Individual Ethics Of The Characters And The “Katharsis” Oriented Of Antigone

Sophocles’ Antigone is an outstanding tragedy of ancient Greece, which made ideologists from later times try to study it from philosophy, religion, politics, literary criticism and other various viewpoints. This paper, taking Antigone as the research object, intends to discuss the moral judgment and evaluation contained in the dialogue and action of characters by analyzing the content of the work and comparing the ethics between Antigone and Nicomachean Ethics. Furthermore, by discussing the moral sense of characters, audiences will have a better understanding of the Katharsis Effect in tragic work.Chapter one is a background statement of ancient Greek society. In the fifth Century BC, Greek poetic language and profound thoughts are closely integrated. Normally, the tragedies undertake the important responsibility of moral enlightenment among polis citizen.Chapter two mainly introduces the dialogues and actions of individuality in Antigone by analyzing intension and extension of predicate of critical evaluative such as ‘wisdom’ and ‘stupid’. Also, the predicates show intension abundance and isolation linguistic features on the cognitional disagreement of the work ‘misfortune’. On one hand, the conflicting dialogues and actions between Antigone and Creon reflect that individual moral practice always have full initiative and autonomy, which make up value diversification requirements by polis. On the other hand, the simplified value commitments between them indicate that absolute rational mode of thinking can only lead to failure and tragedy.Chapter three makes comparison between ethics thoughts in Antigone and moral practice wisdom in Nicomachean Ethics. Both of them agree that practice is the sole creation for testing individual activities which help to achieve the final goal of happy life. Differently, the denial answer by Antigone and Creon on happiness appears the arête and morality Sophocles wants to express. The behavior of them is a practical and rational experiment, which from the standpoint of the opposition represents a common human rational delusion of failure. However, Aristotle positively put forward that human practical wisdom is uncertain and what people have to do is to achieve happiness by middle course philosophy.Based on previous chapters’ analysis of character moral intension in Antigone, Chapter four majorly discuss the moral sense of characters, by which audiences will have a better understanding of the Katharsis Effect in tragic work. “Katharsis” is not only a kind of emotional catharsis, but also an approach to fulfil purification and promotion of moral sense. Because of objective aesthetic psychology and the similar social psychology background, citizens in Thebe of Antigone and ancient Greek are easier to get Katharsis Effect through intensive appeal to polis publicity.