The Definition of Man's Being in The Tragedy of Sophocles

Heidegger's construction of philosophical hermeneutics in his analysis of Antigone

Abstract

The article has as its object of analysis the definition of man's being as thematized by Sophocles, in the tragedy Antigone, from the translation and interpretation made by Martin Heidegger, in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). To conduct our study, we propose the following guiding question: in what way does the original opposition between the being in its totality and man configure the fundamental experience from which the being of man reveals itself as "the strangest"? In the meantime, the purpose of this study is to determine how the character Antigone assumes in her essence the mystery that characterizes the human being as "the strangest". To broaden our horizon of understanding, we will examine the Heideggerian interpretation of the confrontation between the characters Antigone and Ismene, presented in the course Der Ister (1943), with the purpose of demonstrating how Antigone, in becoming aware of her condition of being for death, recognizes finitude as the possibility of being most proper to her existence.