Catharsis

Catharsis (κάθαρσις) names, in the Poetics, the function of tragedy: through pity and fear (eleos kai phobos) to accomplish the katharsis of experiences of that kind (Poet. 6, 1449b27–8, cited in Sorabji 2000). The two standard readings — moral purification and medical purgation — both fail Nussbaum’s philological test. Across the pre-Platonic, Platonic, and Aristotelian lexicon, the katharos-family means clear, freed of obstacle, clarified; katharsis is “the process that yields a katharos result, the removal of obstacles whose absence gives that result” (Nussbaum 1986, pp. 388–391).

On this reading, tragic catharsis is cognitive clarification effected through controlled undergoing. The plot must show suffering coming to someone like the spectator (homoios) precisely so that the spectator can paschein with the hero in a way that yields recognition — that this is what is liable to happen to a human as such (Sorabji 2000, ch. 2, on Rhet. 2.5 and 2.8). Aristotle’s account of pity and fear is therefore fully cognitive (Sorabji 2000); even pleasure and distress are “perceptions of the good as good and of the bad as bad” (De An. 3.7, 431a10–12, cited Sorabji 2000).

Catharsis is the institutional form of pascho. The theatre is a public site in which the patientive position is rehearsed under conditions designed to yield clarification rather than collapse. Apatheia would prevent it: a soul sealed against undergoing cannot be clarified by what it does not let in. The tragic stage is therefore the philosophical opposite of the Stoic discipline — both treating the pathē, but where Chrysippus extirpates them as mistaken assents, Aristotle organizes their controlled reception as the route to mathos.

Relationships

• pathos
• pascho
• pathei-mathos
• apatheia
• mimesis-oral

Primary sources

• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (related; Sorabji 2000 cited via chunk)