Spirit

Abstract Ancient Greece manifests itself in a moral ethos, Sittlichkeit, in which the individual is both fully absorbed (and therefore fully “in” all the relevant actions of the practice) and is fully reflectively, self-conscious about it. This seemingly perfect world is doomed to fall apart, and the Sophoclean tragedy of Antigone manifests this situation and hints at why it is ultimately self-destructive. Antigone is faced with three unconditional duties that are in contradiction with each other. She has an unconditional duty to perform burial rites on her dead brother, an unconditional duty to obey her uncle Creon’s forbidding her from doing so, and an unconditional duty not to make up her own mind about what her divinely mandated unconditional duties are. This shows that either the divine mandates make no sense or that finding oneself in such a contradictory situation is only a matter of blind luck. That itself raises the question for the Greeks about whether their success thus far is itself only a matter of luck. Ultimately, Greece’s luck runs out, and it conquered by Rome and is thus replaced by an empire within which this form of Sittlichkeit has no home.