses to this fateful moment are those of
tragic pessimism and tragic optimism. Tragic pessimism entails an
escape or withdrawal into inaction by renouncing the individuating will.
Tragic optimism promotes self-overcoming through willful action-a
reaffirmation of life in all its tragic wonder.
For Nietzsche, the only salvation from this sinkhole of inaction lies
in artistic illusion the Appollonian drama, which masks this horror and
makes it sufferable. In the tragic moment, art fashions a world that
tempers, and even beautifies, the overwhelming suffering and destruc-
tiveness of excessive human individuation.
Here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art approaches as a
saving sorceress.... She alone knows how to turn these nauseous
thoughts about the horror... of existence into notions with which one
can live.3

According to Nietzsche, the Dionysian chorus is the origin of the

Apollonian fall as well as the source of redemption-the Nietzschean
maskpar excellence. In the course of the tragedy, the chorus masks the
repugnance of human individuation by generating a world of dramatic
conflict that draws the spectator near. This very conflict sets the stage

51Friedrich Nietzsche, THE BmITH OF TRAGEDY 65 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967)
(Kaufnan trans.)
2 Like Aristotle, Nietzsche appreciated the redemptive value of tragedy for the
spectator as well as the hero. By identifying with the tragic hero, the spectator not only
suffers her downfall (catharsis),but is redeemed through her as well.
' Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, supra note 51, at 60. German Idealism conceived
art metaphysically-as fabrication and appearance, and as a source of human
transcendence and redemption. Art is one of the three great vehicles (with religion and
philosophy) through which spirit manifests itself in human history. Partaking of both art
and religion, tragedy is a particularly powerful medium for such spiritual revelation.
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

for the spectator's downfall through that of the tragic hero. Thus, the
chorus reveals what it seeks to conceal: the disintegration lurking
behind excessive human individuation. However, for Nietzsche the end
of tragedy is not the disintegration of the individual, but rather the
redemptive reintegration that it fosters.
This view of things... provides us with all the elements of a profound
and pessimistic view of the world together with the mystery doctrine of
tragedy: the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything
existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil,
and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be
broken in augury of a restored oneness.

1. RadicalIndividuationand the Law of Hubris and Nemesis

In Antigone, the chorus opens a clearing in a conflict between

mutually destructive legal standpoints. The first three Choral Odes lay
the foundation for a possible reconciliation, while the closing lines of the
tragedy offer a formula for human redemption in the midst of tragedy.
Antigone's first two Choral Odes celebrate the two most essential
elements of tragic action-the self-confident greatness of man which all-
too-often falls into hubris, and the tragic fate (nemesis) that inevitably
chastises one whose will has gone awry. According to Aristotle, this law
of hubris and nemesis directs the course of tragic action-from the rise
of the tragic hero, through his sudden reversal of fortune (peripeteia),to
his imminent ruin. The tragic flaw (hamartia)that causes this downfall,
and the purging of pity and fear (catharsis)that is its effect, can only be
understood within the context of this tragic plot and the law that
governs it.
"The Ode to Man," which follows Creon's proclamation of his edict
and his order to apprehend the man who has dared to transgress his
law, boldly sings the praises of the strangeness (deinon)of man and the
wonders of his law."5 Man alone has dominion over all the earth. Of all
creatures, he alone ventures forth away from his home to conquer the
unknown and the contingencies of life to which he is so fatefully
vulnerable. He is the measure of all things and orders all things

" Id. at 74.

55Deinon is an ambiguous term connoting the overwhelming power that instills terror,
the sublime awe that resonates therein, and the violent use of power against itself. Thus
it harbors the collision between will and world-revealing the heights and depths of
human experience. Martin Heidegger, AN INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS 146-65 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) (Manheim trans.) and Martha Nussbaum, THE
FRAGILITY OF GOODNESS 67-79 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2000 Antigone

according to his will-striving to bring order to the chaos of his world

through his law.
Numberless are the world's wonders, but none
More wonderful [deinon] than man;...
All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind;...
•.. from every wind
He has made himself secure-from all but one:
In the late wind of death he cannot stand.
O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure!
O fate of man, working both good and evil!
When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands!
When the laws are broken, what of his city then?"
This Ode depicts Creon's standpoint toward law and toward his
world. Creon orders his world through law by asserting hiswill upon the
objects of his power. Law maintains the public order necessary to
preserve his power, though at significant cost. Death pervades his
law-initially by empowering it, yet finally by overpowering it as well.
Creon is deinon. For he is overwhelmed by the power and might of the
laws of the gods, not by their majesty or justice, though he vehemently
opposes them until he is nearly so destroyed.
Creon's law is the law of excessive individuation-the law that severs
man from man, man from world, and man from his gods. Creon's law
manifests the underlying horror of being human-the groundless
isolation, alienation and vulnerability that fester at the core of human
existence. What can be more striking in this regard than the haunting
image of Creon, "the walking dead man", with which this tragedy ends!
Creon's law separates man from man: brother from brother, hero
from traitor, sister from sister, father from son, man from women, 7
elder from youth, and ruler from subject. This law triggers the downfall
of each of the main characters by polarizing them into increasingly
adamant opposition to one another, until they are all mutually
destroyed.
Creon's law also alienates ruler and subject from their law and from
their world. Through Creon's law, thepolisestablishes rational order in
a barbaric world. Yet his subjects do not rule themselves. They are ruled
by Creon's law-a law to which he can never be bound as tyrant.
Finally, Creon's law severs man from the gods by distinguishing the
law of the gods from the laws of man, and then claiming human

"ANTIGONE at 199.
17 Creon repeatedly confuses Antigone's gender for her cause, justifying his condemna-
tion of her on the basis of gender alone.
520 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

authority over the divine law. Such arrogant disregard for the divine
order (hubris)requires nemesis to reestablish the appropriate relation
between Creon and his gods.
"The Ode to Fate," following Creon's collision with Antigone and his
condemnation of her, warns against the evils of such excessive pride.
The wrath of the gods awaits all who dare to challenge their power, or
who otherwise desecrate what is holy.
Fortunate is the man who has never tasted God's
vengeance! ...
What mortal arrogance
Transcends the wrath of Zeus?...
All that is and shall be,
And all the past, is his.
No pride on earth is free of the curse of heaven. 8
The law of hubris and nemesis pervades the Oedipus Cycle. This
most fundamental law of tragedy is already disclosed in the second
Choral Ode of Oedipus the King, and its desperate warning is as
applicable to Creon as it was to Oedipus: nemesis inevitably levels the
tyrant and all who dare to "outrage God's holy law."
The tyrant is a child of Pride
Who drinks from his sickening cup
Recklessness and vanity,
Until from his high crest headlong
He plummets to the dust of hope.

Haughtiness and the high hand of disdain

Tempt and outrage God's holy law;
And any mortal who dares hold
No immortal Power in awe
Will be caught up in a net of pain:
The price for which his levity is sold. 9
Creon's hubris separates him from all those he should, but cannot,
love-from his son, his niece, his nephew, his subjects, his law, and even
his gods. His excessive pride wills a law of separation that completely
severs him from his world, and therefore is essentially self-destructive.
His hubris condemns him to suffer the wrath of the gods-corpse for
corpse. By the end of the tragedy, he realizes the evil of such radical
individuation. But it is too late! Most of those with whom he should be

58 ANTIGONE at 209-10.
69 OEDIPUS THE KING at 44.
2000 Antigone 521

reunited are dead. But though Creon's disintegration is the apparent

end of Antigone, it opens a horizon of possibilities regarding his
redemptive reintegration and the resurrection of law.

2. Redemptive Reintegration and the Laws of Love and Strife

In contrast to the separation brought about by Creon's law stands

Antigone's law of love. In the midst of her conflict with Creon, Antigone
proclaims: "It is my nature to join in love, not hate6'-a claim that high-
lights the rupture that has emerged between them, while offering a
bridge across this seemingly insurmountable gulf.This theme of binding
love is developed in the "The Ode to Love," which follows Creon's
collision with Haimon and the breakup of father and son:
Love, unconquerable...
Even the pure Immortals cannot escape you,
And mortal man, in his one day's dusk,
Trembles before your glory....
And none has conquered but Love!"'
Love emerges in the Oedipus Cycle as an antidote to excessive
individuation and the disintegration that it fosters. In his final words
to his daughters at Colonus, Oedipus has already revealed this
redemptive power of love. "And yet one word frees us of all the weight
and pain of life: that word is love."62 Unfortunately, Antigone's love is
not that of her father.
Antigone claims her law to be one of love-a law of juncture and
unity. Yet by the time of her death, she has severed herself from all
those she should, but cannot, love all but the dead. Though she seeks to
join together, she only tears herself apart. Antigone shuns her sister for
not supporting her attempted burial ofPolyneices, and then for claiming
to share in her thwarted deed. She scarcely thinks of Haimon, her
beloved, or the suffering that he will endure as a result of her death.
And her break with Creon, her uncle, is especially severe. There is even
some question whether she may not have severed her relation with the
gods by overzealously pursuing her cause.
Antigone suffers such deprivation. Although she is keenly aware of
the lack of justice in the world, she lacks the patience to respond to it
appropriately. Antigone has always lived with injustice: the injustice of

o ANTiGoNE at 206.
81 ANTIGONE at 218.
2 OEDIPUS AT COLONUS at 161-62.
522 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

her incestuous birth, the untold injustices inflicted upon her father, and
now the flagrant injustice of Creon's law and Polyneices' exposure in
death. Antigone is starving forjustice, and her hunger is insatiable. She
is so obsessed with righting these wrongs that she can no longer await
the reparations of fate, the Furies, or even the gods.
Antigone's love emanates from her suffering. Her love is a love of
lack, as her love of the dead who can no longer love her clearly reveals.
Such love can only be requited in death-for only in death can she be
reunited with those she loves.' Antigone's love is neither redemptive,
nor reintegrative, but is rather purely reactive-obsessively seeking
what it lacks in complete disregard of all else. Such love must remain
embedded in the very separation that is its origin. As Nietzsche has
noted,
there are two kinds of sufferers: . . . those who suffer from the
overfiulness of life . .. and those who suffer from the impoverishment
of life.... Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this
main distinction.. ." Is it hunger or overflow that has here become
4
creative?"
Unlike Oedipus, whose love emanates from an overfullness of life,
Antigone's love is one of impoverishment. Oedipus grows wise in his old
age; Antigone dies young, exhausted by the obsessive idealism of her
youth. Though she recalls her father's love, she has not yet matured into
the wisdom that comes after years of silently enduring one's suffering
and probing the depths of one's guilt.

In the fifth century B.C., Empedocles presented a cosmology that

conceived the process of creation to be a cycle of integration and
disintegration. According to Empedocles, the universe began as a fusion
of elements in a primordial unity ruled by Love. However, in time
differentiation and disintegration entered the universe under the power
of Strife. Eventually, Love reunites what Strife has torn asunder, and
the process begins anew. Thus, Love attracts and brings together what

"See Nonet, supra note 50 for a discussion of the interplay between love, death and
the eternal "too late."
" Friedrich Nietzsche, THE GAY SCIENCE 370 (New York: Vintage Books, 1974)
(Kaufmann trans.). This same distinction is crucial to Hegel's thought. According to
Hegel, Streben connotes a wanting from lack that one strives to fulfill, while Trieb
connotes a wanting from overfuidness which drives one to give out of excess. Thus, love
can be either a striving to fill an existing lack, or a drivenness to give out of over-
abundance.
2000 Antigone

belongs together as one, while Strife repels and tears apart what
belongs apart as many. Both forces are equally essential to life.
Like Love and Strife, Creon's law separates while Antigone's law
rejoins, claims to rejoin together. Both individuation and reintegration
are necessary for the development and the fulfillment of the human
being. Yet the Oedipus Cycle does not end here. Though the forces of
individuation and reintegration will continue to ravage the tragic hero,
though the powers ofwill and world will collide in ever more destructive
ways and though the law of hubris andnemesis will prevail over all who
fall before it, there remains one fundamentally unanswered question:
How will one act in response to this human predicament? Will one
withdraw into inaction through a renunciation of will, or will one
reaffirm life through willful self-assertion? Will Schopenhauer's tragic
pessimism or Hegel's tragic optimism prevail? This quandary is the
great challenge posed by tragedy.

C. Wisdom, Reverence andAmor Fati

Although Greek tragedy does not provide a definitive answer to this

question, it does offer a way to engage in its resolution. In the Oedipus
plays, the impulsive cleverness with which Oedipus solves the riddle of
the Sphinx is gradually transformed into wisdom regarding the tragic
mystery of being human-revealing the insidious destructiveness of
radical human individuation and the possibility ofreintegration into the
oneness of life. For Oedipus, and perhaps for Creon, wisdom will come
in old age, but only after the necessary foundation has been laid.
Wisdom rests upon integrity, and integrity upon harmony-maintaining
the proper balance between will and world, and man and the gods. Law
discloses this order, but must be heeded to attain wisdom. Thus it is
through reverence for law that wisdom becomes possible.
In the second Choral Ode of Oedipus the King, reverence is revealed
as the appropriate standpoint to be taken toward law. Reverence is born
of the awe of the gods and the reception of their law. Reverence
cultivates humility and tempers the individual will. Thus, the "Ode to
Reverence" clears the way for Oedipus' redemption, though it will only
come in the waning years of his life once awe has inspired him to act
with humility.
Let me be reverent in the ways of right,
Lowly the paths I journey on;
Let all my words and actions keep
The laws of the pure universe
From highest Heaven handed down....
 Legal Studies Forum Vol. 24

... let no fair ambition be denied;

May God protect... [those]
Who will fear [Him], and on His ordinance wait."
While reverence sustains the proper relation between man, his law
and his gods, amor fati presents the proper relation between man and
his world. The love of fate is one of the most profound lessons of Greek
tragedy. However, it is so bound to hubris and nemesis that it is often
overlooked, as if destruction was the final end of tragedy. Nevertheless,
divine retribution is meant to reestablish a balance or appropriate
boundary between will and world, or more radically, to reconstitute the
will itself.
Amor fati transforms the will from either pessimistic self-
renunciation or optimistic self-affirmation to open receptivity toward
that which is given and that which one makes one's own. Amor fati is
born of the awe attending one's encounter with the world in which one
lives-as Heidegger has represented it, the wonder that beings are as
they are: the wonder of being itself Amor fati cultivates humility, and
humility amor fati, thereby tempering the will in relation to its world.
Amor fati is love of all in all its tragic wonder. As Nietzsche has so
eloquently stated:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one
wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all
eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it... but
love it.'

Oedipus represents a love that emanates from profound suffering,

thoughtfulness and affirmation-from an overfullness, rather than
impoverishment, of life. In Oedipus, wisdom, reverence and amor fati
come together in a way that overcomes the horror of human existence
by reaffirming the fullness of life out of the depths of human tragedy.
Antigone's interminable impatience and premature death foreclose any
such reintegration on her part, while Creon's conversion opens the
possibility for his future redemption, but only after years ofthoughtfully
enduring his suffering. Thus, the Oedipus Cycle comes full circle, and
the Choragos chides:
There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.

5 OEDIPUS THE KING, at 44.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Why I Am So Clever" in ECCE HoMo 258 (New York: Vintage
Books, 1969) (Kaufmann trans.)
2000 Antigone

Big words are always punished, 7

And proud men in old age learn to be wise.j
A world seems to separate us from Sophocles' appreciation of the
tragic mystery of life. His fusion of wisdom, reverence and happiness is
in direct opposition to Socrates' equation of knowledge, virtue and
happiness-the conception that so dominates our modern world. While
the tragic standpoint thoughtfully receives what is given and recognizes
sin as grounded in willful separation, the Socratic method reconceives
sin as a product of ignorance to be overcome by an act of wil-the willful
acquisition of knowledge. Both Sophocles and Socrates were frightfully
aware of the evils of unbridled will. But while Sophocles relied upon the
forces of fate (nemesis) to vindicate acts of hubris, and the power of
tragedy to induce redemptive reintegration, Socrates internalized this
process-seeking to tame the will through reason.
Perhaps this is why Greek tragedy appears so foreign to us-
because it speaks from a world view so radically different from our own.
However, before we discard its lessons prematurely, we may wish to
consider how will turns its 'master' into a slave, and how the world
continues to call it to account for its willful transgressions.
Though we may have forgotten the law of tragedy in our willfully
determined, the modern world, its being is not solely predicated upon
our thoughtfulness. Our salvation may well be.

67 ANTIGONE at 238.