Comp. by: Jaganathan Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0002251385 Date:5/12/14 Time:17:27:13 Filepath://ppdys1122/BgPr/OUP_CAP/IN/Process/0002251385.3d137 6 Tragedy with and without Religion: Hegelian Thoughts Terry Pinkard The outlines of Hegel’s conception of tragedy are so well known they need little introduction. 1 Here is the familiar picture. In tragedy, so Hegel argued, it is not primarily hubris or catharsis that commands our attention in tragic plays but a contest of right versus right whose outcome must be the destruction of one or both sides. The paradigm is Sophocles’ Antigone, where Antigone is right in performing the traditional burial rites on her brother in defiance of Creon’s orders, but it is also true that Creon is right to give those orders, Antigone is wrong in disobeying them, and Creon is justified in punishing her for such disobedience. Both sides suffer because there is no middle ground to adjudicate that kind of clash of right versus right. The impossibility of the amelioration of such a clash leads inexorably to its tragic conclusion. As it stands, that much is fine as far as it goes, but it is also, to use a typical Hegelian expression, rather rigidly one-sided in its presenta- tion. For Hegel, tragedy, like all forms of art (and religion and ultimately also philosophy), seeks to reconcile us to our place in the world. However, if indeed both sides are doomed because of the 1 Hegel’s discussion of tragedy has its fullest expositions in his lectures on the philosophy of art, put together on the basis of his lecture notes and his students’ notes after his death in 1831 (see Hegel 1970: xiii–xv, and the fairly good English translation at Hegel (1975a)—and in his discussion of Greek life in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (see Hegel 1970: iii). There are mentions of tragedy in his other works, but no extended discussion, except for the very short summary of his views in the lectures on the philosophy of religion (see Hegel 1970: xvi: 16, 132–5). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 5/12/2014, SPi