Theory of Catharsis:
Explain the concept of Catharsis.
Discuss the function of tragedy.
As
to the exact meaning and concept of Catharsis, there has been a lot of
controversy among scholars and critics down the centuries. Therefore, it
deserved separate treatment. Let us consider it in detail:
The
critics on catharsis by prolonged debated has succeeded only in creating
confusion, not in clarifying the concept.
John
Morley has rightly said: “The immense controversy,
carried on in books, pamphlets, sheets, and flying articles, mostly German, as
to what it was that Aristotle really meant by the famous words in the sixth
chapter of the poetics, about tragedy accomplishing the purification of our moods
of pity and sympathetic fear, is one of the disgraces of the human
intelligence, a grotesque monument of sterility.”
Yet
since Aristotle is vague in the usage of this word, critics have to interpret
it on his behalf. Certain broad understanding of the term is necessary, though
the attempts at deriving the doctrines regarding the functions of the tragedy
from this are absurd and ridiculous.
F.L.Lucas
in his Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle’s Poetics
asks three pertinent questions, and answers very illuminatingly. The questions
are:
(i) What was really Aristotle’s
view?
(ii) How far is it true?
(iii) What led him to adopt it?
Let
us consider the answers one by one.
1. The
meaning of Catharsis:
Let us quote F.L. Lucas at length on the meaning of catharsis: “First,
there has been age-long controversy about Aristotle’s meaning, though it has
almost always been accepted that whatever he meant was profoundly right. Many,
for example, have translated Catharsis as ‘purification’, ‘Correction or
refinement’, ‘Reinigung’, or the like. It has been suggested that our pity and
fear are ‘purified’ in the theatre by becoming disinterested (impartial or
without bias). It is bad to be selfishly sentimental, timid, and querulous; but
it is good to pity Othello or to fear for Hamlet. Our selfish emotion has been
sublimated. All this is most edifying; but it does not appear to be what
Aristotle intended.”
There is strong evidence that Catharsis means, not
‘Purification’, but ‘Purgation’. A medical metaphor. (Aristotle was the son of
a Physician.) Yet, owing to changes in medical thought, ‘Purgation’ has become
radically misleading to modern minds. Inevitably, we think of purgatives and
complete evacuations of water products; and then outraged critics ask why our
emotions should be so ill-treated. (Eg.Ayurved-panchkarma).
“But Catharsis means ‘Purgation’, not in the modern,
but in the older, wider English sense which includes the partial removal of
excess ‘humours’. The theory is as old as the school of Hippocrates that on a
due balance … of these humours depend the health of body and mind alike.”
F.L.Lucas.
To
translate Catharsis as purgation today is misleading owing to the change of
meaning which the word has undergone. The theory of humours is outdated in the
medical science. ‘Purgation’ has assumed different meaning. It is no longer,
what Aristotle had in mind. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to
translate Catharsis as
‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’ of the passions. But such translation, as
F.L.Lucas suggests, ‘keeps the sense, but loses the metaphor’. Anyway, when it
is not possible to keep up both, the meaning and the metaphor it is better to
maintain the meaning and sacrifice the metaphor in translating Catharsis as
‘moderating’ or ‘tempering’.
The
passions to be moderated are these of pity and fear. The pity and fear to be
moderated are, again, of specific kind. There can never be an excess in the pity
that results into a useful action. However, there can be too much of pity as an
intense and helpless feeling, and there can be too much of self-pity, which is
not a praise-worthy virtue. The Catharsis or moderation of such pity ought to
be achieved in the theatre or otherwise when possible, for such moderation
keeps the mind in a healthy state of balance.
Similarly,
only specific kinds of fear are to be moderated. Aristotle does not seem
to have in mind the fear of horrors on the stage, which as Lucas suggests are
“supposed to have made women miscarry with terror in the theatre”, Aristotle
specifically mentions ‘sympathetic fear for the characters’. “And by
allowing free vent to this in the theatre, men are to lessen, in facing life
thereafter, their own fear of … the general dread of destiny.” (F.L.Lucas)
There
are besides fear and pity the allied impulses which also are to be moderated.
“Grief, weakness, contempt, blame – these I take to be the sort of thing that
Aristotle meant by ‘feeling of that sort’.” (Lucas).
2. Then
we are faced with the second question: How far is Aristotle’s view of Catharsis
true? We may feel after witnessing a tragedy that certain tension in course of
the hours’ traffic upon the stage are built up and relaxed. We may feel released
/ relaxed when certain emotions are worked up in the mind and are rinsed out as
it were at the end which is more or less positive by implication, for death or
calamity is explained and accounted for as arising from certain avoidable
weakness or miscalculations of the hero. This sort of relaxation or release
after a prolonged tension that is built up and maintained during the drama,
though a welcome feeling, is not a purgation or moderation but fulfillment or
satisfaction with the conclusion which is not only logical but also
reasonable, which is not outrageously pessimistic but sadly positive and
corrective of tragic errors to the spectators. They did not get rid of anything
as in purgation they should; they gain something – a sort of artistic delight
which tragedy gives. In fact, tragic delight is what they want and expect from
tragedy, not moderation or proper balance of humours or purgation which has
only ethical significance. Certain moral ends of Catharsis might be
incidentally achieved. But it is not the chief end of tragedy. F.L.Lucas
observes:
“One could, of course, argue that these good folks
were instinctively craving a catharsis. But I should have thought they were
suffering in their daily lives, not from excess of emotion, but from
deficiency; that they wanted, not to be ‘purge’, but to be fed – that they were
hungry and thirsty for emotions that the dull round of their days denied.”
And again, he observes:
“He (Aristotle) stands in the position of a person
arguing with a fanatical Puritan about wine or dancing. The advocate of
moderate indulgence is naturally driven to plead that wine is good medicinally
and dancing as exercise; but, in fact, man do not usually drink wine as
medicine, and only Socrates dances alone in his house for exercise.”
But there are critics who find the theory of
Catharsis profoundly meaningful. They do
no deny that tragedy has as its chief end only tragic delight to serve. But in
the anatomy of that delight they find the truth of psychology as
elucidated by Aristotle in his theory of Catharsis. Aristotle, they say, makes
us critically aware of complex psychological processes that contribute to the
art-experience of tragedy; while enjoying this experience we are not aware of
these processes. Mr. W.
Macneile Dixon, for example writes in his Tragedy( London, 1938)
in defense of Aristotle’s theory:
“A theory , we may unreservedly admit, as pretty as
it is popular, and of interest to us since something of modern psychology,
which dwells upon the dangers
of repressed desires, is here anticipated. Repression, it appears, leads to neurosis. The
idea associated with emotional states may, some physicians tell us, if denied
their natural outlet
issues in instability and
hysteria. Relief of the unconscious mind, whether of the community or the individual from
physical tension is at times a necessity… The milder ailment cures severer, the
external excitement draws off the internal, the fear without disperses the fear within, the cup of the sour brims over and
tranquility is restored. … And if
you care to add refinement you may think of this release as an escape from
personal pre-occupations and anxieties into the larger life of sympathy with
the whole human clan, the
universal world, which embraces that great society of the living, the dead, and
those yet to be born.” (Pg. 118).
3. The
third question is: What
led Aristotle to adopt this theory? It should be remembered that
Plato, his master, has attacked poetry in general including tragedy from moral
and philosophical point of view. So Aristotle had to defend poetry against his
master’s attack on the moral and philosophical ground. He has to refute Plato’s
charges. To quote F.L.Lucas:
“Poetry, said Plato, makes men cowardly by its
picture of the afterworld. No, replies Aristotle, it can purge men’s fears.
Poetry, said Plato, encourages men to be hysterical and uncontrolled. On the
contrary, answers his pupil, it makes them less, not more, emotional by giving
a periodic healthy outlet to their feelings. In short, Aristotle’s definition
of tragedy is half a defense.”(Pg. 57)
But it is only half a defense. That is to say that
the other half of the theory is possibly the result of a serious, analytical
inquiry of Aristotle’s into the nature of tragic delight and its psychological effects. His
Catharsis forms the most important part of his concept of tragedy as a
positive, not pessimistic, drama which leaves wholesome effect, not mere
disturbance, in the minds of the spectators.
Since, Aristotle in Europe, tragedy has never been a
drama of despair, causeless death or chance disaster. The drama that only
paints horrors and leaves souls shattered and mind unreconciled with the world
may be described as a gruesome, ghastly play, but not a healthy tragedy, for
tragedy is a play in which disaster or downfall has causes which could
carefully be avoided and sorrow in it does not upset the balance in favour of pessimism. That is why, in spite
of seriousness, even heart-rending scenes of sorrow, tragedy embodies the
vision of beauty. It stirs noble thoughts and serves tragic delight but does
not condemn us to despair. If the healthy notion of tragedy is maintained
throughout the literary history of Europe, the ultimate credit, perhaps, goes
to Aristotle who propounded it in his theory of Catharsis.
Catharsis
established tragedy as a drama of balance. Sorrow alone would be ugly and
repulsive. Beauty pure would be imaginative and mystical. These together
constitute what may be called tragic beauty. Pity alone would be sentimentality. Fear alone
would make us cowards. But pity and fear, sympathy and terror together
constitute the tragic feeling which is most delightful though it is tearfully
delightful. Such tragic beauty and tragic feeling which it evokes
constitute the aesthetics of balance as propounded for the first time by
Aristotle in his theory of Catharsis. Therefore, we feel, reverence which
Aristotle has enjoyed through ages has not gone to him undeserved. His insight
has rightly earned it.