Aristotle’s Understanding of Fear’s Expression
by:
Stephen Leighton
Queen’s University
Abstract
This paper considers how Aristotle’s account of fear can explain ensuing activity and its absence. After observing our own presumption that strongly links fear to activity, the argument turns to Aristotle’s depictions of fear, then De Anima’s study of passions of the soul. Doing so offers a better grasp of Aristotle’s understanding of fear, and his framework for comprehending passions, but it does not give fear a teleological bent or help to explain fear’s ability to account for ensuing activity. Reflection on an example found in the Rhetoric suggests an intriguing and subtle teleological orientation to fear, one that can link fear to activity, doing so through hope and deliberation. This understanding is investigated, as is its applicability to several cases of fear that Aristotle notes. Of particular interest is how and how well this understanding can explain ensuing activity where appropriate, yet allow for inactivity where appropriate. Aristotle’s understanding of fear and its connection to activity is not our own, but it is interesting.
Introduction
How does Aristotle explain fear’s expression in activity? How successfully does the pertinent explanation apply in the diverse settings in which Aristotle takes fear to be found – including those as different as the battlefield and the theatre? These questions are worth answering not only for their value in understanding Aristotle, but also because they provide an intriguingly different approach from our own understanding of these matters. Indeed, in order to appreciate best the novelty of Aristotle’s thought, it will be helpful to begin with more familiar views of these matters.
A Common View:
We commonly link fear to desire and behaviour, sometimes to a freeze, flight, fight syndrome.[1] Fear’s natural expression, then, is found in behavioural activity. On this view, fear’s place in contexts where action is not warranted or wanted calls for special explanation. Kendall Walton, for example, maintains that fear has a distinctive and required motivational force.[2] Accordingly, he proposes that “fear” and other “emotions” experienced in aesthetical contexts (because they do not and should not incur motivation or action) are quasi emotions, something different from, less genuine than, and unreal in comparison to fear’s manifestations in more mundane circumstances. Despite the controversial nature of these latter suggestions, Walton helpfully captures the link often supposed between fear, desire and behaviour, and does so in a way that allows him to plausibly explain why persons are liable to freeze, fly or fight in response to terrifying matters, but not to their portrayal on stage or screen.
Aristotle’s thinking proves quite different: it offers no obvious link between fear and desire or behavioural response, yet supposes fear to have important roles in diverse domains (including the stage, the battlefield, and ordinary life), and does so without impugning the reality of fear in these or other settings. One cannot but wonder whether (and how) Aristotle’s thought can make sense of fear’s place in these and other domains.
[1] See C. Tappolet “Emotion, Motivation, and Action, the Case of Fear” P. 327 & 330 ) [in Goldie], and K. Oatley Emotions: A Brief History (pp. 79-81).
[2] “Fear emasculated by subtracting its distinctive motivational force is not fear at all.” Mimesis as Make Believe, 1990, p. 202; see also sections 5.2 and 7.1.