With the word "contradiction", I don't think Hegel would mean anything different from "conflict". It is wrong, therefore, to argue about the hegelian concept of "contradiction" as if it involved a technical notion of logical nature. A "contradiction", in Hegel's sense, is a conflict, which is relevant and meaningful from a historical point of view; a conflict so intimately linked to its own context that to remove it is to change the same form of life it is well embedded in. Why, then, had he to make use of a logical word like "contradiction" ? Because of his polemic against the Enlightenment culture. The conflict between the will of gods and the will of man, we see in Greek tragedy, can't be explained as if it was something engendered by the prejudices of Greek people and a theoretical mistake. It is a "living contradiction" means: it was a real thing and we can't regard it as the result of a still insufficient development of scientific reason.

P. Facod