Tragedy As Catharsis: - Sacrifice as Metaphor
"But Justice turns the balance scales, sees that we suffer and we suffer and we
learn. And we will know the future when it comes."
-Chorus, Agamemnon, Aeschylus
The greatest minds in history have grappled with, and disagreed about, the
value of tragedy to the human experience. The only thing they agree upon is
that it is of great value.
Catharsis is a medical term referring to purging or cleansing, and both Plato and
Aristotle argued witnessing tragic theater grants the audience this experience.
Plato argued catharsis separated the soul from the body/senses -- and we should
consider how all great art does this: it removes us from reality and takes us
temporarily into another imaginative, emotional realm; for Plato, this realm may
be "truer" than physical reality.
Aristotle argued witnessing tragic drama simply forces us to temporarily
experience the dangers of transgression and teaches us a basic cautionary tale at
a deep, truly terrifying emotional level. It is one thing to tell you not to trust your
wife and another to take you through the experience of witnessing Agamemnon's
tragic fall.
Others interpret Aristotle's treatment of catharsis to mean that we leave the
theater feeling emotionally spent -- the pity and terror of our real lives has been
released in theater, placed on a scape-goat (remember goat-song?) and
successfully "dealt with" for awhile.
Wisdom is central to Aristotle's view of tragedy and the tragic hero's experience:
the tragic experience is not meaningless, and its meaning, at the conclusion, is
not wasted on the tragic hero; only the tragic experience itself completes the
hero's journey to a deeper understanding of him or herself and the workings of
the cosmos.
Aristotle's view forms the modern psychological perspective: Unaddressed
fears tend to evolve (descend?) into neurosis and phobia, and in order to
maintain sanity we must learn that we can overcome terror.
You might also think about how good you feel after you cry. I mean, that's what
I've heard because, you know, being a real man, I never cry....
Psychologists have increasingly noted that the brain actually fires the neural
connections associated with behaviors when we watch those behaviors: in the
literal, neural sense, the mind actually "lives" vicariously when we watch sports,
and of course pornography, and we literally release love pheromones when we
watch lovers fall in love on the screen. So, the theory here would be that to
watch tragedy is to experience tragedy, and thus to learn from the vicarious,
artistic experience of suffering.
Nietzsche argued that we enter the tragic not to free ourselves from it but to
celebrate it as a necessary element of the human experience: "The psychology of the
orgiastic as an overflowing feeling of life and strength, where even pain still has the effect of
a stimulus, gave me the key to the concept of tragic feeling, which had been misunderstood
both by Aristotle and even more by modern pessimists... Saying Yes to life even in its
strangest and most painful episodes, the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality
even as it witnesses the destruction of its greatest heroes — that is what I called Dionysian,
that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to be
liberated from terror and pity, not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its
vehement discharge — which is how Aristotle understood tragedy — but in order to
celebrate oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity — that tragic joy
included even joy in destruction"