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THE EYE THAT DIES

I have not read Sophocles� text recently, but listened to
exceptional audio edition. Powerfully acted out, with an eerie chorus and dramatic music, it has been a superb experience.

I have come back to this play now in a roundabout way. As part of a Seminar on Aesthetics, The Eye that Thinks, imparted in the Prado Museum, we were prompted by our Professor Félix de Azúa to read Oedipus in a Hegelian framework. We had been discussing the contributions of Hegel to Aesthetics, and he wanted us to visit the play and think of the role of Sphinx and the significance of Thebes.

In Hegel’s aesthetic system he identified Greek sculptures as the apex of what art could achieve in its quest of perfect and supreme beauty. Earlier architecture and art were still immature attempts. For example, the large Egyptian monuments were undertakings in which matter still prevailed over Geist. When Hegel saw some Kouroi in Munich (now in the Glyptotech), specimens of very early Greek art, he was struck by the significance of the step in this walking man.




In Egyptian representations of humans, legs are seen in profile. They depicted stability, while the Greek marble in Munich man was striding forward. The Kouros, although still using Egyptian conventions presented something very new. It embodied gesture. And Hegel thought that art should strive to represent movement.

The conceptual step of the Kouros, an awakening out of immobility, separated the worlds of the two Thebes: the one in Boetia in ancient Greece from the one up the Nile in ancient Egypt. In Greece Geist was finally on the move.





If Hegel favoured Greek sculpture, he found that Greek drama could offer an additional dimension to sculpted beauty as the unfolding of time could be represented as well. For him Greek tragedy had invoked the greatest aesthetic power.



Hegel had also understood the Egyptian Sphinx as the first instance of the representation of human emerging out, liberating himself, from his animal nature. In this reading of Oedipus Rex as I have tried to keep on some sort of Hegelian glasses (and forget about the pervasive Freudian interpretation), I have seen the solution of Oedipus to the riddle of the Sphinx, and the consequent dissolution of the curse on Thebes and the destruction of the monster, as the emergence of humanity over its previous servitudes and imprisonment.

And yet, this conquered freedom also brought the possibility of unwilled intention or of the unintended will and the impossibility of unlearning what one already knows.

Trapped in this situation Oedipus attempt to escape his knowledge by doing away with his eyes, could only bring death.

As the chorus chants: it is the only liberation.





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