Antigone (Sophocles play)
Antigone ( ; ) is a tragedy by Sophocles written in or before 441 BC.
Antigone (Sophocles play)
Martin Heidegger, in his essay, "The Ode on Man in Sophocles’ Antigone", focusses on the chorus’ sequence of stophe and antistrophe that begins on line 278. His interpretation is in three phases: first to consider the essential meaning of the verse, and then to move through the sequence with that understanding, and finally to discern what was nature of humankind that Sophocles was expressing in this poem. In the first two lines of the first strophe, in the translation Heidegger used, the chorus says that there are many strange things on earth, but there is nothing stranger than man. Beginnings are important to Heidegger, and he considered those two lines to describe primary trait of the essence of humanity within which all other aspects must find their essence. Those two lines are so fundamental that the rest of the verse is spent catching up with them. The authentic Greek definition of humankind is the one who is strangest of all. Heidegger’s interpretation of the text describes humankind in one word that captures the extremes — "deinotaton". Man is "deinon" in the sense that he is the terrible, violent one, and also in the sense that he uses violence against the overpowering. Man is twice "deinon". In a series of lectures in 1942, "Hölderlin’s Hymn, The Ister", Heidegger goes further in interpreting this play, and considers that Antigone takes on the destiny she has been given, but does not follow a path that is opposed to that of the humankind described in the choral ode. When Antigone opposes Creon, her suffering the uncanny, is her supreme action.