KATHARSIS

KATHARSIS 




Aristotle’s belief in the formative and morally desirable effect of art is implicit in many of his writings. He states, more or less in answer to Plato, that tragedy produces a healthful effect on the human character through what he called a katharsis, ‘through pity and fear effecting a proper purgation of these emotions.” A successful tragedy, then, exploits and appeals at the start to two basic emotions. One is “fear” –,the painful sense, as Aristotle elsewhere describes it, “of impending evil which is destructive …. “ Tragedy, in other words, deals with the element of evil, with what we least want and most fear to face, with what is destructive to human life and values; it is this concern that makes the theme of the play tragic. In addition, tragedy exploits our sense of “pity”: it draws out our ability to sympathize with others, so that, in our identification with the tragic character, we ourselves feel something of the impact and extent of the evil befalling him. But tragedy does more than simply arouse sympathetic identification and a vivid sense of tragic evil or destructiveness. It offers a katharsis, a “proper purgation” of “pity and terror”. It is not merely an outlet or escape for emotion. It is not simply that men go about full of pent-up emotions, and that the sight of a dramatic tragedy every once in a while serves as a safety valve, so to speak, by which they let off steam. More than this, tragedy first of all deliberately excites in the spectator the emotions of pity and fear which are then to undergo the “’proper purgation.” The tragic katharsis operates by a process which first excites and then tranquillizes emotion; and it does the first in order to accomplish the second. It is a controlling and directing of emotion. Whereas Plato, in the Republic, had adversely criticized poetry because it “feeds and waters the passions instead of starving them,” Aristotle-both psychologically more sophisticated and also more typically Greek-took for granted that it is undesirable to “starve” the emotions; he assumed them to be a necessary aspect of human life. The morbid element purged from the emotion is the subjective, the purely personal and egoistic element. The emotion is caught up, as it were, by sympathetic identification with the tragic character and situation. It is extended outward, that is, away from selfcentered absorption and is itself desirable and operates to the advantage of one’s psychological and moral health. Above all, it has joined feeling to insight, conditioning our habitual emotion to that awareness of the essential import of human actions which poetry, through “imitation,” is capable of offering. Art possesses a unique power to form the “total man,” in whom emotion has been reconciled to intelligence and harmoniously integrated with it. The Poetics {this is the actual passage} Tragedy is then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By “language embellished,” I mean language into which rhythm, “harmony,” and song enter. By “the several kinds being found in separate parts,” I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song. Now as tragic imitation implies persons acting, it necessarily follows, in the first “place, that spectacular equipment will be a part of Tragedy. Next, Song and Diction, for these are the medium of imitation. By “Diction” I mean the mere metrical arrangement of the words: as for Song it is a word whose sense everyone understands. Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality-namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.” But most importantly, Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not of quality.