The Sophoclean self transcends the limitations of social roles and is able to put those roles in question, but it remains accountable to the point of death and accountable precisely for the way in which it handles itself in those conflicts which make the heroic point of view no longer possible. Thus the presupposition of the Sophoclean self’s existence is that it can indeed win or lose, save itself or go to moral destruction, that there is an order which requires from us the pursuit of certain ends, an order relationship to which provides our judgments with the property of truth or falsity.
