On Saturday, our Great Books and World Classics discussion (sponsored by Northern New Jersey Mensa and Mensa in Atlanta) discussed Antigone, one of the three Theban tragedies by Sophocles:
- Oedipus Rex dealt with the story of Oedipus, king of Thebes, who unwittingly fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his own mother.
- Oedipus at Colonus deals with the death of Oedipus
- Antigone deals with the conflict between Oedipus’ daughter Antigone and a later king of Thebes.
Read the text.
Watch the play.
At the beginning of the play, Antigone must choose either of two equally bad options. Her brother has died in the losing side of a civil war. King Creon has declared that the dead on the losing side must remain unburied. As a citizen of Thebes, Antigone is legally bound by this law. Yet she is morally bound (by the laws of the gods) to give her brother a decent burial. Antigone chooses the course of action that is now called civil disobedience. She ritually buries her brother, thus breaking the king’s law, but then she willingly submits to the punishment for doing so. Antigone must die, but King Creon also suffers because of his unjust rule.
Antigone burying her brother
Antigone Gives Token Burial to the Body of Her Brother Polynices, by Jules-Eugène Lenepveu [French, Angers 1819–1898 Paris]. Watercolor, pen and black ink over black chalk, on gray-green paper.
By openly breaking an unjust law and then submitting herself for punishment, Antigone took precisely the course of action that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail:
In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
The question of whether to obey a law is a thorny problem in ethics. From a logician’s point of view, the problem hinges on the word “should.” “Should” is used to express irrealis modalities (i.e., something other than an assertion of fact). Thus, statements of what should be done (or ought to be done or must be done) are not statements of fact. (The “is-ought” distinction is sometimes called Hume’s guillotine.) For this reason, the logical positivists argued that “should” statements cannot be true or false and cannot be logically derived from statements of fact. Rather, “should” statements are expressions of feelings or attempts to influence other people’s behavior. Thus, when people say that you “should” do something, they generally mean that they want you to do it. When an authority figure tells you that you must do something, he or she may be threatening to do something unwelcome to you if you do not comply.
There are two basic approaches to ethics:
- Deontology (from the Greek word for obligation or duty) is a moral theory that stresses the inherent rightfulness of actions, as opposed to their consequences. Unfortunately, Antigone has two duties: to obey the king and to obey the gods, and she cannot do both at the same time.
- Consequentialism is a moral theory that judges actions by their consequences. There are two problems with this. One is that the consequences cannot always be foreseen. Thus, the rightness of an action can be judged only retrospectively, if at all (since causality is so hard to prove). Another problem is that some actions have some predictable bad effects, even if they are undertaken for a praiseworthy purpose. Niccolò Machiavelli had argued that if a goal is morally important enough, then any method of achieving it is acceptable. Dr. King disagreed with that. He argued that our ends are imaginary, but our means are how we live. Thus, the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. Like any “should” or “must” statement, this is an expression of his feelings or an attempt to influence your behavior. But I feel that it’s a pretty good rule of thumb, especially for civilians.
To practice civil disobedience, you must have achieved the sixth (highest) stage in Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. To people who have not progressed beyond stage 4 (Law and Order Morality), obedience to authority is the only virtue, so civil disobedience makes no sense.
Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development
Lawrence Kohlberg argued that one’s ability to make moral judgments develops as one’s brain develops. These stages represent the kind of moral reasoning that becomes possible at various ages. However, not everyone progresses to the highest level, even in adulthood.
So, when you find yourself asking whether you should disobey an unjust law, you are really asking questions like these:
- What practical consequences will my actions have, for myself and for others?
- What will other people think of me or do to me if I disobey this law?
Dr. King was speaking at a time when there were many unjust laws on the books, especially the laws enforcing racial segregation. He was urging people who break those unjust laws to do so openly and to willingly accept imprisonment, he specifically said that the purpose of such a course of action was to arouse the conscience of the community over the injustice of the law. In other words, submitting yourself for punishment is a political tactic—specifically, an act of political theater. If Antigone had been a commoner, it might have made sense for her to try to bury her brother on the sly. Yet as a princess, and thus as a prominent person, she evidently felt a social obligation to disobey openly and to accept the punishment. Perhaps because she was a princess, her acceptance of punishment led to serious consequences for the tyrannical king, as well.
Antigone and Plato’s Apology
Last week, the Great Books and World Classics group discussed Plato’s Apology, which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his own defense in the trial in which he was sentenced to death (399 BCE). According to Plato, Socrates argued that he had done nothing wrong and that he was willingly accepting his death sentence. Of course, not everyone trusts Plato, who was, after all, contemptuous of democracy and argued that it was good to tell “Noble lies” to control the common rabble. (Other contemporary sources say that Socrates said nothing in his own defense.) Antigone was written and performed in about 440 BCE, and presumably Socrates would have seen the original performance of the play. So you could draw parallels between Antigone and the trial of Socrates: with Athenian democracy cast in the role of the bad king Creon and Socrates in the role of the political prisoner Antigone, unjustly sentenced to death. This aligns with Plato’s political agenda, although it might not align with the truth.
The Death of Socrates
The Death of Socrates, painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1787. According to Plato, Socrates calmly accepted his death penalty, as did Antigone in the play by Sophocles. Yet we should take Plato’s account with a grain of salt. According to Plato, Socrates spoke eloquently in his own defense at his trial, whereas other contemporary sources say that Socrates said nothing in his own defense.
Personally, I think that it was shameful for the Athenians to sentence Socrates to death. (I oppose the death penalty as a matter of principle.) But I do give the Athenians a lot of credit for letting him live as long as they did. Students of Socrates were prominent members of the “Thirty Tyrants” who had committed countless atrocities in Athens. Unlike thousands of Athenians, Socrates was neither killed nor exiled during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. But because of an amnesty (circa 403 BCE), Socrates could not be tried for anything he did during that period. The interesting question is whether he was up to fresh mischief, which then led to his trial in 399 BCE. For a clear-eyed account of this case, read I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates.
Who was Oedipus, originally?
One of the curious features of the Sophocles play is the setting: Thebes. When I first heard about the play of Oedipus Rex when I was a child, I naturally assumed that “Thebes” referred to the city that was capital of Egypt for such a long time. After all, Oedipus becomes king of Thebes after solving the riddle of the Sphinx, and the Sphinx was in Egypt. Thus, if Oedipus were really king of Thebes, he would have been an Egyptian pharaoh. But then, I was told that I was wrong. There was also a city named Thebes in Greece. That Thebes was not far from Athens, and it sided with the Persians during the Greco-Persian war. So, it makes sense that an Athenian playwright in 440 BCE would have used the Greek city of Thebes as a setting for a play where the king makes bad choices. However, lots of other people have also suspected that Oedipus really was Egyptian after all.
Sigmund Freud’s protégé Karl Abrams suggested that the character of Oedipus was based originally on Akhenaten, the “heretic pharaoh” who tried to convert Egypt to monotheism in the 14th century BCE. This idea was explored further by Immanuel Velikovsky, in his book Oedipus and Akhnaton. Unfortunately, Velikovsky published a lot of theories that were total nonsense, so his analysis of Oedipus and Akhenaten has been ignored, perhaps unjustly.
Was Oedipus the King an Egyptian Pharaoh?
Oedipus was the king of Thebes, but was it the Thebes in Greece or the one in Egypt? Some scholars suspect that the story of Antigone’s father Oedipus Rex was based originally on stories about Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh who tried to get Egyptians to worship only one god (the Aten). Sigmund Freud suggested that the Biblical Moses was a priest of the Aten. Others have suggested that Moses was Akhenaten himself. This statue of Akhenaten came from the temple of Karnak, in Thebes, Egypt. The name Oedipus means “swollen foot.” Akhenaten’s successor Tutankhamun had a clubfoot.
Sigmund Freud dismissed the idea that Oedipus might have been based on Akhenaten, but he argued in Moses and Monotheism that Moses from the Bible may have been a priest of Akhenaten’s monotheistic religion. Egyptologist Ahmed Osman goes further, arguing that Moses was Akhenaten himself. (The name “Moses” is the Egyptian word for heir and could have been used to refer to a deposed pharaoh whose name became legally unspeakable after he was deposed.) The name Oedipus means “swollen foot.” We know that Tutankhamun (“King Tut”), who was a successor of Akhenaten, had a clubfoot. Clubfoot can be partly heritable, so it’s possible that Akhenaten also had a clubfoot. (We don’t know the identity of Tutankhamun’s father. It was probably not Akhenaten.) Or perhaps a storyteller just got the two pharaohs confused at some point. Akhenaten’s mummy has never been definitively identified, so we don’t know if he had anything wrong with his foot.
If Oedipus really was Akhenaten, or perhaps Tutankhamun, then maybe Antigone also represented an actual person from ancient Egypt. Since Egyptian pharaohs were expected to marry their own sisters, it’s possible that the original model for Antigone was a dead pharaoh’s wife, as well as his sister! Thus, the original story would have been about the funeral of a deposed pharaoh, which would have been a big deal, indeed.
The Wife (and Sister?) of Pharaoh
This image, from a box found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, depicts Tutankhamun and his wife Ankhesenamun, who was the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Mummies that are believed to be Tutankhamun’s parents, on the basis of DNA testing, have been found, but their identities have not been established. However, it was common for Egyptian pharaohs to marry their own sisters. Could the character of Antigone have been based originally on the sister/wife of Akhenaten or Tutankhamun?
Next week: Faust!
Join us on October 4 for a discussion of Goethe’s Faust! Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Northern New Jersey Mensa