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The topic “the two readings of Antigone by Heidegger” presupposes a historical background in German philosophy. By this I mean that time and again before Heidegger, major German philosophers have treated Greek tragedies as metaphysical documents. In Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, tragedy is construed to be, in one way or another, an introduction to metaphysics. However different their interpretation of the essence and the ground of Being might be—Identity between freedom and necessity , Absolute Spirit, Will—they have this in common: for all of them tragedy is the voice of Being. I believe that such an astonishing continuity deserves close examination. It raises first a problem of genealogy which includes two questions. First question: How did the Greeks of the fifth century look at tragedy? Second question: How did Plato and Aristotle consider tragedy? To be sure, the answer to the first question is, to a large extent, more a matter of reconstruction than of empirical evidence. However, there is evidence enough to ensure some agreement among the historians and philologists of classical Greece. Plato himself suggests in the Laches that tragedy was linked to Athens as the military arts were linked to Sparta. According to contemporary historians, the evidence of this link is most obviously provided by a set of institutions. Nine tragedies were performed twice a year in Dionysian festivals which were official celebrations. The person in charge of selecting the three poets whose trilogies would be presented to the public was a magistrate chosen by the drawing of lots. That magistrate, called the epônumos archôn because he gave his name to the year, was in charge of choosing, again by drawing lots, the wealthy citizens who during several months of rehearsal would recruit and support the members of the chorus assigned to each selected poet. During the period Plato’s Legacy in Heidegger’s Two Readings of Antigone Jacques Taminiaux 22 of rehearsal, the chorists were exempted from all military obligation. Once the nine tragedies had been performed, a special jury was in charge of electing the best poet. The members of that jury were themselves chosen by lot as representatives of all the constituencies of the City. Finally, at the end of the festival, the public Assembly of the citizens held one of its meetings in the theater itself. All of these institutions suggest that the tragic theater was indeed an intimate concern for the political regime of Athens. Given this institutional backdrop, contemporary historians have been induced to regard as a nonissue the problem of the origin of tragedy which obsessed the nineteenth-century philologists. These contemporary scholars call attention to the fact that the blossoming of tragedy coincides with the blossoming of democracy in Athens. Hence, the real issue for them is the link between tragedy and the invention by Athens of an entirely new way of life, the bios politikos (political existence). In spite of very serious historical limitations such as the strictly private condition of women as well as slavery for prisoners of war, this way of life allowed all citizens to share publicly words and deeds in a spirit of agonistic parity, and to be equally entitled to any public office. The tragedies that have come down to us represent only 3 percent of the more than a thousand works staged in Athens. But it is remarkable, as Christian Meyer notices, that none of them is a work of propaganda. Instead of celebrating the city of Athens, they highlight what is questionable in human interaction. And, as Martha Nussbaum observes, instead of reducing these questions to simple terms, they stress their complexity and ambiguity, by showing that those who simplify them and claim to be able thereby to solve them are blinded by hubris (overweening self-assertion) and thus doomed to failure. Moreover, the very structure of the tragic works, the distinction between stage and chorus, functions, as Jean-Pierre Vernant notices, like a distinction between the possible revival of the tyrannical inclinations of the past and the ordinary condition of a democratic citizen. Consequently, the general consensus of contemporary scholarhip runs approximately as follows: those dramas gave the citizens twice a year the opportunity to realize that in human affairs nobody but the gods is in a position of mastery and that the best attitude toward human affairs is measure, prudence. In other words, for the City, tragedies were documents about praxis, action as human interaction. The second question is this: How did Plato and Aristotle look...

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