From Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: Page 261

437. The difference between self-consciousness and essence, is therefore, perfectly transparent. Because of this, the distinctions in essence itself are not accidental determinatenesses; on the contrary, in virtue of the unity of essence and self-consciousness (this latter being the only possible source of disparity), they are 'masses' articulated into groups by the life of the unity which permeates them, unalienated spirits transparent to themselves, stainless celestial figures that preserve in all their differences the undefiled innocence and harmony of their essential nature. The relationship of self-consciousness to them is equally simple and clear. They are, and nothing more; this is what constitutes the awareness of its relationship to them. Thus, Sophocles' Antigone infallible law of the gods. 1 acknowledges them as the unwritten and

They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they came from, none of us can tell. They are. If I inquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence they arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the universal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being,
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and regard them as something which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not true. Ethical disposition consists just in sticking steadfastly to what is right, and abstaining from all attempts to move or shake it, or derive it. Suppose something has been entrusted to me; it is the property of someone else and I acknowledge this because it is so, and I keep myself unfalteringly in this relationship. If I should keep for myself what is entrusted to me, then according to the principle I follow in testing laws, which is a tautology, I am not in the least guilty of contradiction; for then I no longer look upon it as the property of someone else: to hold on to something which I do not regard as belonging to someone else is perfectly consistent. Alteration of the point of view is not contradiction; for what we are concerned with is not the point of view, but the object and content, which ought not to be self-contradictory. Just as I canas I do when I give something awayalter the view that it is my property into the view that it belongs to someone else, without becoming guilty of a contradiction, so I can equally pursue the reverse course. It is not, therefore, because I find something is not self-contradictory that it is right; on the contrary, it is right because it is what is right. That something is the property of another, this is fundamental; I have not to argue about it, or hunt around for or entertain thoughts, connections, aspects, of various kinds; I have to think neither of making laws nor of testing them. All such thinking on my part would upset that relation, since, if I liked, I could in fact just as well make the opposite conform to my indeterminate tautological knowledge and make that the law. But whether this or the opposite determination is the right, that is determined in and for itself. I could make whichever of them I liked the law, and just as well neither of them, and as soon as I start to test them I have

already begun to tread an unethical path. By acknowledging the absoluteness of the right, I am within the ethical substance; and this substance is thus the essence of selfconsciousness. But this self-consciousness is the actuality and existence of the substance, its self and its will.
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470. It can be that the right which lay in wait is not present in its own proper shape to the consciousness of the doer, but is present only implicitly in the inner guilt of the resolve and the action. But the ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more inexcusable, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be violence and wrong, to be ethical merely by accident, and, like Antigone , knowingly commits the crime. The accomplished deed completely alters its point of view; the very performance of it declares that what is ethical must be actual; for the realization of the purpose is the purpose of the action. Doing directly expresses the unity of actuality and substance; it declares that actuality is not an accident of essence, but that, in union with essence, it is not granted to any right that is not a true right. The ethical consciousness must, on account of this actuality and on account of its deed, acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality, must acknowledge its guilt.
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437. True ethical law is the unwritten, inerrant, unalterable divine law spoken of in the Antigone . It is not anything that an individual can hope either to criticize or to justify, and certainly not in terms of mere self-consistency.
From Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Page 114

For this reason, family piety is expounded in Sophocles' the

Antigone

one of the most sublime presentations of this virtueas principally

Page Break 115 law of woman, and as the law of a substantiality at once subjective and on the plane of feeling, the law of the inward life, a life which has not yet attained its full actualization; as the law of the ancient gods, 'the gods of the underworld'; as 'an everlasting law, and no man knows at what time it was first put forth'.24 This law is there displayed as a law opposed to public law, to the law of the land. This is the supreme opposition in ethics and therefore in tragedy; and it is individualized in the same play in the opposing natures of man and woman.* [A.]
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From Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics: Vol. 2, Page 1217

This sort of development is most complete when the individuals who are at variance appear each of them in their concrete existence as a totality,1 so that in themselves they are in the power of what they are fighting, and therefore they violate what, if they were true to their own nature, they should be honouring. For example, Antigone lives under the political authority of Creon [the present King]; she is herself the daughter of a King [Oedipus] and the fiance of Haemon [Creon's son], so that she ought to pay obedience to the royal command. But Creon too, as father and husband, should have respected the sacred tie of blood and not ordered anything against its pious observance. So there is immanent in both Antigone and Creon something that in their own way they attack, so that they are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to
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their own actual being. Antigone suffers death before enjoying the bridal dance, but Creon too is punished by the voluntary deaths of his son and his wife, incurred, the one on account of Antigone's fate, the other because of Haemon's death. Of all the masterpieces of the classical and the modern worldand I know nearly all of them and you should and can1 the Antigone most magnificent and satisfying work of art of this kind. seems to me to be the