[501W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 181-182]
[P. 181] “Still more violently [than Oedipus’s unwitting murder of his own father Laius] was roused the public horror, by the circumstance that Oedipus had wedded his own mother and begotten children of her. In the life of the Family – the most natural, albeit the most straitened basis of Society – it had been established quite of itself, that betwixt parents and children, as betwixt the children of one pair, there is developed an inclination altogether different from that which proclaims itself in the sudden, violent commotion of sexual love. In the Family the natural ties between begetter and begotten become the ties of Wont; and only from out of Wont, again, is evolved a natural inclination of brothers and sisters toward one another. But the first attraction of sexual love is brought the stripling by an unwonted object, freshly fronting him from Life itself; this attraction is so overpowering, that it draws him [P. 182] from the wonted surroundings of the Family, in which this attraction had never presented itself, and drives him forth to journey with the un-wonted. This sexual love is the revolutionary, who breaks down the narrow confines of the Family, to widen it itself into the broader reach of human Society. The intuition of the essence of family-love and its distinction from the love between the sexes is therefore an instinctive one, inspired by the very nature of the thing; it rests upon Experience and Wont, and is therefore a view which takes us with all the strength of an insuperable feeling. Oedipus, who had espoused his mother and begotten children of her, is an object that fills us with horror and loathing, because he unatonably assaults our wonted relations towards our mother, and the views which we have based thereon.” [501W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 181-182]
[502W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 182-183]
[P. 182] “The hapless pair [i.e. Jocasta and her son, Oedipus], whose Conscience (Bewusstsein) stood within the pale of human Society, passed judgment on themselves when they became conscious of their unconscious crime: [P. 183] … . How full of meaning it is, then, that precisely this Oedipus had solved the riddle of the Sphinx! In advance he uttered both his vindication and his own condemnal when he called the kernel of this riddle Man. (…) {FEUER} It is we who have to solve that riddle, to solve it by vindicating the instinct of the Individual from out Society itself; whose highest, still renewing and re-quickening wealth, that Instinct is.” [502W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 182-183]
[503W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 184]
[P. 184] {FEUER} “Antigone, the sister of both brothers, -- she who had followed her blind father into banishment, -- in full consciousness defied the edict, interred the corpse of her outlawed brother, and suffered the appointed punishment. – Here we see the State, which had imperceptibly waxed from out the Society, had fed itself on the latter’s habit of view, and had so far become the attorney (Vertreter) of this habit, that now it represented abstract Wont alone, whose core is fear and abhorrence of the thing unwonted.” [503W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 184]
