Ethics after Tragedy: Hegel and Bonhoeffer on Rival Social Orders

The terms of tragedy continue to resonate in public discourse. It is common to hear contested cultural memories plotted as “tragic,” a designation that can serve to obscure moral responsibility. Meanwhile, citizens are often formed as ethical subjects through the use of case studies that assume “fated” conditions in which an allegedly lesser evil should be chosen. Both historical framing and hard-case ethics invite critical engagement over the definition of “realism” and the meaning of moral responsibility.

Philosophy and theology offers significant resources for appraising such invocations of fate and tragedy. Greek tragic drama is rife with reference to divinities, as shown in the interplay between Apollonian order and Dionysian frenzy or in Antigone’s appeal to the “unwritten and unerring law of the gods.” German philosophical and theological reception of such figures has resulted in a series of profound and politically astute reflections on the place of human freedom given the operations of Schicksal, “fate” or “destiny,” in individual and national histories.

Although their political contexts differed dramatically, both G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) claimed reconciling forms of thought and life that overcame an ultimately tragic clash between laws. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel speaks of a form of thought beyond the eternal conflict of laws as expressed in Greek tragedy. He delivers this vision in the midst of the Napoleonic incursions, with the place of traditional mediating institutions in a tenuous state threatened both by a forceful new administration and the reactionary impulses it provoked. Hegel later extends his account at the recently founded University of Berlin, which sought to foster a newly integrated state settlement. In stark contrast, the university and civil service under the Third Reich could not effectively resist what Fritz Ringer calls the “brutality of the emerging political style.” Bonhoeffer also came to renounce accounts of tragedy, though in contrast to Hegel this led him to choose a path of resistance politics that resulted in the rejection and “civil dishonour” that he saw as characteristic of the life of Christ.

Both Hegel and Bonhoeffer make their case for an ethics after tragedy with reference to a common source, Sophocles’ Antigone. The play portrays two figures who are required to act in a manner that is simultaneously right and an act that leads to their own destruction: Creon, as defender of the civic state, outlaws the provision of proper burial rites for his nephew Polyneices because of a traitorous attack; Antigone, as defender of the household law, provides these rites for her dead brother. As a result of Antigone’s transgression, Creon sentences her to be buried alive, leading to her suicide and a chain of events that ruins Creon’s own family. From Antigone’s vantage point, she is caught in the midst of the “unwritten and unerring law of the gods,” which lives forever with no clear point of origin.

Antigone features in one of the early shapes of Geist in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hegel comments that “In terms of this actuality and in terms of its deed, ethical consciousness must recognize its opposite as its own. It must acknowledge its guilt: ‘Because we suffer, we acknowledge that we have erred.’” Hegel sees Antigone’s tale as the absolute example of tragedy, for the protagonist sees only one side of the law, what he calls “reality without justification.” In Charles Taylor’s summary, “this immersion in partiality is their pathos.”

For Hegel, this account of mutual destruction exposes the dissolution of the harmonious ideal of Greek “beauty.” This is not, of course, where Hegel’s journey ends, for the impasse of Greek tragedy leads a period of societal alienation in the movement toward renewed unity. A form of consciousness is sought that can encompass both laws, leading onwards to a new ethical unity that surmounts the tragedy endemic to Greek thought.

Writing under the Third Reich, Bonhoeffer also makes reference to Antigone and Creon in a comparison between Greek tragedy and Luther’s gospel. In Ethics, he describes a set of narratives in which characters “are all subject to the claim of two eternal laws that cannot be reconciled in one and the same life; one pays for obedience toward one law with guilt for breaking the other.” Neither character can be proven right because “the structure of life is transgression [Schuldigwerden] against the laws of the gods.” Bonhoeffer claims that occidental thought in general, and Protestant ethics in particular, have been shaped by this view of conflict such that they do not recognise how the Christian message has overcome this insight. More proximately, he is arguing against invocations of tragedy and fate in his contemporary theologians such as Nazi supporter Emmanuel Hirsch and neo-Lutheran ethicist Werner Elert.

To make his case, Bonhoeffer recovers the Sermon the Mount from Hegel’s view that Jesus’ teaching was like the French Revolution—a necessary but unsustainable radicalization. Bonhoeffer employs the Sermon on the Mount to speak of present blessedness even in an enduring state of non-recognition and estrangement from the state. He states that the tragic view is foreign to Christian teachings that “do not grow out of bitter resignation over the irreconcilable rift between the Christian and the worldly.”

Although Bonhoeffer articulates a vision of renewed alliance between church and remnant-state in his Ethics, the age of opposition in which he lived meant that he would be executed by the state before completing his manuscript. Rather than casting his death as a tragic end, in part given all he could have written, his extant writings invite us to observe his death as a consummate ethical statement. As Bonhoeffer wrote in the face of state pressure on his underground seminary, “let us never pity ourselves, let us never be tragic.” That disavowal was vital to his ethics of resistance.

Indicative Bibliography:
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim
Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, Ethics, Letters and Papers from Prison
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right
Margaret Visser, Beyond Fate
Rowan Williams, Tragic Imagination