In todayÕs lecture and in sections tomorrow and Friday we will discuss some of the strategies that Kierkegaard uses to develop his argument. We will question some of his assumptions not so much to decide whether they are right or wrong as to bring out some of the habits of mind that lead him to formulate an argument like this.
The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even the early modern period seem not to have drawn such a hard and fast distinction between antiquity and their own times. We have seen, for instance, that images of pagan mythology--Deadalus, for example, or the goddess Venus--were placed in a series of reliefs along with the Christian sacraments of penance and matrimony on the bell tower of the Florentine cathedral. We have also seen that the nineteenth-century sculptor Antonio Canova had no difficulty prepresenting the Emperor Napoleon as a classical hero much in the style of certain statues of Hellenistic rulers from the second and third centuries BC.
It would be wrong to say that these medieval and early modern artists perceived no difference between the ancient myths and contemporary practices and individuals. In fact, it would be equally wrong to assume that the ancient artist who depicted a contemporary ruler in the guise of Hercules was unaware that he was drawing a comparison between two very different spheres of experience. But it does seem correct to infer that all of these artists are working to assert the similarity that they or theri patrons perceive between the ancient myths and contemporary experiences. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, is working to assert that their is a categorical difference between the Greek myths in their ÒoriginalÓ form and the forms to which a modern audience would respond, at least in the filed of tragedy. He was not the first modern thinker to make such a claim, but his essay is notable for the way in which it uses a specific version of a familiar ancient myth to illustrate the idea.
The first thing to stress is that Kiekegaard does demonstrate adequately that he has a fairly high degree of scholarly control over the mythic material. Unlike, say, many writers and artists of the Renaissance (according to Seznec, for instance), Kiekegaard is not writing on the basis of a handbook knowledge of the Greek myths: he is evidently able to read Sophocles (and Aristotle, et al.) in Greek, no doubt because he received the intensively classical education that was usual for young European men in his day. In fact, it is probable that the title of the bogus society that he pretends to be addressing is borrowed from a Greek author of the second century AD, Lucian, who wrote comic dialogues using mythological material and sometimes dealing with serious themes. So Kiekegaard is in a sense following in the footsteps of ancient authors whom he himself has read in Greek and knows very well.
Even so, Kiekegaard is obviously not following his ancient models slavishly. In fact, after discussing the character of Antigone in Sophocles, he then goes on to invent his own Antigone, different from the ancient prototype, to illustrate the differences between ancient and modern conceptions of the tragic.
KiekegaardÕs realationship to his ancient mythological sources is obviously rather complex. On the one hand, he (arguably at least) knows the sources of ancient Greek mythology better than, say, the painters of the Renaissance; yet he finds it necessary not merely to demonstrate his accurate knowledge of the ancient myths, but then almost ostentatiously to develop his own ideas about these myths, even varying the form of the stories, in order to illustrate a philosophical point.
Why Kiekegaard does this would be another good question to ponder for your discussion sections. Some particular points to pocus on are:
Early in the essay, Kiekegaard invokes AristotleÕs conception of tragedy. In his Poetics, Aristotle had cited SophoclesÕ Oedipus the King as the most perfect tragedy. Aristotle is speaking primarily in terms of plot construction.Kierkegard evidently wishes to place himself within the tradition of philosophical discussions of tragedy that Plato and Aristotle began, but he also wishes to assert a difference in perspective. For Aristotle, says Kierkegaard, thought and character are the two main sources of tragic action; Òbut he also notes that the primary factor is the telos [end, purpose] and the individuals do not act in order to present characters; rather these are included for the sake of the action. Here it is easy to perceive a difference from modern tragedyÓ (p. 143). Kierkegaard, then stresses the importance of character in modern tragedy. Thus, when he later invokes SophoclesÕ Oedipus ÒtrilogyÓ (which, as we have seen, is in fact not a trilogy in the ancient sense, since the plays were written years apart from one another and were all performed in different competitions), he chooses Antigone as the heroic character on whom he wishes to focus.
Is this an idiosyncratic choice? The influence of Aristotle in canonizing the Oedipus myth was obviously great; and in the twentieth century, as we have said before and as we will see next week again, the influence of the Oedipus myth has been enormous, and the role of Antigone in this myth has received very little emphasis by comparison with that of Oedipus himself. So is KierkegaardÕs choice unusual? Not at all; because, as George Steiner writes (in Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (Oxford 198), ÒBetween c. 1790 and c. 1905, it was widely held by European poets, philosophers, scholars that SophoclesÕ Antigone was not only the finest of Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spiritÓ (p. 1). Steiner goes on to document this assertion in a book of some three hundred pages, which includes a thorough discussion of KierkegaardÕs essay and many other appearances of the Antigone myth during the period in question.
Why this fascination with Antigone? What is it that made Antigone such a compelling figure, especially to nineteenth-century intellectuals? Can you find elements in the other material we have seen and read--in Byron or Tennyson, in the images of Canova, David, Ingres, and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood--that agree with points made by Kiekegaard and so help to explain the popularity of Antigone in particular? This would be another good topic to reflect upon in preparation for discussion sections tomorrow and Friday.
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