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  • Catharsis

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    Sharuk Rahaman
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    Catharsis refers to the purification or cleansing of emotions that Aristotle believed could be achieved through experiencing tragic drama. There has been much debate around Aristotle's definition of catharsis and what exactly is being purged - whether it is the emotions of the audience or the guilt of the protagonist. Aristotle argued that tragedies should arouse pity and fear in the audience in a way that results in catharsis. He also believed the best tragic heroes are neither wholly good nor evil, but have a tragic flaw that leads to their downfall, allowing the audience to feel both pity and fear for the character.

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    Catharsis refers to the purification or cleansing of emotions that Aristotle believed could be achieved through experiencing tragic drama. There has been much debate around Aristotle's definition of catharsis and what exactly is being purged - whether it is the emotions of the audience or the guilt of the protagonist. Aristotle argued that tragedies should arouse pity and fear in the audience in a way that results in catharsis. He also believed the best tragic heroes are neither wholly good nor evil, but have a tragic flaw that leads to their downfall, allowing the audience to feel both pity and fear for the character.

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    202 views1 page

    Catharsis

    Uploaded by

    Sharuk Rahaman
    Catharsis refers to the purification or cleansing of emotions that Aristotle believed could be achieved through experiencing tragic drama. There has been much debate around Aristotle's definition of catharsis and what exactly is being purged - whether it is the emotions of the audience or the guilt of the protagonist. Aristotle argued that tragedies should arouse pity and fear in the audience in a way that results in catharsis. He also believed the best tragic heroes are neither wholly good nor evil, but have a tragic flaw that leads to their downfall, allowing the audience to feel both pity and fear for the character.

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    Catharsis is the effect of' purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama,

    according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics. Aristotle wrote that


    a TRAGEDY should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to
    accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his
    meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an
    unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read
    as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the
    disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is the
    PROTAGONIST'S guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror.
    Adjective: cathartic.

    Precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies "purgation,"


    or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, a number of
    commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the
    undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering
    and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In
    the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls
    "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic
    or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the
    highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a
    tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot.

    Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our
    pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of
    both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we
    are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is
    exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his
    mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of
    judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One
    common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or
    overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning
    or to violate an important moral law.)

    The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity
    because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but
    he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our
    own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure
    and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most
    effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through
    complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or
    discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in
    his fortune from happiness to disaster.

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