Fate: The Final Form of Tragedy

The Greek tragedies of Sophocles are widely taught and widely known, even millenia past their creations. For some reason, we postmodern and our own modernist, especially German, predecessors still have an indefatigable fascination with these works so far removed from our and their own time. This state of events is an anomaly; it suggests the presence of something manifestly timeless within these tragedies so as to make them palatable and even intriguing to many of the foremost intellectuals of our very different times. For Hegel, they are an account of the progress of the ethical consciousness through practical conflict, demonstrating the interplay of historical trends which must conflict and eventually resolve one another through incidental, individual instantiation of the simultaneous occurrence of opposite values. This is an interpretation that is as misunderstood as it is contested, and the subject of this paper shall be an exploration of a paper wherein both the prior options result in its conclusion: The Ends of Tragedy; Schelling, Hegel, and Oedipus by Simon Goldhill. He sees a fundamental flaw in the construction of this narrative by Hegel because of the play Oedipus Tyrannus, arguing that German idealist tendencies cause authors like Hegel to ascribe a telos, or end, and an ostensibly Christian one, when none is present in the sense of the tragic in terms of the play’s themes in order to haphazardly force them into their own idealist frameworks in the manner of Procrustes. I contend that this claim fails to see the general, metaphysical influences behind Hegel’s assertions and correlations and so erroneously describes them as inconsistent and inserted. He does this by conflating them with related but subsequent, subordinate concepts and those of other mentioned authors, lacking the legitimate justifications for these claims. I shall showcase this through an analysis of Goldhill’s positions, then contrasting them with the textual evidence of both Hegel’s works and the tragedies which informed them. I will do this through foremostly correcting his unspoken understanding of the tragic, followed by an investigation of the impacts of this on Oedipus Tyrannus’ status as such, and the actual “Christianity” necessarily within Hegel’s claims.