Georgetown University Institutional Repository http://www.library.georgetown.edu/digitalgeorgetown The author made this article openly available online. Please tell us how this access affects you. Your story matters. Withy, Katherine. “Authenticity and Heidegger’s Antigone.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 45.3 (2014): 239-253. Collection Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10822/761591 © Taylor & Francis This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology on February 13, 2015, available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00071773.2014.968993 This material is made available online with the permission of the author, and in accordance with publisher policies. No further reproduction or distribution of this copy is permitted by electronic transmission or any other means. 1 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology on 13 Feb 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00071773.2014.968993 or http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3V9aheXtHh4eJNtkNcaK/full AUTHENTICITY AND HEIDEGGER’S ANTIGONE Katherine Withy Georgetown University Abstract: Sophocles’ Antigone is the only individual whom Heidegger names as authentic. But the usual interpretations of Heidegger’s ‘authenticity’ (as being-towards-death, taking responsibility for norms, world-historical creation, and a neo-Aristotelian phronēsis) either do not apply to Antigone or do not capture what Heidegger finds significant about her. By working through these failures, I develop an interpretation of Heideggerian authenticity that is adequate to his Antigone. The crucial step is accurately identifying the finitude to which Antigone authentically relates: what Heidegger calls ‘uncanniness’ (Unheimlichkeit). I argue that uncanniness names being’s presencing through self-withdrawal and that Antigone stands authentically towards this in her responsiveness to the call of being and her reticence at the end of explanation. In conclusion, I consider Sophocles’ own creative act, which bequeathed to the West an understanding of being and a vision of how to relate to it authentically. I argue that Sophocles’ status as a world-historical creator does not provide a competing picture of authenticity but must itself be understood as responsive and reticent. In his 1942 lecture course on Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Ister’, Heidegger describes Sophocles’ Antigone as ‘“properly” unhomely’ (‘“eigentlich” unheimisch’) (HI117) – which is to say, authentically uncanny (eigentlich unheimlich).1 This gives Antigone a rare distinction: she is the only individual whom Heidegger identifies as authentic. It is surprising, then, that interpreters of Heidegger have not paid her much mind, and in particular that she is not invoked as a standard against which interpretations of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity are judged.2 In this paper, I will show that the most familiar sorts of approaches to Heidegger’s authenticity do not accommodate his Antigone. From the elements of this negative claim I will build a positive account of Antigone’s authenticity, and in doing so I will translate Heidegger’s dense and 2 opaque claims about Antigone out of the idiosyncratic vocabulary of his lecture course and into a more familiar Heideggerian vocabulary. I will argue that Antigone is authentically uncanny in that she is responsive to the call of being and reticent at the end of explanation. Heidegger’s Antigone will be a surprisingly passive heroine – quite unlike the autonomous and radical Antigone whom we meet in other interpretations, and quite unlike the authentic individual described in Heidegger’s earlier texts. While Heidegger’s vision of Antigone may not be sufficiently grounded in the play to interest readers of Sophocles, it is Heidegger’s only concrete vision of authenticity and so must be confronted by readers of Heidegger. I. Mortality and Ontology In Sophocles’ play, Antigone faces punishment by death for attempting to bury her brother, Polyneices. Creon, ruler of Thebes, has forbidden proper burial and so entombs Antigone in a cave, where she commits suicide. Throughout the play, Antigone bravely faces up to her fate, saying things like ‘I choose death’ (Line 555, Woodruff’s translation), ‘Already my soul is dead’ (Line 559, Woodruff’s translation) and ‘There’s no return; I follow death, alive’ (Line 810, Woodruff’s translation). On the face of it, comments like these suggest that Antigone’s authenticity consists in her resolute anticipation of death, which Being and Time posits as the content of authenticity.3 Although Heidegger insists that the authentic individual does not seek death or commit suicide,4 we might nonetheless see in Antigone’s attitude towards her imminent death the kind of ‘facing up to’ mortality that Heidegger describes. However, while Heidegger acknowledges that Antigone ‘faces [death] with certainty’ (HI103-104), he hardly discusses her death at all. Heidegger mentions Antigone’s relationship to death only once and only in order to say that it indicates something about her relationship to being: ‘[H]er dying is, if it is anything at 3 all, that which constitutes kalōs, a belonging to being’ (HI104). Antigone’s authenticity concerns not mortality but ontology. Accordingly, Heidegger spends much of his analysis discussing Antigone’s well-known appeal to an unwritten divine law. His key move is to ontologise this law, reading it as the law of being (HI118). The law of being trumps any civic law that Creon might enact – including the command against burying Polyneices. Of this command, Antigone says: It was no Zeus that bade me this, Nor was it Dike, at home amongst the gods below, who ordained this law for humans, And your command seemed not so powerful to me, That it could ever override by human wit The immutable, unwritten edict divine. Not just now, nor since yesterday, but ever steadfast this prevails. And no one knows from whence it once appeared. (Lines 450-457) (HI116) As Heidegger reads this, Antigone tells us that there is a law of being. She tells us that we are subject to it, that we cannot override it, and that we do not know where it comes from. What is this law of being? The ‘law of being’ is what Heidegger here calls ‘the polis’ (HI82), which he describes as both a pole and a swirl (HI81).5 These two characterisations of the polis correspond to the two senses of the ‘law of being’ generated by hearing the phrase as both a subjective and an objective genitive. I will return to the objective genitive and the polis as a swirl in section III. As a subjective genitive, the law of being is the polis as the pole around which ‘entities, as manifest, themselves turn’ (HI81/100). Entities turn around the polis in the sense that they are (or are not), and are what they are, by virtue of their relation to it. Things are intelligible to us as what they are by virtue of their relationships to other things and to human practices, concerns and 4 possibilities. The totality of such meaningful relationships governs the sense that things can make, and it is what Heidegger called ‘the world’ in Being and Time. The polis or the world can also be understood as dikē: fittingness, or ‘how things hang together’.6 To take one portion of a world or polis as an example: the ‘law of the living and the law of the dead’ are the complex and largely implicit sets of ways in which dead and live bodies, religious beliefs and rituals, mortality, familial obligations, climate and terrain, health and sanitation concerns, and so on, intersect and determine what it is to be dead or alive and what is to be done with dead bodies and with living bodies. Such networks of relationships – worlds – order intelligible things and provide an unwritten, hidden law for human life: a law of being. Antigone is special for Heidegger because of her relationship to this law. In Antigone’s world, the dead belong below ground and the living belong above ground. So when buried alive, Antigone must either return to the place of the living (by escaping) or become one of the dead. There is no intelligible way to remain both alive and below ground. Similarly, burying Polyneices’ body is part of making Polyneices intelligible as dead and so as something that should be below ground. A dead body shows up, by the law of being, as something to be buried. Whether or not Antigone succeeds practically in burying the body, she has already succeeded ontologically if the body shows up to her as to be buried, for in this Antigone lets the dead body be what it is. She thus respects the law of being, treating entities as the entities that they are. This is an ontological piety or an ontological responsiveness. This metaphor of response in turn suggests that of a call: Polyneices’ unburied body calls out ‘Bury me!’. Such a call is part of what Heidegger names ‘the call of being’. Antigone responds to this call by hearing it. Hearing the call of being is hearing what the situation calls for, what is fitting (dikē).7 5 So Antigone’s distinction lies in part in the way that she allows entities to show up – that is, in the way that truth happens through her. Unlike readings of Antigone that grasp her as a moral agent confronted with a tragic conflict of multiple allegiances (usually, her allegiance to the state and her allegiance to her family or the gods), Heidegger’s reading does not take Antigone to be special because of anything that she does or because of her commitment to some particular good. This would be too ontic.8 Even the Lacanian reading, on which it is Antigone’s desire that marks her, is too ontic. Antigone can be understood in terms of the good (to agathon) or the beautiful (to kalon) only if these are ways of talking about the true (to alēthes).9 If Antigone remains an ethical text for Heidegger, then it is only in the sense of ‘ethics’ on which it coincides with ontology.10 II. Autonomy and Creativity Although Heidegger does not discuss him, Creon can readily be contrasted with Antigone with respect to ontological responsiveness. As ruler, Creon thinks that he can legislate intelligibility. He is supported in this by the Chorus, which says ‘It’s up to you: / Make any law you want – for the dead, or for us who live’ (Line 213, Woodruff’s translation). But human power does not extend so far. Creon may leave a dead body above ground but he cannot make this the place where a dead body (even the body of a traitor) belongs. Similarly, he cannot – by his own authority or his action – make a tomb the appropriate place for a living body. Thus the populace eventually turns against him because he is putting the dead and the living in the wrong places.11 What Creon does not recognise is that the law of being is something ‘against which nothing can avail’ (HI101), ‘over which human beings can neither rule nor dispose’ (HI101), and which is destined or given to us (HI100). The law of being is not a human production. This is why 6 Antigone calls it a ‘divine’ law. Creon’s mistake is thus an ontological hubris: he thinks that the human being is the master of being, and in this mistakes the relationship between being and human being. Antigone points this out early on, saying (as we saw) that Creon’s command is not so powerful that it can override the law of being. Even as he attempts to override it, however, Creon does recognise the law of being. It is to this law (or to something like it (see section V)) that he appeals when he says of Antigone that ‘there must be no surrender to a woman’ (Line 678, Woodruff’s translation), and of his son: ‘Do you really think, at our age, / We should be taught by a boy like him?’ (Lines 726-27, Woodruff’s translation). And it is the law of being (or something like it) to which Creon eventually bows, saying ‘But I cannot fight against necessity’; ‘I’m afraid it’s best to obey the laws, / Just as tradition has them, all one’s life’ (Line 1106, Lines 1113-14, Woodruff’s translation). This is a deference not to religious law but to the law of intelligibility as it is embodied in tradition. Creon’s accomplishment by the end of the play is that he is beginning to recognise this law. So is Antigone authentic because, unlike Creon, she is ontologically pious? If so, then it is hard to distinguish her from her sister, Ismene. Indeed, Heidegger’s discussion of the play puts only Antigone and Ismene on stage, suggesting that it is here that the real contrast lies. Ismene does not attempt to bury Polyneices because she is called to stay in her womanly place and to respect the civil law. She makes sense of herself in traditional terms as a woman and a member of the polis, and the call to be these overrides the call to bury Polyneices.12 But is this not a responsiveness to the law of being that resembles Antigone’s? Antigone responds to the call to bury the body; Ismene responds to the competing call to be a woman and a good member of the 7 polis. Both respect the ways in which things hang together. So what makes Antigone authentic if Ismene is not? A second common reading of Heideggerian authenticity promises an answer. This interpretation is grounded in the chapters on conscience and guilt in Being and Time and inspired by Kant.13 On this kind of reading, Ismene follows the law of being as if it were a law of nature: she responds passively to it. To such heteronomy we could contrast acting in light of, or according to a conception of, the law. This can be understood as a commitment to the norms that govern us. Authenticity would then consist in taking responsibility for our world. Such responsibility or commitment takes what is given or found – the law of being or norms of intelligibility – and takes it up as a reason or ground for action. Unfortunately, this reading does not fit the character of Antigone. It is part of taking responsibility for norms that we take responsibility for their legitimacy, and – since we are finite and so capable of error – this involves being willing to revise them. We must hold our norms open to revision, ready to critique them and to ‘take it all back’.14 Thus the authentic individual must hold the call of being open to question. But, as Hegel stresses, Antigone does not (initially) meet this requirement.15 Antigone has an immediate relationship to norms and lacks critical distance from them. In this respect, she is just as passive as Ismene. Antigone is mired in ‘ethical immediacy’ and so, on this interpretation, is inauthentic. So far, I have argued that two major interpretations of Heideggerian authenticity – facing up to death and taking responsibility for norms – do not account for Antigone’s authenticity. It follows from the inadequacy of the last interpretation that a third picture of authenticity is also inadequate. In texts from the 1930s and 1940s, Heidegger thinks authenticity as world-historical creation: the questioning and transgression by which poets, thinkers and statesmen found new 8 constellations of intelligibility or new worlds.16 No longer understood as mortality or revisability, finitude is grasped as a breakdown in intelligibility: the collapse of the world.17 In facing finitude, I must face up to the possibility that the constellation of intelligibility that I inhabit has ceased to work. I will have to give up myself and my world and make sense of things anew. If this is the kind of finitude that the authentic individual faces up to, then she is necessarily ontologically creative – that is, engaged in ontological transformation and innovation.18 But as we have just seen, Antigone is distinctive precisely because she does not do this. She does not manifest any ontological creativity. Ontologically, Antigone is immediate and conservative, not critical and revolutionary. It follows that she must be facing up to a different kind of finitude – one for which immediacy and passivity, rather than creativity and autonomy, are appropriate. World-historical creation is a broadly Christian conception of authenticity. It involves a transformation of self and world. A competing strain in Heidegger’s thought is more Greek. Interpreters have argued that Being and Time is a rewriting of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,19 and Hubert Dreyfus has developed a vision of the authentic individual that is based on Aristotle’s phronimos.20 Dreyfus’ phronimos is the ‘social virtuoso’, who does in life what a master does in chess. Neither takes up a reflective or critical distance while acting but each responds immediately to the particular situation on the basis of established social practices in which she has been trained. What distinguishes the expert from the novice is a flexibility in and responsiveness to the situation that cannot be codified or explained. Still, we can recognise the virtuoso’s action as appropriate to the situation since (unlike the creative authentic individual) the virtuoso has not left our world. Read in this way, Antigone’s immediacy is a positive trait and not a flaw. Antigone skillfully responds to the call of being with the immediate agility of the expert. Dreyfus has since argued that the phronimos is an incomplete figure of authenticity, 9 precisely because she is merely responsive and not creative.21 However, we can still understand the phronimos – or someone much like her – as authentic if only we notice that she is responding to a different kind of finitude. To do this, let me return to the ‘law of being’, this time hearing it as an objective, rather than a subjective, genitive. III. The Law of Being Recall that as a subjective genitive, ‘the law of being’ names the world, or the polis as a pole. It is how things hang together intelligibility, and according to it (for example) dead bodies are to be buried. Now consider: how does any world work as a world? How does the network of meaningful relationships work so that we can make sense of things? The answer to this question will be the ‘law of being’ in the sense of the objective genitive: the law that governs how being or intelligibility happens. Figuring out this law is Heidegger’s lifelong project. One of his key insights is expressed in these lectures with the claim that the polis is a swirl [Wirbel] (HI81), which is to say that it is in the manner of ‘pelein’ as counterturning presencing and absencing. This amounts to saying that intelligibility or being is given to us finitely, in the sense that it is withdrawn (absences) even as it is granted (presences). This withdrawal has at least two dimensions: being (or the world) backgrounds itself and it ungrounds itself.22 First, being is backgrounding. The world worlds or the network works only when it stands as a background to our daily lives. We always take it for granted but rarely, if ever, encounter it as such. What come to the fore of lived experience are intelligible entities and not intelligibility or being itself. Intelligibility backgrounds itself so that intelligible things may show up. This is the withdrawal of the being of entities. Second, being is ungrounding. The source or ‘whence’ of the world is hidden from us. As Antigone tells us, we do not know where the law of 10