Beyond the antigone complex a reply to Jay Bernstein
pp. 99-104
in: Gary Browning (ed), Hegel's phenomenology of spirit, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
In his exposition of "Conscience and Transgression" Jay Bernstein presents Hegel's theory of ethical life as a poetics of action. Against the Kantians, Rawls and Habermas, on the one hand, who, it is claimed, want to secure the validity of moral actions from all deliberative reproach, and against communitarians, on the other, who take the domain of moral action to be exhausted by customs, practices and obedience to positive law, Bernstein insists on the ineliminable moment of "conscience" and of transgressive action as the sine qua non of all recognition. Only by breaking rules can individual self-consciousness crystallise out of ethical life and not be submerged by it. For Hegel, in the Phenomenology and afterwards, the figure of Antigone is emblematic of the ethical role of conscience. On Bernstein's reading, "Antigone's deed is almost paradigmatic for significant ethical action in general." (p. 91) I will come to the interpretative question of whether this thesis is Hegel's own after first adumbrating and offering criticisms of the position which is advanced in his name.
