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Sophocles, Hegel and Ibsen

A Perspective on A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People
by Helge Salemonsen

VII. The Living and the Dead; Guilt and Destiny

      The next subsection in Hegel’s presentation has the following headline: b. Ethical action; Human and Divine Knowledge; Guilt and Destiny. A keyword is ‘knowledge’. The issue is already hinted at in the previous sectrion. Both Antigone and Creon know themselves to be in the right. From their point of view their actions are in accordance with the ethos, they are ethical actions. But though capable of justifying their own right, the antagonists are incapable of seeing the right of the other. Therein lies their guilt. They are blinded through their unilateral attachment to one of the gender specific aspects of the whole system of norms.

      They know they are right. But a dark-side of non-knowledge is attached to this knowledge, Hegel says. The law of the other, the law to which they are negligent, takes revenge. Guilt attracts vengeance. Only when tragedy falls upon Creon, through the death of his son and wife, does he awaken to the knowledge of his own guilt. He sees the right in the law of the other. “Because we suffer we acknowledge we have erred”, Hegel comments, with reference to Creon’s tragedy:

Creon: Woe for the errors of my mistaken mind, obstinate and fraught with death! You look on kindred that have done and suffered murder! Alas for the disaster caused by my decisions! Ah, my son, young and newly dead, alas, alas, you died, you were cut off, through my folly, not through your own! (Sophocles 1994: 1261 – 1269)

Through the guilt of the living the dead take revenge, a principle that spreads itself through the generations as endless blood feuds:

The dead, whose right is denied, knows therefore how to find instruments of vengeance, which are equally effective and powerful as the power which has injured it. (Hegel 1977: 287)

Antigone becomes the instrument for dead Polynices. But also Haemon and Eurydice become tools for revenge. By their suicides dead Antigone is avenged, thus striking Creon.

      The myth tells that Thebes was sacked and left in ruins as a consequence of the vengeance of the dead. For not only Polynices, but all those proud leaders that fell with him, were left to the same fate, to be denied a proper burial “as prey for dogs and scavengers”. Their mothers could not live with this; they left for Athens to persuade king Theseus to set things right. They succeeded. The bodies were released. But ten years later a new host of warriors threatened the city, an army of the sons of the dead, hungry for revenge. The citizens fled and Thebes was left in ruins. The common ethos, this formerly beautiful interaction between family and community is replaced by private interest and family feuds. The women send their sons to secure, not the common interest, not Thebes’, Corinth’s or Mycenae’s interest, but to secure the family’s honour:

The brave youth in whom woman finds her pleasure, […], now has his day and his worth is openly acknowledged. Now it is physical strength and what appears as a matter of luck that decides on the existence of ethical life and spiritual necessity. Because the existence of ethical life rests on strength and luck, the decision is already made that its downfall has to come. (Hegel 1977: 289)

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