Antigone and tragic choices

As Nussbaum notes, the strategy of conflict elimination as a solution to the problem of bad luck was a prominent theme in 5th Century tragedy; but has also a modern counterpart. The claim is that ‘the human being’s relation to value in the world is not, or should not be, profoundly tragic…that it is, or should be, possible without culpable neglect or serious loss to cut off the risk of the typical tragic occurrence.’ Sophocles' Antigone is a play, which, in Nussbaum’s reading, examines two attempts to achieve the kind of simplification of the structure of an agent’s commitments and loves that will head off conflict and promote security. This is one vision of eudaimonia achieved by two possible routes.

The plot revolves around the dispute between Antigone and King Creon over the unburied corpse of her brother Polynices, who had been killed attacking the city of Thebes. The religious obligation to bury the corpse (which Antigone desires) is in apparent conflict with the civic duty to leave it unburied as the body of an enemy. Creon does not appear conflicted, however, because he narrows his vision of practical reasoning to include only civic values. As the play opens, he seems to have succeeded in keeping the problem of misfortune at bay. His strategy, however, fails him as the plot unfolds: as he mourns for his dead son he repents of his inadequate practical reasoning that led him into such entanglements. Though it is generally agreed that Antigone’s vision is morally superior to Creon’s, Nussbaum argues that her moral vision is similarly limited. She likewise makes a simplification in her concept of the good: family bonds (and so, the religious duty to care for the dead bodies of family members) for her are the trump card. Nussbaum’s Antigone is at least able to recognize the contingent factors that impinge upon her: that her conception of value is vulnerable to some sets of circumstances. Her vision is ‘the more humanly rational and the richer of the two protagonists: both active and receptive, neither exploiter nor simply victim’.

Neither of these two responses is ultimately satisfactory, however. Antigone also eliminates conflicting obligations by means of a simplification of the world of value. Her subservience to duty makes her cold to other values and leads to her destruction. She is an agent who is more than ‘half in love with easeful death’; and blind to the true nature of piety. However, as Nussbaum shows, an optimistic Hegelian harmonization of the two responses is an option that the play countenances and rejects as well. Rather, she finds in the play

…a practical wisdom that bends responsively to the shape of the natural world, accommodating itself to, giving due recognition to, its complexities…To be flexibly responsive to the world, rather than rigid, is a way of living in the world that allows an acceptable amount of safety and stability while still permitting recognition of the richness of value that is in the world…

So: Nussbaum would argue (and in later pieces she makes these thoughts more explicitly her own) that Antigone shows that the avoidance of conflict is not only impossible: it is also undesirable for the eudaimonistic life. Practical wisdom actually demands that we acknowledge our own finitude and our vulnerability to external factors even those we might call ‘luck’. The conflict-free life would be reduced in value and beauty next to the life which is open to the possibility of conflict. For Nussbaum, managing risk is a matter of being ‘flexibly responsive’ to risk rather than eliminating it. This flexible posture towards the world involves using a specifically practical reason – a reason that does not imagine itself mastering the world and its circumstances but rather reflectively interacting with them.