Political Philosophy

CHAPTER 2

Antigone, Daughter of Oedipus and His Mother, Jocasta. Greek Tragedy and Play by Sophocles. Photo credit: Chris Hellier / Alamy

The problem of conflict—what it is, what its causes are, how to control and contain it—is one of the oldest issues of political life. As America’s greatest political scientist, James Madison, wrote: “But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”1

Madison’s point is that if cooperation and agreement came naturally to us, we would not need the instrumentalities of law, the state, and political institutions to impose order. That we are beings whose natural condition is one of competition, envy, disagreement, and conflict is a point we will see reiterated very forcefully in the work of Thomas Hobbes.

That we live in a world pervaded by deep and intractable conflict is an insight that goes back to the Greeks. The so-called pre-Socratic philosophers saw the human world—even the cosmos as a whole—as pervaded by constant and continual flux. Order and stability were largely fragile and uncertain, man-made creations to hold back the all-pervasive chaos with which the human things were threatened. Among the pre-Socratics it was a man named Heraclitus who came closest to grasping this insight that everything is flux. It was this deep sense of chaos and the fragility of life to which the Greek tragedians especially gave profound voice.

For Sophocles, in particular, conflict between fundamental values and ways of life was something built into the very fabric of human nature. The idea of a world like Plato’s Republic, Rousseau’s Social Contract, or Marx’s classless society where conflict had been banished would have been literally unthinkable. To be human was to live in a world of conflict torn by the necessity to make difficult and even dangerous choices between conflicting goals and loyalties. It is this awareness of the role of the intractable conflict between competing goods—their incommensurable quality, as we would say today—that brings us to the heart of Sophocles’s Antigone.

The Antigone is by some accounts the greatest specimen of ancient tragic drama. What concerns us, however, is not so much the place of Antigone within the dramatic canon as what it reveals about the nature of political life. The Antigone is a play about conflict and its role in politics. Moreover, it is a play about conflict at several different levels: between the household (oikos) and the city (polis), between men and women, between nature and convention.

What is more, the play is a study of the role of reason in political life. Is creative human reason or speech—logos—sufficient to govern public life and conquer the natural world, as Creon believes? Or must human practical reason take a back seat to the unwritten and unspoken laws of kinship and religious obligation whose origins lie beyond reason? The Antigone is perhaps the first work to appeal to a higher law that precedes man-made or positive law (449–60). Like the great philosophers, Sophocles was concerned with the nature, limits, and power of human rationality and its role in human affairs. He was a philosopher as well as a playwright.2

The Antigone deals at once with the oldest and most enduring conflict of political life. This tension between human reason and ancestral piety, between the city and the gods, is an expression of what the great twentieth-century political philosopher Leo Strauss called the “theologico-political dilemma.”3 This problem deals with the greatest and most important issue, namely, what is the ultimate source of authority. Does authority derive from the city and those appointed as its governors or does authority descend from God or the gods and those appointed as priests and interpreters? This is a problem which continues to strike at the heart of politics today and to which our modern conception of the separation of church and state is one, but only one, answer.

The highest expression of this theologico-political dilemma is revealed in the conflict between what can metaphorically be called Jerusalem and Athens, the city of faith and the city of philosophy. Whereas for Jerusalem fear of God is the deepest human experience, for Athens it is intellectual curiosity and a confidence in the powers of our own reason that speaks to the highest human possibilities. Which of these is right? We might concede that every attempt to settle this question is ultimately an act of faith. If so, have we not decided in favor of Jerusalem? But perhaps we do not know the answer and are willing to listen to the claims of each. By saying we wish to listen first and then judge, haven’t we decided in favor of Athens? In either case this problem constitutes the nerve or core of the West. Although reflection on this problem reached its height with the great medieval political philosophers—Maimonides, Al-Farabi, and Thomas Aquinas—it was given its first and perhaps most memorable expression in the writings of the Greek tragedians and philosophers who struggled with the problem of religious piety and the limits of reason.

The outline of the Antigone is relatively simple. Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus, has buried her brother Polynices, a traitor to Thebes, against the express orders of the king, Creon. Antigone disobeys Creon’s edict in the name of the sacred ancestral law of family with its ties of blood and kinship. Creon in turn orders Antigone to be buried alive as punishment for her disobedience. But before the order is carried out Antigone kills herself, and Haemon, Creon’s son, takes his own life in protest against his father’s cruelty. Finally, Creon’s wife commits suicide when she learns of the death of her son.

For readers today, it is difficult to imagine a world where the claims of family and blood relations took such powerful form. “The claims of blood relationship are not so strong for us,” the classicist Bernard Knox has written. “We have no fresh history of conflict between family and state.”4 Rather, for contemporary readers it is necessary to try to imagine a world where family obligations represented the absolute and primordial form of loyalty. One example that comes to mind is the flashback scene at the very end of The Godfather, Part II when Michael tells his brothers he has joined the Marines after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His older brother, Sonny, is furious and shouts that he has no right to risk his life for anybody not in the family (“What, did you go to college to get stupid?”). At the end of the scene we see the members of the Corleone family united in celebration of the patriarch’s birthday, but Michael remains alone. What is he thinking? Perhaps he is reflecting on the tension between himself as a member of the Corleone family and as an American. Which will have a greater pull: the ties of blood and family or the ties of national identity? This is a conflict that Sophocles would have readily understood.

There are further obstacles to understanding the world of Antigone. When we read the play today we are more apt to see it as representing a conflict between the individual and the power of the state. This is the way the play was often put on during the past century. There are modern adaptations of the play that depict Creon as a kind of fascistic dictator using political power to crush all expressions of opposition and individual free expression. This is surely not the way that Sophocles intended the play to be read.

There is another more recent tendency to regard Antigone as a feminist drama depicting the conflict between Creon and Antigone as expressing the female struggle against repressive patriarchy. There is an important respect in which male and female archetypes are used throughout the play to express certain primordial conflicts, but to read the play through the moralistic lenses of contemporary feminist theory is no less true than seeing it through the simplistic dualism of the sensitive individual sacrificed on the altar of the totalitarian state.

The desire to reduce the play to moralistic categories of good and evil fails to do justice to Sophocles’s sense of the true nature of tragic conflict. The clash between Antigone and Creon is more than a simplistic clash of good and evil. It is a clash between two valid yet conflicting sets of social morality, each of which is equally binding. The power of the Antigone to move us even today is not because it sets right against wrong but because it pits one morally justified set of claims against another. It is a conflict between two contending moralities that is the essence of tragic drama.

The best statement of this point of view ever written occurs in Hegel’s treatment of Greek tragedy from his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Excuse me if I quote the passage at length:

The collision between the two highest moral powers is enacted in that absolute exemplar of tragedy Antigone. Here, familial love, the holy, the inward, belonging to inner feeling, and therefore known also as the law of the gods, collides with the right of the state. Creon is not in the wrong. He maintains that the law of the state, the authority of the government, must be held in respect, and that infraction of the law must be followed by punishment. Each of these two sides actualizes only one of the ethical powers and has only one as its content. This is their one-sidedness. The meaning of eternal justice is made manifest thus: both attain injustice because they are one-sided, but both also attain justice.5

This passage is difficult, but Hegel’s general point is not hard to grasp. The standpoints of Antigone and Creon represent conflicting moral points of view. If they did not—if one were simply right and the other simply wrong—the situation would not be tragic. If Creon were simply a tyrant, he would not be worthy of Antigone’s challenge, nor would his defeat represent a tragic spectacle. Rather, Creon represents the voice of public legal authority. Creon is no mere tyrant; rather, he is the voice of the polity, of public life, and its claim to supremacy over all matters affecting public behavior. His is the mind devoted exclusively to civic safety and well-being. For Creon, the welfare of the city is the highest ethical obligation.

This becomes evident when we examine Creon’s use of moral concepts, such as good and bad, noble and base, to justify his conduct. In his first speech he indicates that the categories of friend and enemy are distinguished by their usefulness to the city (162–210). The good are those who promote the public well-being, while the bad detract from the city’s welfare. The quality of being agathos (a good man or person) is inseparable from one’s value to the city. Thus, to give honorable burial to Polynices, a traitor, would be to confer equal benefits on the good and the bad alike. For Creon, the city and its rules transcend the natural ties of family and kinship. The city is even seen to become like a family honoring those who honor it. “Never shall I, myself,” Creon says, “honor the wicked and reject the just. The man who is well-minded to the city from me in death and life shall have his honor” (207–10).

For Creon, then, the city with its man-made rules of justice represents the highest order of things. Underlying this standpoint is the deeper and more profound conviction that reason alone is a sufficient tool for governing human affairs. One of Creon’s favorite metaphors is the image of reason setting things right or straight. In his first speech he uses that image three times (163, 167, 190); the third time he refers to the city as that which “saves us, sailing straight,” for “only so can we have friends at all.”

Not only is human reason capable of creating public rules for our safety and welfare, Creon goes on to praise reason as a source of technological mastery capable of harnessing and controlling nature, making it serve human purposes. There is a kind of rationalistic humanism underlying Creon’s early views that is echoed in the Chorus’s early praise of the incomparable resourcefulness and ingenuity of man, the rational animal. Consider the lines of the famous Choral Ode:

Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man. This thing crosses the sea in the winter’s storm, making his path through the roaring waves. And she, the greatest of gods, the earth—ageless she is, and unwearied—he wears her away as the ploughs go up and down from year to year.…

Language, and thought like the wind and the feelings that make the town, he has taught himself, and shelter against the cold, refuge from rain. He can always help himself. He faces no future helpless. There’s only death that he cannot find an escape from. He has contrived refuge from illnesses once beyond all cure.

Clever beyond all dreams the inventive craft that he has which may drive him one time or another to well or ill. (332–68)

This famous ode validates a certain moral attitude toward politics and the natural world that is at the center of Creon’s vision. Risking extreme anachronism we could call it the attitude of the Enlightenment, which regards the world as basically amenable to human technique or artfulness. On this view, the polis along with the rules of law and justice are human creations and a crucial step in exerting our control over a hostile and indifferent environment. Any step away from this order threatens a return to the primordial chaos of nature. It is a view that we will see expressed in various ways in the works of Descartes, Hobbes, and many of the great advocates of the Enlightenment.6

This position of Enlightenment humanism was given powerful expression in the works of Protagoras and other Greek sophists in a phrase that will be familiar: “Man is the measure of all things.” This famous statement expresses the view that our rational human agency is the standard by which we try to seek mastery and control over nature. Only when we attain to rational mastery do we truly become the masters of our own fate. We become, in a word, self-determining. Underlying the Choral Ode is an attitude that will be central to the modern Enlightenment’s doctrine of progress, namely, through the self-conscious application of rational techniques and planning we will be able to attain complete control over nature and ensure our own creativity, autonomy, and self-determination.

In contrast to this view of enlightened humanism stands Antigone. She is the representative of the world of the household and the family. Note here and throughout that Antigone does not see herself as an individual expressing a personal moral code and finding herself thwarted by an intolerant public authority. When she invokes the “unwritten law” (459–60) some see this as a fragile imitation of the later humanistic ideals of the inner conscience thwarted by the conservative norms of the polis. This view of Antigone is false.

Antigone does not regard herself as an individual; she is first and foremost a daughter, a sister, a member of a family with specific ethical obligations to her dead brother. The family and one’s obligation to it are at the core of her being. Antigone, you could even say, is a conservative: she believes that the core of morality is to be found in the nuclear family; she devotes herself to defending the priority and sanctity of the family and opposing Creon’s rationalistic innovations.

Not only is Antigone’s morality a morality of family ties, the tie between the household and religion is central to her moral experience. The household is the natural home for the gods. This is not the time or place to discuss the role of religion in the world of the Greek cities except to note that religion was understood as an exclusively household affair. This has been brought out brilliantly by the nineteenth-century French classicist and anthropologist Fustel de Coulanges in his book The Ancient City, stressing the ties between family and religion: “The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next.… Religion, it is true, did not create the family; but certainly it gave the family its rules; and hence it comes that the constitution of the ancient family was so different from what it would have been if it had owed its foundation to natural affections.”7

Fustel saw in a way that few can understand today how the Greek polis was not a secular democracy—although you could easily get this impression by reading many modern interpreters—but a community where religion, law, and government were inseparable, one where “religion was absolute master both in public and private life”: “Where the state was a religious community, the king a pontiff, the magistrate a priest, and the law a sacred formula; where patriotism was piety, and exile excommunication; where individual liberty was unknown; where man was enslaved to the state through his soul, his body, and his property; where the notions of law and of duty, of justice and of affection, were bounded within the limits of the city; where human association was necessarily confined within a certain circumference around a prytaneum; and where men saw no possibility of founding larger societies.”8

This conception of the polis as a theologico-political institution is entirely consistent with Antigone’s view. She regards her actions as dictated not by some man-made law of reason but by a higher law the origins of which she admits are unknown (449–60). Her appeal to what is beyond human doing or making shows her to be the reverse side of Creon’s emphasis on the creative power of human rationality. Antigone’s world is not the sphere of public reason but the private world of nature, cult, and mystery. It is just this world that Creon, the public figure, cannot understand. Creon would deny the ties of kinship and family in order to celebrate the civic bonding of the polis. But Antigone’s views are equally exclusionary. She would deny the power of public law over obligations to the family. Her position is prepolitical or even subpolitical.

While Creon values persons only insofar as they contribute to the public life, Antigone takes the fact of blood and kinship to be more fundamental because they are more natural. Underlying her view is the idea that the family is a deeper source of moral attachment because it is older than the city, because it has always existed; that although the family can exist without the city, the city cannot exist without the family. Further, while the city exists only as a contrivance, by an act of will, the family exists by nature, by the higher law.

The conflict portrayed in the Antigone goes beyond that of two social institutions—the city and the family—and addresses the underlying gender differences that these institutions express. As Sophocles portrays it, the city as represented by Creon expresses the virtues of maleness: reason, order, self-rule, and autonomy. The family expresses the virtues of the female: piety, obedience, tradition, and respect for the ancestors. The play reveals an enduring, permanent tension between the authority of divinely sanctioned law and human statesmanship’s need for autonomous flexibility and practical judgment. The point of the play, to express it succinctly, is that tragedy ensues when people try to live by their own self-made laws without acknowledging the divine order or sense of cosmic justice to which everything is subject.

Like every great tragedian, Sophocles was a cultural conservative trying to show that human misery is caused by our attempts to impose our own rational designs upon the world and thus deny the claims that nature, family, and religion have upon us. It is the purpose of the tragic drama to illustrate the limits of human rationality.

But if Creon represents maleness and its drive for domination and setting things straight, Antigone represents a kind of denial of all creativity and change. Her world is that of the family; it represents the natural cycle of birth, growth, and decay. Her attitude toward the family is best captured as one of piety where piety means obedience to the sacred or ancestral order of things. Because this order of things was established by the gods, it is strictly forbidden to submit this order to critical questioning. The world of family piety is one of unquestioning obedience or submission to the ancestral or traditional way of life.

The two positions that the play stakes out are, then, strictly opposed to one another; in fact they are paralyzing. Is there a way out? At the end of the play Creon belatedly admits, “It’s best to hold the laws of old tradition to the end of life” (1113). If this is true, he would seem to have come round, somewhat belatedly, to Antigone’s position. The play would conclude with a vindication of Antigone. This might be in keeping with a standard view of Greek tragedy that sees the tragic situation as brought on by excessive pride or hubris, in this case Creon’s desire to exert control over nature and the family at the expense of the higher law. But I think this will not do justice to Sophocles’s play.

Sophocles tries to bring out the inherent tension between a politics of pure reason—the sophistic claim that man is the measure of all things—and the attitude of sacred awe and piety before those things that reason cannot control. Sophocles’s Antigone is about the limitations of human reason. There is inherent in reason a leveling and reductive tendency: a belief that reason is the measure—the only measure—for evaluating and adjudicating between conflicts of goods and the view that all conflicts between competing goods must have some rational solution or some one overriding good to which all lesser goals are subordinate. The tragedians were not irrationalists; they did not celebrate the limitations of reason. Rather, they saw profound dangers in reason’s tendency to reduce the multiplicity of things to some underlying unity and order. This tendency not just to seek but to impose uniformity is a sign of tyranny. The critique of reason is at bottom a political critique. In seeking to reduce the many to the one—diversity to some underlying unity—we end by distorting the meaning of things. A politics based on reason alone will be a politics indifferent to difference, to the natural differences between men and women, between family and polis, between public life and private life. In trying to find a simple, uniform standard to “set things straight,” we necessarily lose sight of the complexity of experience. It is the purpose of tragic drama to bring out and reveal the danger of reason’s imagined potency and creativity.