Quotes
I. Introduction
It is tempting to see Agamemnon’s situation, for example, as the mere cruelty of capricious Gods or simply as bad luck; what he needs to do, we might think, is to grit his teeth, make the decision and then get on with his life and not dwell too much on a painful episode. What I would like to show is that the dilemma can reveal certain crucial information about the decision-maker (i) to us readers-spectators, (ii) to other characters in the play who witness, or are implicated by, the incident, (iii) as well as, and perhaps most importantly, to the protagonist himself or herself. Only through a dilemma is the character forced to acknowledge his own priorities, the ‘price’ he puts on certain values relative to other values, and the consequences that his value-system will have on the relationships to other people and institutions and the responsibilities inherent in such relationships. Ideally, the protagonist will acquire wisdom from the dilemma and the way he handles it.==
II. The nature of moral dilemmas
One important and trivial question to settle right away is whether a dilemma can actually be solved, since, paradoxically, if a choice has to be made in a dilemmatic situation, this very choice would seem to dissolve the dilemma. There are two ways around this.
The second way around the paradox is to adopt a careful definition of ‘dilemma’. Christopher Gowans (3), for example, prefers the term ”inescapable moral wrongdoing," to stress that even if the choice is clear, the dilemmatic aspect is the fact that even a good person is effectively forced to commit a wrong.
A good way to start would be with MacIntyre’s classification of dilemmas, featuring his distinction between the three types of genuine and two types of merely apparent dilemmas. In each case he describes how things appear from the standpoint of the agent involved.
- Role responsibility:
Someone — a morally serious person — who, having assumed or been assigned the responsibilities of more than one social role… discovers that to discharge the responsibilities of one will prevent him or her from discharging those of the other.
- Generally-accepted norms
[Such norms] involve inescapable failure by some morally serious person, not in doing what role-responsibilities require, but in doing what generally-accepted norms for human beings as such, independently of their roles, require.
- This involves such things as the conventions of keeping promises, repaying debts, trust in friendship or business etc. Here the dilemma arises from the heterogeneity and apparent incommensurability of the relevant norms. Actions which preserve confidentiality might threaten those precepts which forbid bringing avoidable harm upon the innocent; actions which avoid such harm will violate the norms which enjoin trustworthiness. This could be seen as a narrower version of the freely-entered ‘station’ typical of the first category. Rather than commit oneself to a whole list of duties associated with a particular job, one commits oneself to a single duty in the form of a promise. As such one could speak of a dilemma as being a co-instantiation of incompatible responsibilities to two different entities, either a concrete person or institution (representing concrete persons, e.g. Agamemnon’s army), each of whom has a legitimate claim corresponding to that responsibility; one such claim will have to be frustrated.
- Alternative ideals of character
Someone is compelled by his or her analysis of what is required for supreme excellence of some kind… to conclude that at least for him or herself a ruthless single-mindedness is indispensable. But he or she also finds good reasons to conclude that such ruthlessness precludes the development of the qualities needed in a good friend or for compassion toward the needy
- For each character the pursuit of their standard of excellence is partially constitutive of who they conceive themselves to be, and so such a pursuit cannot be simply abandoned when it seems to threaten relationships. This austere priority when dealing with this kind of dilemma, I will argue, results in a character that is defective in a very specific way.
2.1. What moral dilemmas are not
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An everyday conflict of duties: my plans to attend a friend’s concert conflict with my duty to correct and return a student’s paper on time.
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One popular example in the recent literature about dilemmas involves two people drowning while I, standing on the riverbank, can only save one.
- If there are no relevant differences, then it does not matter which I decide to save first: my moral obligation is to save one of them (by, say, first tossing a coin) and, if possible, to return to save the other. If there is a relevant difference between the two (for example, one of them is my wife), then there is no dilemma either.
However, it would be quite inappropriate to toss a coin to resolve any of the first three types of dilemmas. For in each case the decision seems to concern me much more closely. My station, for example, may be an integral part of how I see myself, and my particular choice in the event of irreconcilable conflict may very well change the way I see myself and make decisions in the future. When contemplating whom to save first in the lake, the case is more detached from the contemplating agent.
2.2. The importance of regret, remorse or guilt
- The advocates of monist theories such as Kant (11) and Mill (12) simply denied that dilemmas could occur at all. The problem of the apparent dilemma was usually the result of an either culpable or mitigating deficiency in the agent’s knowledge, since, by their definition of morality, there could never be inconsistent, unrankable requirements placed upon a rational agent at a single moment.
- What the above critics claim, however, is that moral dilemmas are not even conceptually possible, for they would threaten the fabric of one or another moral theory, and could also threaten the underlying pre-supposition of moral realism. However — and here’s another purpose of this essay — ==I believe the intuitive existence of moral dilemmas can legitimately threaten unified moral theories by reminding us that the moral life is sometimes just too damn complicated to be captured in a tidy system.== The examples of Antigone and Agamemnon cannot be rejected as easily as the theorist would like.
- AGAMEMNON
- ==The first choral ode of the play tells how a Greek naval expedition has been ordered by Zeus himself (55-62) (15) against the city of Troy to avenge the kidnapping of Helen by Paris (16). Agamemnon, son of Atreus, joint king of Argos, leads the expedition, and takes his daughter Iphigenia along with him. The goddess Artemis, however, is angry for unspecified reasons (17), and has becalmed the 1000-ship expedition at Aulis, out to sea. Not only will this prevent the fulfilment of Zeus’s command (18), but there will eventually be problems with food and water (188-9) for the large marine army. The prophet Calchas (19), on Agamemnon’s ship, divines that the only remedy for the situation is the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter to placate the goddess. The alternative is a slow death by starvation for everyone in the expedition (20). After deliberation, Agamemnon indeed has her sacrificed. Here is the crucial passage:
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Then the elder king [Agamemnon] spake and said: “Hard is my fate to refuse obedience, and hard, if I must slay my child, the glory of my home, and at the altar-side stain with streams of a virgin’s blood a father’s hand. Which of these courses is not fraught with ill? How can I become a deserter to my fleet and fail my allies in arms? For that they should with passionate eagerness crave a sacrifice to lull the winds — even a virgin’s blood — stands within their right. May it be for the best.”
But when he had donned the yoke of Necessity, with veering of spirit, impious, unholy, unsanctified, from that hour his purpose shifted to resolve that deed of uttermost audacity. For mankind is emboldened by wretched delusion, counsellor of ill, primal source of woe. So then he hardened his heart to sacrifice his daughter that he might prosper a war waged to avenge a woman, and as an offering for the voyaging of a fleet! (205-226)
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3.1. Assumptions and consequences
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Discussions of moral dilemmas make several important assumptions about the situation and its participants, which we can address by looking directly at Agamemnon. Edwards begins his article with the following questions:
==“Can we think of him as having a free choice between viable alternatives? If so, is it a choice between alternatives both of which are disastrous? Or has he no free choice, and does Zeus, or Necessity, force him to choose one way, and then later punish him for so doing? Is he guilty of anything, and if so, what? If he in fact makes a choice, and it leads to his death, is it because of his misjudgement, his hamartia, his personality, his folly (22), the guilt he inherited from his father? Is he a devout man, subordinating his feelings to undertake a mission ordered by his god? A patriot, sacrificing his daughter for the good of his country? Does Aeschylus even realise he is posing a problem? (23)”
Such questions are important to understand the nature of Agamemnon’s specific dilemma, and to what degree he can be said to be free and therefore responsible for the consequences of his choice (24). Our first reaction is that Agamemnon is simply unlucky to have found himself between the wishes of two competing gods; we might think that he should see himself as the unwilling instrument of their feud, but that the result is morally the same as if Artemis herself had struck Iphigenia down without human involvement. ==The Chorus, however, while accepting her death as a “yoke of Necessity,” also proceeds to blame Agamemnon for the sacrifice (25). They even call Agamemnon’s state of mind “impious, impure, unholy” (219) — because Greek emotive language exploited to the full the assumption that what is offensive to the speaker, or to man in general, is also offensive to the gods. And yet the crime was committed for the gods, for Artemis directly, and for Zeus indirectly (i.e. that the expedition might proceed) (https://www2.units.it/etica/2001_1/cowley.html#b26)).
This seems incompatible. But we have to look carefully at (i) the nature and the genesis of the “yoke” (does the necessity govern the choice of one of the options, or the actual choice to be made?) and also at (ii) what exactly the Chorus finds blameworthy in the conduct of their chief.
One thing is certain, that Agamemnon, as far as we know a hitherto blameless man and loving father, is not responsible for finding himself in the situation, and hence it cannot be reduced to MacIntyre’s first non-dilemmatic situation. Secondly, we can see that the sacrifice of Iphigenia is indeed preferable with a view to Agamemnon’s sense of self as primarily a military commander, to the reliably-anticipated consequences to the expedition and to the impiety of failing Zeus. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that Agamemnon could rationally have chosen any other way. But both courses involve him in inescapable moral wrongdoing (27).
However, Agamemnon must not be seen as a mere puppet; he is allowed to deliberate and to choose, he knows what he is doing, he is aware of all relevant aspects of the situation (except perhaps of the reason for Artemis’s anger), and he is not being physically compelled or personally threatened. But he is under necessity insofar as his alternatives include no very desirable options. As such there does not appear to be any incompatibility between choice and necessity here.
Agamemnon’s first reaction is anger and grief (203-4). His subsequent description (206-13) shows that he is fully aware of all the relevant consequences, but more importantly, already shows him leaning one way rather than the other (the rhetorical question “how can I become a deserter…?”).
==Nussbaum compares this situation so far (28) to the plight of Abraham, divinely ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac. If we ignore the impression we get of the cruel, vainglorious gods in both Agamemnon’s and the biblical stories, and the whole question of the reliability of the source of the order (how does one recognise a divine command?), the comparison is valid up to a point: a good man is ordered to kill his own innocent child or incur the heavier guilt of disobedience and impiety. But here the comparison ends, for Abraham clearly attempted to fulfil the order only with the greatest horror and reluctance. Whereas in the Agamemnon, the Chorus describes the situation: “holding no seer at fault, bending to the adverse blasts of fortune” (186-8). Agamemnon does not blame either prophet or gods, but inwardly begins to co-operate with necessity, arranging his feelings with his fortune. It is a masterpiece of self-deception, typical of the toughest soldiers who must face the danger, carnage, and utter senselessness of war on a regular basis.
Instead of speaking of his pain and revulsion to himself or others, he talks about the rights of his soldiers to her death: “For that they should with passionate eagerness carve a sacrifice to lull the winds — even a virgin’s blood — stands within their right” (214-217). How far is this self-deception, and how far has natural fatherly feeling been smothered? Whatever the extent, his attitude toward the decision itself seems to have changed with the making of it. Instead of thinking about the evil that he must commit, he hopes it turns out “for the best,” as though he had genuinely resolved the conflict and justified the crime he is about to commit. And if it is right to obey the gods (both Zeus and Artemis), then it is right to want to obey them, and even to yearn for it with “passionate eagerness.” The Chorus blames Agamemnon no such much for committing the necessary deed, but for changing his thoughts and passions with “uttermost audacity” (225). He had to see her as a sacrificial beast, commanding his officer to lift her up “as it were a kid” (232) onto the altar and to stop her mouth with a “bit” (239). ==He simply does not see what the Chorus sees. Never do we hear the king utter a word of regret or painful memory. Nussbaum clearly thinks this reflects badly on Agamemnon’s character, and that we the audience are also invited by the Chorus to condemn him — not for his deed, but for his reactions.
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3.2. The cultivation of responsiveness
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Nussbaum brings up another interesting point concerning the memory of the good person who has been forced to commit wrong:
“Even if an agent comes to the dilemma with good general principles, the case does not present itself with labels written on it, indicating its salient features. To pick these out, he must interpret it; and since often the relevant features emerge distinctly only through memory and projection of a more complicated kind, he will have to use his imagination as well as perception. (29)”
==As Nussbaum goes on to stress, Agamemnon, to lessen the Chorus’s blame, would have to realise, when faced with the choice, all the consequences of each different option in the dilemma: this will involve a deep understanding of his own pluralistic theology and the price of disobedience (assuming reliably intelligible divine instructions), and the possibility of mutually-contradictory instructions. At the same time, Agamemnon would have to allow himself to really see his daughter as such, rather than the sacrificial goat that some querulous god has demanded. Most importantly, after the act, Agamemnon would have to remember the act itself as the murder of his daughter and not the destruction of an animal. If the Ancient Mariner was able to suspend the dead albatross on his neck, then Agamemnon should be able to buckle under the weight of his memories of what he has done, in the form of her face, her trailing yellow robes, the cries of ‘Father’, and the look of accusation in the silent eyes (228-247).
==Above all, Agamemnon must allow himself to feel that he has committed wrong, and not be deceived by a choice well made (30). Though he must, to a certain extent, act like a resolute person, he will feel the deepest remorse and make every effort through the rest of his life to make reparations.
==In tragedy, as in life, the experience of conflict could be said to have two functions, two ways of being rendered intelligible: it reveals to others and to the agent himself aspects of what the agent’s character has been all along. It can also mark the beginning of a period of self-discovery and change, both voluntary and involuntary. This has traditionally been one explanation for the caprice of the gods in bringing down misfortune on the undeserving. The condition, as described above, is that one really be allowed to experience them, that the shock will break through the interpretative curtain; Agamemnon of course knows that it is his daughter lying before him, in the sense that he can truthfully answer questions about her, but he does not seem to know that it is the distinct person who is Iphigenia, that it is his daughter, that she is just as much alive and individual as he. An honest effort to do justice to all aspects of a hard case, seeing and feeling it in all its conflicting many-sidedness, could enrich future deliberative efforts. The Chorus invites us to believe that Agamemnon denies himself this opportunity for growth out of fear of the pain that it would involve; but with the ensuing self-knowledge, he could reach a new understanding of piety and of the love he owes to the rest of his family:
“But even in trouble, bringing memory of pain, droppeth o’er the mind in sleep, so to men in their despite cometh wisdom. With constraint, methinks, cometh the grace of the powers divine enthroned upon their awful seats.” (182-185) (31)
However, if Agamemnon is deficient in this sensitivity, in this capacity for understanding, in imagination, surely that deficiency is itself a piece of bad luck. How can we share the Chorus’s condemnation? The assumption is that emotional responses are not subject to any sort of control and cannot form a character that an agent deliberately forms. But this would be to deny that an agent cannot cultivate responsiveness by working through the memory of the event. Nussbaum writes:
==“[the Chorus’s] patient work, even years later, on the story… reminds us that responsive attention to these complexities is a job that practical rationality can, and should, undertake to perform; and that this job of rationality claims more from the agent than the exercise of reason and intellect, narrowly conceived… We see… a two-way interchange of illumination and cultivation working between emotions and thoughts: we see feelings prepared by memory and deliberation, learning brought about through pathos. (At the same time, we ourselves, if we are good spectators, will find this complex interaction in our own responses).(32)”
==The Kantian assumption that only the intellect and the will are appropriate objects for ethical assessment now begins to impoverish and distort our deeper understanding of tragedy.
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3.3. Agamemnon and moral dilemmas
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==What light does the tragedy of Agamemnon throw on our understanding of moral dilemmas? It would be worthwhile considering Sartre at this point (33), for whom the moral of such hard cases is that it is useless for an agent to form an ordered system of ethical principles and to try and live by that system. Since principles clash, it is no good trying to live by principles at all, since to be bound in general to what cannot guide one in extreme cases is foolish mauvaise foi. If Agamemnon were a Sartrean hero, he would, at the moment of perceiving the conflict and understanding it as unresolvable, dissociate himself altogether from both of the competing principles, and regard himself as entirely, radically free to make an unregretted choice. Although this approach is correct in regarding the choice as a key moment in Agamemnon’s life, the solution seems arbitrary and strange, like the tossing of the coin advocated for the second type of MacIntyre’s non-dilemmas (the two people drowning).
The standard response to existentialist invention is that it attempts to deny continuity in character, and this is neither possible nor commendable. As Nussbaum puts it:
“All our judgements about the appropriateness of certain kinds of emotional and imaginative activity in our two cases has presupposed a background of ongoing character and value commitments (the agent’s own, or, where that proves deficient, the Chorus’s) against which action and response can be assessed. The very possibility of moral assessment seems here to be bound up to the idea of on-going character. We do not know how we would talk about an agent who keeps improvising himself from moment to moment and was never willing to identify himself with any general commitments.(34)”
It is not even clear, in Agamemnon’s dilemmatic situation, that his duties as military commander and as father (and, as human being, the duty to respect innocent life) do offer him bad guidance. The guidance they offer is that he should feel bound to each of two contingently incompatible actions. He will be forced to go against his commitment, but “insofar as such thoughts and feelings both express and further strengthen a virtuous and committed character, the guidance seems to be good (35).” ==Again, Nussbaum’s main point is the educational aspect of moral dilemmas. Agamemnon ultimately does not need any help to decide what to do; but he does need help in deciding how to feel.
I tend to sympathise with Nussbaum’s analysis, but I think she simplifies things a little, and is too quick to blame, partly because there would be no point to blame. In the context of a slightly different argument over Agamemnon’s rationality, Williams wrote that it would be “a glib moralist who said, as some sort of criticism, that he must be irrational to lie awake at night. (36)” Similarly, it would be a glib moralist who tried to enter the situation and admonish Agamemnon for his lack of outward feeling. In one sense, that is all we have to go by; in another, we have insufficient warrant to speculate about the inner feelings, especially those of a military commander. I would suggest that the text allows enough room for a skilled actor to flavour his apparently cold words with a hint of desperate irony, to show that he is acting out the part in an almost blind frenzy and rage, as if to throw the deed back in the faces of the playwright and the gods. Indeed, Nussbaum also seems to accept the possibility that when he suppresses his initially accurate judgements, „his shift may be inspired by horror at the situation confronting him, which he can endure in no other way than to deny that it exists.(37)” But it is Bernard Williams again, who I think sums up a very plausible alternative judgement:
==One way me might understand this is as a man’s being driven mad with extremity. Equally (and indeed in no conflict with that) we might see the rage as something that was necessary to Agamemnon if he was to do this thing at all. This is not a text that invites us very far into psychological interpretation, but still less does it beckon us towards blame. The Chorus is laying before us what happened, and this horror, the father’s fury, is part of it. A sense of the work requires a suspension of moral comment at this point, and so does a sense of the event that it describes.(38)”
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- Antigone
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It is now time to consider the second of our dilemmatic situations from Greek drama, quite different from that in which Agamemnon found himself. The latter, through no fault of his own, was forced by feuding gods to choose a woeful alternative in order to save his fleet and fulfil his divine mission. Whatever his reaction to the choice and the murder of his daughter, the situation seems to us, the audience, to warrant revulsion, remorse, painful memory and a life-long desire to amend what will always remain, in the eyes of the agent himself, a crime.
That dilemma involves one person with two conflicting options, both of which are painful. ==The contrast with the situation of Antigone is clear, for in this case there are two people (Antigone and Creon) who represent two incompatible specific commitments which form part of two larger, otherwise often compatible systems of values==. The other difference is the attitude that we the audience are invited to have toward the two titular heroes. Are the two characters to represent polar moral opposites, or is there a sense in which they are both wrong? Both can be accused of having too narrow a vision of moral duty, of elevating their perceived duty into a moral fetish. Agamemnon’s situation offered no easy way out, since his decision concerned irreparable damage done to one person or to many. Antigone’s, on the other hand, is marked by what some of us would perceive as an irrational stubbornness that ultimately concerns nobody’s life except her own. We may admire her for a supererogatory gesture, but would not blame her for failing to perform it. I propose looking at the dramatic situation, then at Creon’s dilemma, then at Antigone’s.
4.1. The situation in Antigone
Oedipus’s two sons, Polynices and Eteocles, ended up on opposite sides of a near-civil war surrounding Thebes, which resulted in both their deaths. Creon, the new king of Thebes and uncle to the two brothers and to Antigone, orders a full state burial for Eteocles who was defending the city, and condemns Polynices to the fate of traitors (39): his body is to be left to rot, unburied, outside the city gates. Antigone and Ismene are both sisters to the two brothers, and therefore nieces to Creon. Antigone resolves to bury the corpse of Polynices symbolically, by sprinkling earth on it. She is caught by the guards and sentenced to death by Creon for breaking the law, a sentence that she was well aware of. At first glance, then, we have two incompatible desires: to bury a brother, in accordance with religious and family custom and fraternal sentiment, and to prevent the burial of a traitor, in accordance with prudential principles of government — a government which Antigone considers legitimate and whose laws she acknowledges, and a adroitly-preserved civic order from which she benefits.
In the Antigone there are no gods directly relevant to the dilemmatic situation, although they are frequently invoked by both protagonists in partial justification of their priorities. It is a drama that could easily be imagined taking place today, between the people and the institutions they support and represent (40).
==In addition, Antigone portrays a more protracted conflict than in Agamemnon; there is plenty of room for softening and relenting before Creon is forced to make good his threat by Antigone’s firmness of purpose.
==We shall see two different attempts to close off the prospect of conflict -and tension by simplifying the structure of the agent’s commitments; we shall examine what motivates such attempts, and what becomes of them within the context of the tragic crisis.
==Finally, as with Agamemnon, we shall ask whether practical wisdom is to be gained, if nothing else, from such a conflict.
==Just as the situation in the Agamemnon did not appear like a classic dilemma, since the hero knew what he had to do, so in the Antigone, the two protagonists are so clear in their minds, have their priorities so carefully ordered, that they do not experience their dilemmas with the same urgency as we the audience.
Antigone and Creon can approach problems of choice with unusual confidence and stability, and seem unusually safe from the ravages of luck. As such, it is again difficult, at first, to speak of choice. Both Creon and Antigone have freedom to do what they want, of course, but they only want one thing, and the alternatives (not attempting to bury her brother, or, making an exception to a city edict) are seen as too much of a sacrifice to the values with which they firmly identify.
==And yet each, we are invited to see, is somehow defective in vision. Each has omitted recognitions, denied claims, called situations by names that are not their most relevant or truest names.
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4.2. Creon’s dilemma
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==Creon believes that the most important thing a man can have is practical wisdom (1050-1), and that the healthy mind is devoted to civic safety and civic well-being (41); he is either the consummate unimaginative bureaucrat, or, less charitably, the Machiavellian tyrant, seeking to justify his maintenance of power with moral labels.
==As such he is able to forestall confusion and inconsistency by a ‘healthy’ rearrangement of evaluations, so that positive ethical terms apply uniquely to those who promote, by effort or opinion, the good of the city, which Creon has established as the single intrinsic good. Antigone’s badness becomes civic disloyalty, and Eteocles’s goodness is his honourable defence of his native town (42).
==To give burial to the city’s enemy would be, he argues, to give equal share to the good and the bad (520). As Santirocco points out in a discussion of the concept of justice:
“At different times and in different contexts the word can signify custom or usage, law-enforcing authority, penalty and of course ‘justice’ as a higher standard. Its precise semantic range is wide and fluctuating. Thus tragedy becomes, in a sense, a matter of vocabulary. In the Antigone, the characters appeal to justice, but each defines it differently, so that the conflict is not so much between justice and injustice as between one sort of justice and another… . Sophokles’s vision… is austere. Although he acknowledges the existence of an ideal of justice, he exposes the tensions and ambiguities inherent in it and thereby questions whether that ideal can ever be realised in the lives of men. (43)”
Civic order and prospering is the highest good, to which, Creon believes, even the gods would aspire. As such he feels justified in defying religious custom to promote this good, in “spurning the due of Heaven” (743). “Why would the gods honour someone who came to destroy their temples and their laws?” (287) “Do you see the gods honouring bad people? It cannot be” (289-90).
==In addition to words like ‘justice’, ‘respect’ and the ‘good’, Creon also shifts the meanings of ‘love’ (44) and ‘piety’ (Nussbaum 57). We would expect him to have numerous obligations to members of his family, for example to his son Haemon, to his nephew’s body lying outside the city gates, and to his niece Antigone herself. And yet he is determined, for the sake of consistency, to conceal from deliberative view the claims of both familial and affective ties, at least insofar as they clash with civic interest.
So “an enemy is never a philos, not even when he dies” (522). So when Creon is presented with the claims of piety and philos, he cannot recognise them and sees not a dilemma but merely insurrection. Any other description would be misguided. Like Mill’s utilitarian, every object or concept of value can be coined in a single currency and then easily measured against each other. It does not contain conflicts within itself, and can recognise no rival source of value and commitment.
The play is partly about Creon’s discovery of a more complicated deliberative world; his supreme end, once properly conceived, is not so simple as he thought it, and it fails to do justice, finally, to all his concerns. The clearest rupture is Haemon’s presumably trustworthy statement that the people support Antigone (733), even though it is still possible that her actions threaten the city unbeknownst to its inhabitants. As Nussbaum puts it:
==“A city is a complex whole, composed of individuals and families, with all its disparate, messy, often conflicting concerns that individuals and families have, including their religious practises, their concern for the burial of kin. A plan that makes the city the supreme good cannot so easily deny the intrinsic value of the religious goods that are valued by the people who compose it”(45).
In the end, it is his own recalcitrant humanity that Creon fails to subdue. He is forced to acknowledge his love for his son and to see its separate value:
Oh errors of my ill-reasoning reason… Oh, how impoverished my deliberations were… You have died, [my son], you have gone away, through my bad deliberations, not your own” (1261-9) (46).
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4.3. Antigone’s dilemma
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While most commentators agree that Creon is morally defective and superficial, the situation with Antigone and her dilemma is more controversial. There has been a lamentable tendency to see her in saintly terms, dying for truth, resisting tyranny (47).
==However, it seems more plausible to suggest that, like Creon, Antigone also engages in a ruthless simplification of the world of value in order to effectively eliminate conflicting obligations. And like Creon, she can be blamed for narrowness of vision, even though she still remains morally superior to Creon. (48)
Antigone’s prime concern is for her family and the duties she sees as incumbent upon her, whether she likes it or not; and she is Ismene’s sister, Antigone reminds her, whether she [Ismene] likes it or not (45). Although the ‘family’ as a value-concept is not so all-encompassing as the ‘city’ (fewer value words can be realigned), Antigone’s effort can easily be seen as a direct parallel to Creon’s. For her, there is no ‘enemy’, ‘traitor to the state’ or ‘friend to the state’ among her brothers, there are merely philoi, to whom she is related and therefore bound.
If one listened only to Antigone, one would not know that a war had nearly taken place, or that Thebes, her city and the location of all she claims to hold dear, had been directly attacked by the brother she is now trying to sanctify through burial.
==What is important, however, is that this duty does not seem to be backed by natural sentiment; she loves her duties more than she does her brothers: “I shall lie with him as a loved one with a loved one,” (73) she proclaims, without any sense of closeness, personal memory or particularity animating her speech (49).
Ismene, the one person to whom she might be drawn after the deaths of their two siblings, is treated from the beginning with remote coldness, and is even called “enemy” (93) when she takes the ‘wrong’ stand on matters of pious obligation. Whereas it is Ismene whom we see weeping “sister-loving tears”, and who asks, with an intensity of feeling that never animates her sister’s piety: “what life is worth living for me, bereft of you?” (548) (50).
Duty to the family dead is therefore the supreme law, passion and value, and Antigone structures her entire life and her vision of the world in accordance with this simple, self-contained system of duties. Indeed, she is just as obsessed about what she conceives as justice as is Creon about what he conceives of justice, only she claims to equate it with the gods and their desires as manifest in religious customs. It reflects the central question of Plato’s Euthyphro: is an act good because it is pious, or is it pious because it is good?
For Creon, civic justice governs the gods themselves; for Antigone, the customs sponsored by the gods define goodness and justice, to which the sublunary world must succumb. Even within her system, Antigone is ready to handle any conflicts with her fixed priority ordering to dictate her choice without regret. So all-consuming is her interest that one wonders what she has been doing to entertain herself before her brothers went to war.
I am not so sure about Antigone’s attempts to justify her act by appeal to religious custom. Like Creon, she claims allegiance to Zeus when convenient (e.g. 950) while considering her general commitments to be themselves above the gods. The very expression of her devotion is suspect: “Zeus did not decree this, as far as I am concerned” (450). Antigone is a ‘maker of her own law’ (autonomos, 821) and her defiance is a ’self-invented passion’ (autognotos orga, 875). If we ask of Antigone the same question she asked of herself: “What divine justice have I disobeyed?” (921), we must answer: “none”. But as Santirocco explains:
“in a very real sense this is the wrong question. Although Antigone’s actions coincide with the requirements of diké (i.e. that the dead should not go unburied) they are not the result of any conscious concern for diké. Antigone’s motive was personal, and this, in some way, qualifies her response since it leads her to ignore the claims of society just as dramatically as Creon ignores the claims of the gods.” (51)
Like Creon, she comes to recognise the complexity of life as her own demise grows imminent. She comes to see that the service of the dead requires the polis, that her own religious aims cannot be fulfilled without civic institutions. In her last speeches, she laments not her imminent death, but rather, her isolation from her community of offspring, from friends and mourners. How is it, therefore, that we can admire Antigone over Creon, if they are so similar? Nussbaum gives three reasons: first, in the world of the play, it seems clear that Antigone’s choice is preferable to Creon’s.
“The dishonour to civic values and the inherent prudential risk is far less radical than the violation of religious custom involved in Creon’s act. Antigone shows a deeper understanding of the community and its values when she argues that the obligation to bury the dead is an unwritten law, which cannot be set aside by the decree of a particular ruler.” (52)
This view will be shared by the audience and emerge even despite the criticism of Antigone’s single-mindedness. Second, Antigone’s pursuit of virtue is her own, and involves nobody else and commits her to abusing no other person (although Ismene might justifiably expect better treatment). Third, and perhaps most importantly, Antigone is ready to risk and sacrifice her ends in a way that is not possible for Creon. There is room in Antigone’s system for a genuine sacrifice within the defence of piety. She dies recanting nothing.
4.4. The importance of the Antigone
The main dramatic dilemma is the conflict between the two of them. Interestingly, the conflict is highly personal. Creon’s ‘victory’ in destroying Antigone does not represent a victory for civic duty, and Antigone’s relative ‘victory’ in our eyes does not represent the defeat of the city by the family. A==nd yet it is hard to speak of a real conflict, since the two speak such different languages (with similar terminology, to be sure) that they never really engage, and never really listen. As Blundell points out, Sophokles could have achieved far more interaction and dramatic excitement in two ways: Creon’s case could certainly have been much stronger, since Classical Greek sympathies would definitely be with him and his devotion to the city. On the other hand, Antigone could have tried to persuade him on his own terms that, for example, both brothers had been responsible for the war. Rather, the two remain narrow and self-absorbed ==(53).
The simplistic hagiography of modern versions of the play does detract from an important dramatic question. We, the spectators, can imagine ==ourselves in Antigone’s predicament, and ask: “are there any values I personally would be willing to die for in conditions of sufficient adversity?” In modern western democratic society, such adversity has been scarce since the system allows dissent to be voiced and indeed, if voiced by sufficient numbers, heeded.
==But the question of adversity remains relevant in two contexts: first, in questions of integrity and compromise in the face of any form of authority making specific rules perceived as unjust: a teacher, boss or local politician.
Second, in more extreme political regimes as many will remember in Europe this century. Annouilh was not particularly original in seeing the parallels with defiance to the Nazi occupation of France, but in portraying his heroine as a guiding ideal he lost not only much of the subtlety of Sophokles’s dramatic portrayal, he also failed to capture fully the individual experience during those terrible years in France. While it is true that many emerged from the occupation with a definite feeling of moral stigma for what they themselves perceived as craven collaboration with an unambiguous enemy, the choice that French individuals faced on a daily basis was mostly a moral and not a moral-prudential dilemma.
==A moral-prudential dilemma involves one moral horn and one prudential horn. In such dilemmas, one knows what one morally ought to do, but one is afraid or one does not consider the risks to be worth taking. This need not be cowardice: it does not seem blameworthy for me to refrain from jumping in to save somebody when I cannot swim; although I will feel awful if I therefore have to watch them drown. No doubt I will feel a similar stigma as the self-described collaborator for not having fulfilled what I myself considered a moral requirement: to resist the enemy by all means at my disposal. Antigone’s conflict with Creon is not really a moral-prudential dilemma, and it would not be interesting if it were.
Rather, the two horns of her dilemma are both moral requirements, and I as an audience member have to decide — regardless of the way Antigone resolves it — what I would do in her situation. Similarly, Sartre’s student faces a moral dilemma in that he cannot decide between two moral requirements he himself acknowledges: filial duty versus patriotic duty. This is far more characteristic of the dilemmas typical of occupation.
The important point is that Antigone is not a revolutionary. She does not attempt to incite or persuade others to lobby the government, she does not write passionate letters to the media about her grievances, she does not even bother to really engage her own sister in rational argument about the point of dissent. She is utterly alone, and well recognises the futility of her gesture in terms of long-term change, and Ismene is careful to explain this to her — in the same way resistance to a military occupier is also likely to be futile. Were it not for Creon’s wife’s and son’s support for her desperate act with a likewise desperate protest, it is unlikely that Creon would have been moved to reconsider his policy, or his way of viewing Antigone’s transgression.
Again, though, it is one thing to be provoked into thoughts of integrity and resistance, and quite another to see the Antigone purely in such terms. We have no strong reason to assume that Creon’s rule is otherwise unjust, and that Antigone suffers unduly. If anything, her special position as relative to the king might give her privileges. We never hear her complain of other constraints on her desires, beyond the widespread and unquestioned patriarchal thinking of a woman’s place and role in society. ==In one sense, Antigone is not a very effective role model when portrayed as an unswerving saint because her behaviour is too demanding for the rest of us, who have ambitions and hobbies that we take delight in, who have relationships with people whom we care about and who depend on us, and who, ultimately, only have one life to lead. Antigone did not have to live with her choice after she had made it in the way Agamemnon did, she did not have to become a person capable of killing his own daughter. As such it may be said that although Antigone loses her life at the end, she did not have much else to lose.=