Abstract

Philosophy as paideia is shown here as a resignification of tragedy as paideia in consonance with several contemporary thinkers. In this philosophical reading of tragedy, noted as the confirmation of an êthos starting from páthos, the experience of suffering is a privileged instance of learning which generates a peculiar wisdom — anagnórisis. Its appropriation gives occasion for a deep conversion that may take place as salvation. Moreover, the tragical paideía is — in the case of Antígone — an exemplary surpassing of violence towards justice, and the surpassing of justice in the paradigm of friendship and human solidarity. From Antígone, it is possible to throw light on the ethical life, so as to see it as did Hegel. In it there is already a constellation of tensions provoked by the connected incidence of destiny and the action of human liberty. This constitutes the tragical conflict which shakes the home or family, the pólis, the phýsis and questions of justice and destiny, in order to recover them, perhaps, at a higher level of love and friendship. But above all, Antígone presents an alternative to paideía because she speaks and acts from alterity, from the brother or sister as the other absent, and so allows the other side to emerge, the other side imperfectly seen until now as an obscure, unconscious, underground — the other that one tends to forget and avoid — the excluded, the nothing as mystery of being, the kingdom of shadows that exalts the limits of light-figures, the female principle as the gravity-force of the male principle, femininity as 'irony of the community.'