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Sophocles’ Antigone was composed in 441 BC, less than a decade after the fifty-year long Persian Wars had come to an end. While the play presents the concrete circumstances and consequences of a war that had both been caused by and led to a ’state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand),1 the primary concerns of the play are also more general, raising issues about the relations between the individual and society, the interactions between the private and the public spheres, the tensions between family/kinship relations and marriage, finally confronting individual duties and rights based on carefully formulated claims and counter-claims as well as – and this is a crucial issue – what it means to be human. But it is probably the combination of the extraordinary circumstances of Antigone’s family history and her identity – being both the daughter and the sister of the same man (Oedipus) – and these more general human concerns that has given Sophocles’ play its unique status as a dramatic as well as a philosophical text, or perhaps rather a text presenting direct challenges for philosophical thinking. This combination forces us to listen very carefully to how the characters perform their claims and in particular how they argue for their respective positions as humans in a world of ethical conflicts and ambiguities.

Hegel formulated the basic structure of Sophocles’ play as an agon, a competition or a struggle between two incommensurable positions, where neither Antigone, representing the primacy of the family or kinship structures, nor Creon, representing the larger collective of the polis – the state and the law – is willing to compromise. Both of these positions, which are presented in the two first scenes of the play, can be summed up as logical arguments for what is the legal and the ethically right (or proper) action with regard to the burial of Polyneices – Antigone’s brother and Creon’s nephew – after he has been killed in the war between two factions of the family and whose name actually means "manifold strife".

According to Samuel Weber “to identify the Hegelian interpretation of Antigone with the position of Creon, for instance, privileging the authority of the state over that of the family, is to ignore the dialectical structure of the Hegelian text”.2 Instead, Weber claims, there is a “symmetrical negativity”, comparable to Judith Butler’s double negative in her rendering of Antigone’s confession, emphasizing that Antigone’s admission is expressed with a double negation that "I will not deny my deed".3 According to Weber the relations between family and state become transformed into what he describes as “signifiers of something else […] [which] has to do with the determination of identity in terms of individuality: not individuality as such, but individuality mediated and reflected in its constitutive negativity, which is to say, individuality as ‘spirit’”.4 In terms of the plot of Sophocles’ play this multifaceted negativity gradually leads to three consecutive and inevitable erasures, of individuality, of family and finally of the polis itself.

Examining these features of tragedy as a literary genre and in particular of Sophocles’ Antigone – though they are not necessarily limited to drama or performance – I want to argue here that one of the distinguishing features of tragedy is that it both integrates and at the same time confronts and subverts the classical forms of logical argumentation. Logical argumentation and its subversion constitute the ‘ground’ of tragedy on which the perceptions of the tragic as well as of particular literary tragedies are based. The ways in which logical argumentation is privileged while at the same time drawing attention to its limitations are no doubt an important reason why tragedy as a genre, and Antigone specifically has received such a prominent position in philosophical discourses, in particular with regard to which actions are ethically right or wrong (or humane) and how to seek justice by developing and problematizing legal practices rather than just doing what is ’legal’.

Since logical arguments have been embedded in Antigone as well as in most tragedies, the principles of logic can in turn be extracted from these plays. And even if the theoretical principles of logical argumentation were only fully formulated by Aristotle in the Poetics two generations after these plays had been written and performed, the notion of tragedy as it had been practiced by Sophocles was, on the one hand, based on the use of logical argumentation in order to define the positions and relations of the major conflicting characters – in this case of Antigone and Creon – but at the same time also to investigate and define what it means to be human. Being human includes both the ability to make logical arguments based on rational thinking and the use of language, while the tragedies bring about situations where the basic principles of logic are challenged and even reach a liminal point of failure and collapse. And paradoxically, this collapse frequently occurs exactly at the point when someone is trying to define what the characteristics of being human are.

But before examining this paradoxical situation in terms of tragedy and the tragic I want to present the two basic principles of formal logic which are activated and challenged by tragedy. First, the theory of deduction, for example in the so-called ‘Barbara syllogism’, beginning with a universal proposition which does not have to be proven empirically, but is based on some common understanding and can therefore also refer to fictional/mythical situations that “All x are y” or “All humans are mortal” or “The Gods are immortal”. Such a universal statement is followed by a particular statement, like the claim that “Socrates is a human” from which we draw the necessary conclusion that “Socrates is mortal”. The second principle of formal logic that is of importance in this context is the three Classical Laws of Thought: the Law of Identity, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and in particular the Law of Non-contradiction. The Law of Identity is based on the proposition that “A is A and not not-A”, the Law of the Excluded Middle on “P is either true or false” and the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false.5

Even if Aristotle no doubt was familiar with a large number of literary works when he formulated these basic principles of logic, he never explicitly associated the syllogism, which can in effect be seen as a basic narrative ‘scaffolding’ for the narrative kernels in tragedies. But Aristotle’s self-evident, even seemingly ’trivial’ formulation in chapter 7 of the Poetics, that a tragedy must have three parts in order to be complete – a beginning, a middle and an end – must not be understood naively, as if Aristotle was considering the three acts in a play, but rather as an implied reference to the three parts of the deductive syllogism:

A beginning [Aristotle claims] is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.6

A narrative which begins with something “which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be”, and ends with “nothing following it” could just as well be a deductive syllogism, which Aristotle defined in the Prior Analytics as “an argument in which when certain things are laid down something else follows of necessity in virtue of their being so”.7 It is also possible to show that what can be said about tragedy as a whole is also true of its parts, which are the focus of this discussion. But I will not develop this idea in detail here.

At this point I am thus not examining the comprehensive syllogistic structure of any particular tragedy, which is apparently Aristotle’s concern in the above passage from the Poetics. My focus is rather to clarify how a specific tragedy integrates the logical structures presented by the characters and how their contradictory argumentations, in situations of conflict through an agon, affect our understanding of what it means to be human. On the one hand, these arguments are framed within a combination of social, political, religious, ethical and ideological contexts, which open up a broad range of hermeneutical horizons, which most likely, in cases like Antigone, can activate the readers, directors and spectators for new and innovative interpretations in increasingly more complex contexts and situations, testing our ability to contain and even to accept the tensions between the logical necessities of the underlying syllogisms in relation to the randomness and intrinsic instability of the broad range of such social, political and ideological contexts in which they have been or can be embedded.

At the same time, these contextualisations can also be developed and expanded by confronting different logical arguments with each other as they are presented and contextualized within the psychic universes of the characters. In Sophocles’ Antigone the confrontations between the positions of Antigone and Creon are obviously the most important ones. For Antigone the syllogism, with which the play begins, is:

 To be human means to bury our dead/kin as the gods have commanded us to do

 Polyneices is my (dead) brother

 Therefore I must (and will) bury Polyneices

And for Creon, who presents his argument in the following section of the play, the syllogism has the following formulation:

 It is illegal to bury enemies

 Polyneices is an enemy of the polis

 It is illegal to bury Polyneices

The gradually accelerating conflict between Antigone and Creon is based on the incommensurability of these two syllogistic arguments which are simultaneously contextualized in social, religious and ethical terms. Relying on divine authority both of them argue that it is either legal or illegal to bury Polyneices. It cannot be both. Such a situation was formulated by Aristotle as the Law of Non-contradiction that “P and not-P” is always false, or according to Aristotle’s own formulation in the Metaphysics: “It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect”.8

However, just after the conflict between Antigone’s and Creon’s syllogistic formulations has challenged the Law of Non-contradiction concerning the burial of Polyneices, in the next section of the play, with the chorus singing the first stasimon, usually referred to as the "Ode to Man", this challenge to one of the basic laws of logic is further reinforced. In the "Ode to Man" the chorus directly draws attention to the contradictory nature of what it means to live a human life and to be human. There is only one thing concerning human ‘life’ about which there is no argument, and that is that all humans are mortal which as the chorus argues cannot be prevented, even by the remarkable marvels of human inventiveness.

Here is an abbreviated quote from the “Ode to Man”, which obviously needs a much more detailed philological explication. But it contains enough information to formulate its syllogistic argument, and for the moment I will insert the key concept of deinon and deinotaton, referring to the contradictory characteristics that define what it means to be human – being both wondrous and monstrous (which will be clarified in what follows) – without translation:

There is much that is deinon, but nothing

that surpasses man in deinotaton.

He sets sail on the frothing waters

amid the south winds of winter

tacking through the mountains

and furious chasms of the waves.

[…]

Everywhere journeying, inexperienced and without issue,

he comes to nothingness.

Through no flight can he resist

the one assault of death,

even if he has succeeded in cleverly evading

painful sickness.

[…]

Clever indeed, mastering

The ways of skill beyond all hope,

he sometimes accomplishes evil,

sometimes achieves brave deeds.9

The attempt to formulate the syllogistic structure of the “Ode to Man” is much more complex than in the two previous cases. First, because it consists of three universal statements – which is also an accepted form of syllogism (“All men are mortal. / All Greeks are men. / All Greeks are mortal.”) – and these universal statements in turn branch out into syllogisms about the mortality of humans that include particular statements as well as referencing particular human deeds and claims; and, secondly, (as I pointed out before) because of the preference for the use of negative statements, like "Nothing surpasses man in being deinon”.

The following attempt to formulate an extended syllogism in the “Ode to Man” gives us a basic idea of this complexity, regardless of its circularity:

 Nothing surpasses humans (which I prefer to “man” in the quote) in being deinon; or simply: All humans are deinon

 Since humans “sometimes accomplish evil, / sometimes achieve brave deeds”, they are defined by their inherent contradictory nature. Or in other words: the Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions, i.e. what it means to be human

 Therefore the attempt to apply the Law of Non-contradiction to humans will show that they are deinon, possessing contradictory characteristics

We could probably say that logic has outwitted itself by arguing that "The Law of Non-contradiction does not apply to human nature or actions", which is a self-referential statement, like the Cretan who says that "All Cretans are liars". The Greeks were no doubt fascinated by situations of logic and its contextualisations where the relations between inclusions and exclusions are tested and logic and language seem to turn upon themselves, as in such paradoxical statements.

Classical Greek tragedy exposes and examines the tensions between different laws of logic and between these laws and the contexts of the fictional world, including those specific situations where the laws of logical thinking are actually applied but also questioned. This activates a self-referential mechanism where the paradoxical combinations of context and logic serve as a challenge to the adequacy of logical thinking for the understanding of the complexity of what it means to be human. But classical drama – and I should really only speak of Sophocles’ Antigone here – does not challenge the fundamental validity of logical thinking as such. As I intend to show however, the two twentieth-century interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone by Heidegger and Brecht I will now examine more closely, also contest the validity of the traditional, Classical forms of logical thinking, in particular in those cases when the logical argumentation refers to ethical contexts, regardless if the interpretation is primarily philosophical (as with Heidegger) or performative (as in Brecht’s case).