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Monday, January 07, 2008
Catharsis
The story so far: Plato has banished the poets from his ideal Republic ("You will know that the only poetry that should be allowed in a perfectly managed state is hymns to the gods and paeans in praise of good men; once you go beyond that and admit the sweet lyric or epic muse, pleasure and pain become your rulers instead of law and the rational principles …"). He does this on the grounds that (a) they peddle copies of copies, moving people further away from the true realm of the Forms, (b) they lie, and (c) they encourage passions, when as any fule kno passions must be manfully (or, I guess, womanfully) repressed: “poetry feeds and waters the passions, weeds that should rather be killed by drought” [606a-d]. Aha, says his pupil, Aristotle. Not so. Which is to say, I agree with you that man should not be governed by his emotions; but, rather than encouraging such emotional incontinence, poetry is an effective treatment for it:
Tragedy is, then, a representation of an action that is heroic and complete and of a certain magnitude—by means of language enriched with all kinds of ornament, each used separately in the different parts of the play: it represents men in action and does not use narrative, and through pity and terror it effects a Κάθαρσις of these and similar emotions. [Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b]
We might put it this way: the debate is whether tragedy is tonic or cathartic. I’m teaching a course on tragedy this term, amongst other things, and have been reading a fair few books on the subject recently, one of which (Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence, I think, although my memory is hazy) likens it to modern-day debates on the pornography or violent video games: one camp taking the Platonic view that such things only roil-up socially dangerous feelings and ought to be banished, the other the Aristotelian view that they provide a healthy vent by which such emotions can be harmlessly released.
Then again, before getting stuck into the preparatory reading for this course, I’d assumed that ‘catharsis’ for Aristotle meant (as some critics think it does) something like ‘bring these emotions, pity and terror, into a healthy balance in the body’. But looking over Aristotle again, I’m wondering. For the Greeks, katharsis was a term with strong medical overtones: purging in a theraputic sense ... emetics, laxatics, the whole pre-modern doctoring perscription. The aim of such an activity was the rid the body of bad humours, or poison. Read that famous passage again. Mightn’t we want to take Aristotle at face value? He’s not talking about a lavender-scented ‘purification’ or balancing; he’s talking about purging the body of pity and terror. He’s saying the purpose of tragedy is to produce pitiless, fearless men; men who could, presumably, fight in the Athenian army and navy without qualm or hesitation, who could kill without mercy. Men who when faced with the order to kill all the men and sell all the women and children of Mytilene into slavery would not be distracted by effeminate nonsense like pity or fear. ‘I’ve seen Agamemnon murdered in his bath ... killing a few thousand civilians doesn’t bother me in the least’. Mightn’t it be, in other words, that Aristotle’s theory is: tragedy produces cold-eyed killers, and good thing too.
Comments
Fearlessness and pitilessness would never be virtues to Aristotle. In the _Ethics_, as I recall, he quite plainly finds the virtue of courage to be between the vices of cowardice and recklessness. Someone without fear would be as bad in his view as someone ruled by fear.
A bad humor in the Hippocratic sense is not an mexternally introduced poison, but a poisonous systemic excess or local accumulation of one of the humors already permeating the body and--when in balance--regulating its functions.
You might want to particularly compare the Aristotelian idea of the purgative effect of tragedy with the ancient use of black hellebore for insanity--not intended to strip some poison from the body, but to relieve an accumulation of black bile in the head.
Persuasive.
But then again …
Would somebody without fear necessarily be reckless? Recklessness is surely a lack of judgment; but a fearless warrior might still retain the capacity to make sensible judgments. It would clearly disadvantage a warrior to be fearful, but I can’t see how it benefits a warrior to be ‘half-fearful’: fearlessness would surely be preferable in battle.
You’re suggesting, Paul, (in line with the traditional view of commentators on Aristotle’s Poetics, I might add) that katharsis is about regulating and balancing the humours, not purging something completely: that in a word it’s homeopathic. I thought so too: but more recently I’ve come to doubt it.
This, from Dale Grote’s fairly recent survey of scholarship on the term [‘Katharsis of Such Pathemata: Recent Work on the Poetics’, The Classical Journal (1995), 456-62]:
The prevailing understanding of Aristotelian katharsis is at base homeopathic … [but] Greek theories of medical katharsis, the clear analogy for psychic katharsis, are universally allopathic, and allopathic medical katharsis does sketch out a mechanism consistent with the psychic katharsis of the Poetics … a survey of the use of the word katharsis with a genitive shows it never means the purification or cleansing of the substance in the objective genitive, but it means the complete elimination of this substance from something else. The homeopathic view of katharsis assumes that the object of its treatment is not purged completely, but merely treated or refined, and this … is impossible Greek.
This is what I’m now wondering: our present-day perspective finds the valorisation of fearlessness and (especially) pitilessness repugnant; and a refusal to believe that Aristotle could possibly have been saying anything so extreme as ‘tragedy fully removes fear and pity’ has shaped commentator’s assumptions about how to read this famous passage. But an Ancient Greek perspective might indeed have found such qualities eminently desirable: properly manly, warlike and so on.
Are you aware I’ve written a poem on the subject?
http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/abecedarium/pages/a.html
Rene Girard has some interesting things to say about catharsis - he argues that its purgative effect is directed primarily at social contamination. It is a mechanism that combines identification and last-minute disavowal which thus serves to rejuvenate social bonds after carrying out sacrificial murder. In other words, though they fully identify with Agamemnon, the men in the audience are thinking, at least in part, “I’m glad it’s not me being dismembered in the bathtub.” In that sense, catharsis is a kind of leftover, though a tremendously significant one, from the times when the community openly practiced human sacrifice.
As for the issue of tragedy making its viewers into cold-blooded, pitiless killers, I think rather that it would be aimed at producing a subject which is fully human, shows a broad range of recognizably human capacities, while being capable of killing human beings in times of war. The point would not be encouraging people to relinquish their humanity, but rather to provide a medium by which the citizens may come to grips with the inhuman actions they commit in the name of defending or expanding the power of the polis. Thus, a hoplite might have personal reservations about killing the defenseless citizens of Melos or Mytilene, actions which might strike him as excessively cruel, but tragic knowledge, as opposed to cold-blooded ruthlessness, would steel him for the task. The theater has taught him that the most important dilemmas in the world are those that are tragic, in which there are no good choices and thus in which one good (benevolence and mercy) must be sacrificed for the sake of another (the well-being of the state). Furthermore, his enemies would do the same thing were the positions reversed. Tragedy would confer the necessary ambivalence (the correct balance of passion and knowledge) necessary to undertake mass killing. For tragedy tells him that it is the fate of individuals and communities alike to contend against each other and to become undone by each other - it’s the inescapable law of history.
On the other hand, it would be undesirable (from the ancient Greek standpoint as well) simply to produce cold-blooded killers. For all the brutality and violence that mark ancient life, especially to us First World postmoderns who place an unprecedented premium upon psychological comfort (to the point where every other culture has come to appear inexplicably cruel and irrationally inhuman), ancient peoples were acutely aware of the need to set up and reinforce boundaries between peace and violence, between what we might call the human and the inhuman (think of the image of the werewolf in the section of the Republic where Plato discusses the insatiability of the tyrant). Hence they take recourse to a complicated set of rituals in order to maintain and reassert these divisions. It is important to be able to kill on behalf of the state, but killing done in the wrong manner destroys the very basis of social life. Thus, Tydeus, one of the Seven against Thebes, is denied immortality because he kills and eats the brains of one of his enemies.
The point would not be encouraging people to relinquish their humanity, but rather to provide a medium by which the citizens may come to grips with the inhuman actions they commit in the name of defending or expanding the power of the polis. Thus, a hoplite might have personal reservations about killing the defenseless citizens of Melos or Mytilene, actions which might strike him as excessively cruel, but tragic knowledge, as opposed to cold-blooded ruthlessness, would steel him for the task.
This makes my point (or a better, refined version of it) much more eloquently than I did originally.
There’s a rather cogent interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy toward the beginning of Gadamer’s “Truth and Method”. It’s probably around pg. 80 or 100 and is part of his phenomenology of “play”.
Possibly you are right about fear; but your argument is not with me, but with Aristotle, who thought fearlessness a kind of insanity.
I do not have access to the article which you quote. I am surprised by the use of the modern terms “homeopathy” and “allopathy” in connection with classical medicine. Certainly Hippocrates did some treatment by similars, but it did not characterize his medicine--which more often employed opposites to achieve balance. I would gather that the author means to distinguish between treatment of the humors, and treatment of the symptoms with specifics?
The elimination of the substance is not the elimination of the capacity. Katharsis was used for the elimination of the guilt of a particular crime; but the elimination of the substance of that instance of guilt did not, I gather, imply that the purged person would be shameless in the future.
I always understood the Aristotelian analysis of courage in the way Paul describes it.
If a soldier is fearless, then his actions cannot be courageous or heroic. I person who fights a tiger without knowledge of the tiger’s danger is not acting heroically; he’s acting recklessly, even if he wins. The soldier who charges a hill without fear is careless—literally—not courageous. And we see this especially if that solider is a leader who recklessly leads his men to charge a hill without proper fear.
Fear is basically the root of respect. It’s the perception of danger and realization that one’s life or livelihood is at risk. Aristotle would never think that tragedy purged all fear for the simple reason that *Oedipus* so clearly is about having a proper fear of the gods, having a proper knowledge of one’s limitations. Oedipus is a fearless leader; Creon a pitiless one. Their fates instill the proper balance of fear and pity in the audience.
Courage implies both fear and steadfastness. Steadfastness without fear is easy, and hence not courageous. Fear without steadfastness is cowardice.
Adam, I think that what you raise with the issue of fearless vs. reckless is addressed by Homer. In the Iliad, the heroes more often than not have, on their own, the proper amount of fear of the gods and the enemy. They often hang back from battle, fear pushing the armies too hard.
It’s the gods who inspire the heroes to their great devastating heights. But then those same divinely-inspired heroes become difficult to control, going so far as to attack gods who show up on the battlefield. Whipped up into fearlessness by the gods, the heroes also become reckless and must pay the costs of crossing over into the extremes.
I cannot think of a single Homeric hero who is without fear.
Just got back in town after traveling in California to see where the discussion has headed…
In response to Luther B.’s comments, one finds in Plato’s Phaedo a discussion of courage that seeks to separate it from fear, i.e. the courage of the soldier is not really courage because it is the exchange of one fear (fear of disgrace) for another (fear of death). Only the philosopher is courageous without contradiction, without fear, and one might add, without being reckless. But the fearlessness of the philosopher leads him to submit serenely to the laws of the state which have decreed his death - does this mean that philosophy is essentially unsuitable for catharsis? Socrates is not even given a moment to catch a snooze in the garden of Gethsemane.
On the other hand, Plutarch’s bio of Pelopidas is an intriguing portrait of a freedom fighter who is done in, after a series of remarkable feats on the battlefield and in the city, by his own audacity.