This is my final post on Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s Hymn The Ister in the lecture course of 1942. The measure of truth in Hölderlin’s river poetry is not found in the actuality of the geographical river, Hölderlin saying “Is there a measure on earth?  There is none (Hölderlin, In Beautiful Blue).”  Heidegger says we must confront Hölderlin’s encounter with the Antigone, “which means bearing and suffering it (167).”

The titular character in Sophocles’ Antigone can absolutely symbolize how the causes, those gleams in our eyes that animate our lives can lead to destruction (Antigone) and Nothingness (Creon), much like Ahab in Moby-Dick. The characters are driven by an unshakable commitment to a personal principle or obsession, and their stories illustrate how such fervor can spiral into tragedy.  Back in 2002 in my MA thesis on Heidegger I explored that the tragic insight into the human condition by the melancholic is that unlike him, at least the oppressed person has a cause.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, Antigone is animated by her unwavering loyalty to familial duty and divine law. She defies King Creon’s edict forbidding the burial of her brother Polynices, believing it’s her sacred obligation to honor him despite the consequences. This cause—noble in her eyes—defines her identity and gives her life meaning, yet it leads inexorably to her downfall. Her stubborn adherence to this principle pits her against the state, resulting in her entombment and eventual death. Antigone’s destruction isn’t just physical; it ripples outward, contributing to the suicides of her fiancé Haemon and his mother Eurydice, unraveling Creon’s world as well.

Similarly, Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick is consumed by his vendetta against the white whale that maimed him. His cause—revenge—becomes the singular force animating his existence, transforming him into a monomaniacal figure who sacrifices his ship, crew, and ultimately himself in pursuit of it. Like Antigone, Ahab’s commitment is both his strength and his fatal flaw; it fuels his relentless drive but blinds him to reason, dragging everyone around him into the abyss. The whale, like Creon’s decree, stands as an immovable force that Ahab’s obsession cannot conquer, and his pursuit ends in total loss.

All the characters embody a tragic paradox: their animating causes give them purpose, yet that same purpose becomes a destructive force when it overrides all else—relationships, survival, or compromise. Antigone’s moral stance and Ahab’s vengeance are deeply personal, almost sacred to them, but they’re pursued with a rigidity that leaves no room for adaptation or mercy. In this way, Antigone can indeed symbolize the same archetype as Ahab: a figure whose life is defined by a cause so powerful it consumes them, turning their passion into the instrument of their ruin.

Is Creon empty at the end of the Antigone, and may this symbolize what the human is like when all their animating causes are gone?

At the end of Sophocles’ Antigone, Creon is indeed portrayed as a man stripped of vitality, teetering on the edge of listlessness and emptiness. After the deaths of Antigone, Haemon, and Eurydice—all precipitated by his stubborn adherence to his edict—he’s left shattered. His final speeches reveal a man who’s lost his animating force, reduced to a husk of his former self. He says, “Take me away, quickly, away. I am a rash, foolish man… I’ve killed you, my son, and you, my wife, without meaning to.” His words drip with despair, and his repeated pleas to be taken away or to die—“Let it come, let it come, that best of fates for me”—suggest a profound emotional and spiritual exhaustion. He’s not just grieving; he’s unmoored, a king whose authority and purpose have collapsed.

This state of emptiness can absolutely symbolize what happens to a human when their animating causes—those principles, duties, or relationships that give life meaning—are gone. For Creon, his cause was the rigid enforcement of law and order, a belief that his decree against burying Polyneices upheld the state’s stability. He clung to this principle with a mechanical ferocity, ignoring pleas from Haemon, Tiresias, and even the Chorus. But when his unyielding stance leads to the annihilation of his family, that cause turns to ash. Without it, and without the loved ones who might have grounded him, he’s left with nothing to propel him forward. His transformation from a decisive ruler to a broken figure muttering about fate mirrors a broader human experience: when the ideals or passions that define us are lost or proven hollow, we risk becoming mere shadows, moving—or barely moving—through existence.  Creon becomes a bare human stripped of his causes and distractions, like how a Greek shade is a human stripped of humanity and what remains is the human’s core: a restless wandering shade.  We know that someone stripped of distractions put in a corner in time out has inconspicuous restlessness become conspicuous as cabin fever.

The Chorus underscores this in their final lines: “Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy, and reverence toward the gods must be safeguarded… The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate.” Creon’s pride and his cause were intertwined; their destruction leaves him not just empty but a cautionary emblem of what happens when a person’s driving forces are stripped away. It’s less about apathy and more about a void—listless from having nothing left to fight for or live for.  In this way he dis-closes the essence of humanity that lurks beneath our causes and distractions.

Does Antigone ever hint irony about her mission, that at some level it’s just another cause that humans get lost in?

Antigone doesn’t explicitly voice irony about her mission in a way that suggests she sees it as “just another cause” humans get lost in—at least not in Sophocles’ text as we have it. Her character is defined by a fierce, unyielding conviction, and she remains steadfast even as she marches toward death. However, the play itself, through its structure, dialogue, and the Chorus, subtly weaves in layers of irony that invite us to question whether her cause is as absolute as she believes, or whether it’s a human fixation that spirals into tragedy.

Antigone’s mission—to bury her brother Polynices in defiance of Creon’s decree—is framed by her as a sacred duty, rooted in divine law and familial loyalty. She declares, “I will bury him myself. / And even if I die in the act, that death will be a glory” (Sophocles, Antigone, lines 81-82, trans. Fagles). There’s no hint of self-doubt or detachment here; she’s all in, seeing her cause as transcendent, beyond mere human whims. Unlike a modern character who might wink at their own zeal, Antigone lacks that meta-awareness—she’s not written to step outside herself and reflect on the absurdity of her obsession.

Yet, the irony creeps in through the play’s broader perspective. The Chorus, often a voice of communal wisdom, doesn’t fully endorse her. They call her “raw and wild” (line 929) and suggest she’s inherited her father Oedipus’s stubbornness: “You’re paying the price now / for your father’s terrible ordeal” (lines 937-938). This implies her mission isn’t just divine justice—it’s also a personal, almost inherited compulsion, a human flaw masquerading as a higher calling. The Chorus doesn’t mock her outright, but their ambivalence hints that her cause might be less universal than she thinks, more a product of her own nature.  Perhaps the message of Sophocles’ tragedy is all human causes that light up our eyes are just extreme ways of running away from our existential emptiness: Heidegger translating the deinon ode to man as “Manifold is the uncanny, but nothing more unhomely/homeless (deinon/apolis) than man.

Creon, too, serves as a foil that underscores the irony. He’s just as dogmatic about his own cause—maintaining order and state authority—and his clash with Antigone reveals two rigid ideals canceling each other out. Neither backs down, and both lose everything: Antigone her life, Creon his family. The play doesn’t let Antigone pause to say, “Look at us, lost in our petty crusades,” but the symmetry of their mutual destruction suggests it. If Antigone’s mission is divine, why does it end so messily, so humanly? The irony lies in how her sacred duty looks, from the outside, like another stubborn stand humans die for—noble, perhaps, but not necessarily wiser than Creon’s or anyone else’s.  There’s Tiresias’s warning to Creon—“you’ll pay with your own flesh”—which indirectly critiques Antigone’s rigidity too, as both characters ignore prophetic counsel. This could sharpen the irony: neither sees their cause as “just another” until it’s too late.

Compare this to Ahab, who occasionally lets slip a grim awareness of his madness (e.g., “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it… that drives me?” in Moby-Dick, Ch. 132). Antigone doesn’t get that moment of introspection that the chorus sees that I mentioned above. Her lack of irony about her mission makes her more tragic—she’s too deep in it to see it as “just another cause.” But Sophocles, through the play’s unfolding, plants that seed for us. The relentless march to her death, paralleled by Creon’s ruin, whispers that maybe all such causes—hers, his, ours—are human traps we build for ourselves, even if Antigone herself never says it.

The Chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone does suggest that Antigone inherited negative traits from her father, Oedipus, though they don’t frame it as a simple condemnation. Their commentary points to a mix of admiration and lament, tying her stubbornness and fate to her family’s troubled legacy—specifically Oedipus’s unyielding nature and the curse that haunts their line.

In the fourth choral ode (around lines 944-954 in Robert Fagles’ translation), after Antigone has been sentenced to death and is being led to her tomb, the Chorus reflects on her situation. They say:

“You’re paying the price now

for your father’s terrible ordeal,

child of pain, Antigone—

glorious now in your own ordeal—

you’ve gone too far,

all too far in your reckless spirit…”

(lines 937-942, adapted from Fagles)

As I said, here, they explicitly link her current plight to Oedipus (“your father’s terrible ordeal”). The phrase “child of pain” ties her to the suffering that defines her lineage—Oedipus’s unwitting crimes of patricide and incest, which brought divine wrath on the house of Laius. But the Chorus goes further, implying that her “reckless spirit” is part of what she’s inherited. Earlier, they call her “raw and wild” (line 929) and note her “self-willed pride” (line 917), traits that echo Oedipus’s own headstrong determination.

Oedipus, in Oedipus Rex, is famously relentless—his refusal to back down from seeking the truth about Laius’s killer, even when warned, drives him to uncover his own guilt. That same inflexibility shows up in Antigone’s refusal to yield to Creon, despite the Chorus’s pleas and Ismene’s caution. The Chorus doesn’t say “negative traits” outright—they’re too nuanced for that—but their language suggests a flaw: her “reckless spirit” and going “too far” hint at a destructive stubbornness, a family flaw magnified in her defiance.

Later in the same ode, they broaden the scope to the house of Labdacus (Oedipus’s grandfather), singing, “No generation frees another, / some god strikes them down” (lines 665-666). This reinforces the idea that Antigone’s traits—noble yet fatal—are ironically her own invention and a legacy she can’t escape. Her pride and resolve, like Oedipus’s, are double-edged: they make her heroic but also doom her. The Chorus does tie Antigone’s negative traits—like her reckless, self-willed nature—to Oedipus. They see her as both a product and a victim of her father’s character and curse, inheriting a tenacity that’s as much a burden as it is a strength, a poetic lament, steeped in the play’s tragic worldview. For if Antigone was really doing the gods’ will, why her tragic end?

CONCLUSION

Nietzsche said in a letter to Overbeck that his creative energies being poured into creating his Third Untimely Meditation left him invulnerable to the agitated boring eternal return of cabin fever that was effecting the people around him (Nietzsche, 1975,: 11.3 382).  The joyous life of the higher type of individual is what Nietzsche calls “Caesar with a soul of Christ – the overman (KGW VII 2:289).” It is a Christ-like Caesar, conquering not with might but rather love, not a seeking desire of eros, but a will to power transfiguring desire, a glass half-full approach to life. Not the Peace through victory of the Romans but peace through love. The key is whether one lives a life of love determined by eros or “lack,” like honor and glory seeking Achilles, esteeming beings because they seem beautiful/worthy, or whether to live a life of godless will to power agape where your “surplus” of love transfigure beings (widow, orphan, stranger and enemy in the gospel of Matthew) into becoming more important than self – agape as amor fati and dancing in your chains.  A key to this is how Jesus will overcome the tedium of Ecclesiastes (nothing new under the sun). Nietzsche says in his unpublished book Will to Power stamping becoming with Being is the highest form of Will to Power