Creon treats men and women as agents of the City, without emotions, and therefore as less than human. Antigone treats enemies of the City as ordinary friends, and ends by failing to distinguish any longer between loyalty and treachery. I think the conclusion of both poets was that no system avoids conflict; and the most any human being can do is to recognise conflict when it appears, and do his or her best. This was about 500BC. And Jesus was faced with the same problem centuries later, in the conflict between his vocation and his family.
Ironically my attempt to solve the problem was instinctively exactly the same as his, although I was slow to realize it. In my book, I describe my choice in the only sensible way I could, by describing the spiritual or intangible world as I found it to be. So I tell the story obliquely. And in order to tell it at all, I had first to create a theory of consciousness. There was none already in existence, so far as I am aware. In Professor Roger Scruton’s popular resume of philosophy, he records that among philosophers there is a tendency to think it is impossible to create a theory of consciousness, “as it always slips through your fingers”. Well it may slip through the fingers of an individual, but it did not slip through mine, because I believed I had a sense of communion with another, which enabled me to weather the fluxions of consciousness, regardless of whether this belief was fact or fantasy.
Once I had created such a theory, it was relatively easy to see public duty, or if you like conformity with social convention, as being in one frame of mind, and family duty or human affection in another frame of mind. So the problem of reconciling them became just an example of reconciling two frames of mind; no easier for that, but at least recognisably a problem that one must be able to solve to live even the most basic life in society. No purely intellectual solution is possible, because you cannot reconcile two different frames of mind. But it at least helps you to see things in true proportion, and in this way helps you try to work out as best you can a true solution. It was just this that the Greek dramatists lacked: a theory of consciousness.
Martha Nussbaum continues her book with a discussion of Plato and the dialogue of Protagoras, who I think is made to argue very well. She says the Greek philosophers sought for a single end product to living (usually pleasure or happiness) which would give coherence to the whole of human conduct. To my mind, they made the same mistake as Antigone made: seeking a single “good” which would enable an individual to avoid the type of conflict which Agamemnon had to try to resolve. But as Sophocles indicates, it is seeking to give “life” a simplicity which it does not have, and in the end “life” will not allow you to get away with it.
In my idiom, it is an attempt to attribute to one particular frame of mind a quality which one can make into a supreme good; like the German philosophers searching for a single “Weltanschauung”. Not only does this mean subjecting the body to continual tension, which it cannot stand for long as I will explain, it is also parochial. Einstein has taught us that no one frame of mind in physics is better, or worse, than any other; and even if in morality this is not so, it is still true that no frame of mind is unique, save for what I call “the perfectly relaxed consciousness”, in which thought as we normally understand it is not possible. Other frames of mind are likely all to be flawed to some extent; and are not therefore appropriate for making into a unique “good”.
Again the basis of the mistake in these dialogues of Plato, assuming Martha Nussbaum is correct about their search for an end product, was his failure to create a theory of consciousness, and his failure to appreciate that a perfectly relaxed consciousness, if this is a valid concept, precludes any idea of pleasure or happiness being a goal, because these two states of mind each represents only one of an infinite number of possible frames of mind, all of which are in a state of flux and “slip through your fingers”, and none of which can be unique, although it is fair to say some are much more desirable than others. Besides, nothing destroys the imagination quicker than being forced into a mental strait-jacket.