Hegel’s Antigone: Sittlichkeit as a Concrete Universal

Abstract

In this paper, we will analyze Hegel’s concept of the concrete universal in the context of his political thought. In particular, we will analyze it as it appears in the realm of Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) of Objective Spirit, Hegel’s notion of a socio-political world. In the first section of the paper, we will examine the relationship of interdependence and reciprocity between the universality of institutions and the particularity of individual citizens, focusing on how Ethical Life must always be conceived as a concrete universal which is dynamic, active, in motion, and thus vitalized by individual demands. Specifically, we will explore how Ethical Life indeed requires customs, and hence social practices or ‘habits’, but, as we shall see, these must always remain subject to revision, and the particular should never be entirely absorbed into the universal, lest the latter become a dead mechanism, a merely abstract principle. To illustrate this point, the second section of the paper will draw a parallel between social custom, on the one hand, and habit (Gewohnheit) as a moment of the Subjective Spirit, on the other. This comparison will show how the ethical community risks ossifying its Spirit if a social order becomes overly formal, as Hegel asserts in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. The third section of the paper takes up the tragic character of Antigone in the Phenomenology of Spirit in order to demonstrate how the particular, with its individual demands, must always challenge the universal tendency to become formal and abstract. We will see how such an analysis of the concrete universal in the Hegelian political sphere leads to a reflection with feminist implications which must go beyond Hegel himself, precisely to remain faithful to the dynamism of his philosophy.