“Living Is Good, Dying Is Bad”: The Vitalist Core of Hribar’s Ethics of Sacredness

Abstract

In the second half of the 1980s, Tine Hribar developed a distinctive interpretation of Sophocles’s Antigone, which he presented in 1991 in the monograph Tragična etika svetosti (The tragical ethics of sacredness). Here he developed an original concept of the sacred, on which he built an ethical system that has become – particularly through its determined defense of the so-called sanctity of the dead – a cornerstone of the Slovene reconciliation project. This paper deals with some of the fundamental problems that stem from Hribar’s enigmatic definition of the sacred as “the world itself in itself,” showing that, in the conclusions Hribar draws from that definition, the clear distinction between being and life is lost. The central aporia of the Tragična etika svetosti is also closely intertwined with other problematic dimensions of the work that are analysed in the paper: the unfounded appropriation of the ethical characteristics of traditions from which he distances himself in principle; the unreflecting distinction between being and action in relation to the sacred; and not least, the unexplained oscillation between vitalism and Antigone’s ideal of self sacrifice.

Keywords

• tine hribar
• tragična etika svetosti
• antigone myth
• the sacred
• vitalism