The nature of the tragic in Antigone is not that they either Antigone or Creon could have choosen the "right" solution for there were conflicting obligations, neither of which was more paramount than the other.  Nevertheless, each could have conducted his or herself in a just manner. Put differently, each could have acted rightly, notwithstanding that the final choice (consequence) would not be unconditionally right.  The sentry makes us aware of one element that has been missing from both Antigone and Creon.  His narrative is full of homely detail and hence returns us to ordinary realities -- heat, dirt, smells -- about which Antigone and Creon have remained silent.  So too, he is the first to sense that there are two sides to any deliberative question.  He returns us to the realization of the discomfort that attends most deliberations, the two-sideness and the concreteness of the sentry's speech has been a necessary part of practical reasoning that was discounted by all other characters until now. 
 

      Creon establishes the well-being of the city -- the civic -- as the single good, and each virtue or vice he comments upon is in relation to this single good.  Through an "aggressive revisionary strategy," Creon sees no possible conflict between various ethical goods.  The good and bad then are only those things good or bad for the city.  The bad is contrasted with "whoever is well minded to the city" as if the two were polar opposites (Line108-9).  Is one example of a bad woman is Antigone whose badness is civic badness only.  Honor and respect also belong only to the city helpers, and cannot possible be attributed to those who are not (Line 207-10). And of course he denies all familial ties and duties of Philoi insofar as they clash with what he sees as good for the city-state.  Creon then has constructed for himself a deliberative world where tragedy does not enter.  Pause upon this thought.  Insoluble conflict cannot arise, by Creon's estimation for there is only one single good.  He will not accept that the demands of piety and love (family) might clash in a terrible way with the demands of civic justice.

Note the images Creon employs when describing his relation to Antigone , metal working, slave owning, horse taming (Line 473-9).  The human being is an obstacle to him like a horse who will not be tamed.  He wishes in someway to rule over those who do not "talk back," disagree, suggest a different course.  Note Hamemon telling his father you would "better rule in solitude, over a desert space." (Line 739).  While Creon's strategy leads him to consider others as material for his aggressive exploitation, Antigone's dutiful submissiveness to the dead leads to an equally strange result.  She evinces a kind of coldness to the living, her sister and Hamemon.  No living being is loved for his or her personal qualities but only insofar as either stands in agreement with Antigone. 
 

Hegel sees Antigone's and Creon's ethical lack in each's onesideness -- each representing either the masculine or feminine archetype taken to the extreme without room for its opposite.  For Hegel, the elimination of conflict is a proper aim IF one goes about attempting a synthesis.  Analogously, the proper deliberation incorporates both rigor and instinct, reflection and distance as well as attention to detail and a leaning into one's subject matter.  The true course of ethical development is, he says, the annulment of contradiction by a reconciling of the forces of human action, which strive to negate each other when in conflict. Antigone learns -- too late, that the service of the dead requires the city -- civic institutions.  Creon learns too late, that the city itself was pious and loving, it consisted of families, and he could not honor the city without honoring what it upheld as worthy.  Yet in the Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum aptly points out that "The Sophoclean soul is more like Heraclitus;s image . . . a spider sitting in the middle of its web, able to feel and respond to any tug in any part of its complicated structure."  Put differently. humans advance understanding by hovering in thought and imagination in the enigmatic complexities of a seen particular.
 

  Note the Chorus singing "looking at this strange portent, I think on both sides" as Antigone enters a prisoner (Line 376).  The image of deliberation expressed here focuses upon responsiveness and attention to nuance, it discourages search for the reductive and simple and suggests that the realm of ethical deliberation  is never exhausted by a single reading and hence excellence in deliberation requires keen sight and flexibility. So too seeing and passionate weeping are bound up with one another for the chorus -- reason and feeling.  (Line 802-6)  "A purely intellectual perception of this event that was not accompanied by being borne and by the flowing of tears would not be a full or good seeing."   At the darkest moment, an old man enters with a young child.  The man, though blind, walks.  The child, though dependent, is not passively weeping.  "two see from one" (Line 989).  The old man is a priest of Apollo a god associated with ordering and bounding -- the masculine.  He tells Creon to heal himself from the sickness of reason.  We can imply that this is the sickness of the rage for control.  In line 1029, Tiresas tells Creon that good deliberation is tied to yielding (eike) with renouncing stubbornness (line 1028) and with being flexible (Line 1027).              

They do not tell Creon to go to the other extreme and to become passive, utterly yielding, unable to order for lack of distance.  Rather, the task is to cultivate flexible responsiveness -- to incorporate the feminine -- to combine passivity and activity, yielding and aggression, response and faithfulness to one's judgment.  Haemon's advice is that the true way of being humanly civilized requires preservation of the mystery and specialness of the external.  This requires a preservation in oneself of the passions for it is these that transport us to these mysteries.  Tiresia offers a standard for this reconciling and tells Creon to follow "convention" understood properly as the customs and ways of his people.  Neither arid legislation nor individual whim suffice. Custom, as messy and rich, textured and nuanced, will provide a way. (Line 1113-4).  In some sense then, this play teaches that justice is strife.  This is to say that the tensions that invite strife to arise, are also constitutive of the myriad of norms themselves which comport a full and inexhaustible ethical life.  Ethical deliberation is "in being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself:a back stretching harmony as of a bow or a lyre."  Simultaneously we must be humanly artful and responsive to strangeness.  And finally note that the Chorus invokes Dionysus as the "chorus master of the fire breathing stars" (Line 1147).  This suggests the play itself is a harmony, a healing without cure, and that harmony is not simplicity but the tension of what Martha Nussbaum calls "distinct and separate beauties"