CATHARSIS

Of all technical terms, ‘Catharsis’ is probably the one most often used in relation to tragedy. It first appears in this context in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy:
“A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”
There is general agreement that it came into his picture through his wish to counter Plato’s argument, given notable expression in Book X of the Republic, which the poets were to be blamed, and exiled, because their arousing of emotions, including that of pity, worked against a man’s duty to follow the dictates of reason. Combining this, Aristotle asserted that the emotions, particularly those of pity and fear, in being aroused in tragedy, were also ‘purged’. Whether he meant that the emotions of pity and fear were thus eliminated from the system, or that they were purged of the dross in them, has been a matter of controversy. The latter view seems half-acknowledged by Milton in the preface to Samson Agonists, where tragedy, he declares is,
‘said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.’

He proceeds to illustrate from medical practice: for so in Physic things of melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours. Thus he refers to the tempering of the emotions and the reducing of then ‘to just measure’, although this analogue from medicine would rather seem to imply elimination.
Butcher suggested that in tragedy we experience pity and fear without the pain that is customarily associated with them because the action presented has a universal application: the tragic figures are beings like ourselves but with a greatness transcending our reach, with a demand on then to face disasters that are more extreme than ours: consequently, the pity and fear we customarily experience are brought into thought also of the directing kof the emotional responses through tragedy:
“A tragedy rouses the emotions from potentiality to activity by worthy and adequate stimuli, it controls them by directing them to the right objects in the right way I and exercises them within the limits of play as the emotions of the good man would be exercised. When they subside to potentiality again after the play is over it is a more ‘trained’ potentiality than before. This is what Aristotle calls ____________. Our responses are brought nearer to those of the good and wise men.”
We may agree that this is an effect of tragedy for the moment we are better, more sensitive and enlightened people in witnessing tragedy than we commonly are – but we may w0onder if Aristotle’s words allow us to assume he meant ‘catharsis’ in this way, and if this utterance is adequate for the complexity of the tragic impact.
Gerold F. Else suggests that both the idea of eliminating and the idea of purifying pity and fear are mistaken. He contends that Aristotle had in mind the purging of the tragic events. We cannot in real life’ contemplate parricide or incest with any approach to equanimity, but in Oedipus we can see them as tolerable because of the special circumstances in which they are presented to us. Medea’s killings of her children, Antigone’s doom, the blinding of Gloucester and the madness of Lear – would be overwhelming if we encountered them outside a theatre. Aristotle is presented as arguing that in a theatre all the remoteness and authority of dramatic production give them the distance and compensation that allow us to observe them with equanimity. But, else freely admits, this only dubiously works in Greek tragedy and perhaps not at all in later tragedy. We do not in fact preserve our equanimity in watching Lear. If Aristotle meant what Else suggests he meant, the Aristotelian notion of catharsis does not help us much. When Renaissance and ‘Post-Renaissance writers have had catharsis in mind, as Milton for example had, it was a catharsis of a different kind – a lifting of a burden, not a purifying of a deed, as far as Milton’s intended effect is realized.
Not surprisingly, there has been total skepticism on this matter. In recent times we have all occasionally felt, with F. L. Lucas in his ‘Tragedy in relation to Aristotle’s Poetics1927), that the term is commonly used as a mere gesture of reverence and has no connection with our actual experience of tragedy’.
However, it is obvious that feelings of pity and fear are observed by him as undesirable and dangerous qualities within the human system, and it seems necessary that these be washed away regularly so that they do not build up and vent themselves in distorted and harmful ways. The implications are wider then the well-being of the individual; their import is social also. Hence the right kind of tragedy becomes a regulating device for man as a social animal. Observed fact, also, would establish that even after certain feelings have been cleansed away, they are likely to build up again. There is no permanent removal of emotion, but there can be a tempered, habituated cycle, and it is this ‘habit’ pattern which Aristotle conceives as the true foundation of moral behaviour, a pattern which can be fostered by the repeated viewing of tragedy.
As for the method, objections to the homeopathic method might well be removed when we remember that in this system, pseudo rather then actual symptoms are induced. The feelings of pity and fear aroused in the theatre are synthetic and artificial, yet akin to what a person would feel in real life. The element of real danger is removed, the participation in the action, no matter how intense, is vicarious and lacks immediacy. The process of purgation takes place while the audience is watching the play; artificial feelings are used to displace the real ones, and when it is all over, the artificial ones also fade away and a special kind of calm is left.