The Antigone is a play about practical reason and the ways in which practical reason orders or sees the world. It is unusually full of words for deliberation, reasoning, knowledge, and vision. It begins with the question, 'Do you know?' (2), asked about a practical crisis, and with a claim about the correct way of viewing its demands. It ends with the assertion that practical wisdom (to phronein) is the most important constituent of human good living (eudaimonia, 1348-9). It is also a play about teaching and learning, about changing one's vision of the world, about losing one's grip on what looked like secure truth and learning a more elusive kind of wisdom. From a confident claim about what is, in a complicated case, known, it moves to, 'I have no idea where I should look, which way I should lean', and, finally, to the suggestion that a less confident wisdom has, in fact, been learned (1353).
[Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Updated Edition, Cambridge University Press (New York: 2009), pp. 51-52.]
