[44] It is perhaps best to repeat Hegel's own phrase.
[45] Die sittliche Berechtigung zu einer bestimmten That. The context shows that Hegel does not merely mean the justification in the individual conscience, which is demanded by and perfected in such activity, but the actual ethical claim which is vindicated in such action.
[46] That is, the content of the dramatic action in Greek drama.
[47] By Rechtfertigung Hegel here seems to mean not so much the vindicated right as the degree of responsibility which a certain attitude of mind involves. It is the nature of the subjection to the vindicated right, or its absence.
[48] By die subjektive Vertiefung der Persönlichkeit Hegel would seem to mean the psychological analysis of character on its own account.
[49] Blosser Ausgleichung. The metaphor seems to be that of a final settlement of accounts, a general settlement would be perhaps a better translation.
[50] Hegel's statement is hardly supported by the facts as they are narrated in the "Œdipus Rex." It is the force of facts rather than a power of prevision, which arouse the knowledge of the terrible truth. But Hegel is here evidently most absorbed in the ideal and universal significance of the drama.
[51] That is, of course, in death. Sophocles himself of course only very indefinitely, through the evidence of an eye-witness, refers to such a possible apotheosis.
[52] The statement of the general contrast is no doubt true enough. It may be doubted, however, whether Hegel's own interpretation of the reconciliation of Œdipus as one consummated in death can be wholly brought under the ancient conception. It would seem truer to admit that in the spirit at least of the "Œdipus Coloneus" we have, at least in so far as that reconciliation is objective, and not merely a reconciling influence on our minds, the spectators, as in the case of the deaths of King Lear or Cornelia, in the sense that "death makes all things sweet," a mysterious approach to problems which Christianity first attempted seriously to solve, and which are usually regarded as insoluble without the assumption of a future state, or at least a divine absorption. Even admitting that Œdipus in his death became a real constituent of the harmonious unity of the civic life that received him, we cannot with truth say that such a reconciliation was one in which he shared personally, and whereof he was conscious, except in so far as he was aware of this by prevision; and to that extent the reconciliation was not in his death, but rather, as in the Christian view, a condition of the soul, a conviction that by his death he would live again,—almost identical in fact with some modern interpretations of immortality.
[53] Hegel means the conflict between the universal social interest and the private interest, between the concrete social life and the wholly private life.