The Meaning of Catharsis
1.0 Objectives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Relevance of Classical Criticism
1.3 Plato’s Theory of Mimesis and Aristotle’s Defence
1.3.1 Aristotle's Reply to Plato's Objection
1.3.2 Aristotle's Objection to the Theory of Mimesis
1.4 Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy
1.4.1 The Definition of Tragedy
1.4.2 Six Formative Elements of Tragedy
1.4.3 Plot and Character
1.4.4 The Tragic Hero
1.5.1 Unity of Action
1.5.2 Unity of Time
1.5.3 Unity of Place
1.6.1 Why Aristotle had adopted this theory
1.6.2 The Meaning of Catharsis
1.6.3 The Relevance of the Theory of Catharsis in the Present Scenario
1.7 Let us Sum up
1.9 Reading List
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’ or the like. There is strong evidence that Catharsis means, not ‘Purification’, but ‘Purgation’ - a medical term (Aristotle was a 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. “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 simply 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 The theory of humours is outdated in the medical science.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 meanings. 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’. However, 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 those of pity and fear. The pity and fear to be moderated is, again, of specific kinds. There can never be an excess in the pity that results into a useful action. But there can be too much of pity as an intense and helpless feeling, and there can be also too much of self-pity which is not a praise-worthy virtue. The Catharsis or moderation of such forms of 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 if 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).