I am fascinated by the concept of tragedy. Tragic dramas are an ancient conundrum to which vast amounts of thought have been applied, so I thought I’d give you a brief overview and stitch together a few of these threads into something I think might be fruitful.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato (through the mouth of Socrates) explains clearly why, in his “well-ordered State”, that the tragic poets should be refused admittance or banished. He lays against them three primary charges: the first is that the poets are essentially liars. They imitate things of which they have no real understanding; if a poet describes a carpenter at work, he will not be able to imitate the art of carpentry in his poem as he has no knowledge of it, and will only be able to fool people with lesser knowledge of the subject than himself. Poets are therefore deceiving people as their poetry contains an “inferior degree of truth”, at best, and so provide no value to the city.

The second is that the poet is using this deception to appeal to the “inferior” part of the soul. This is the base, emotive, and subconscious areas of a man’s mind where reason does not predominate and which causes him to act in irrational ways that Plato considers to be unworthy of a well-ordered State. He likens giving preference to a man’s passions over his reason as a city to giving political authority to evil men instead of good men. It is not that these things coexist in Plato’s view, either: he feels that to strengthen a man’s passions corresponds with an impairment to his reason and his ability to make sound judgements that track the truth. The poet “implants an evil constitution” within the man he recites to, training them to indulge in his irrational nature so that he cannot properly understand the world around him, which things are important and which things are not, so that he will be “removed” from truth to the point where he may well be living within a world of lies.

The third, and what Plato considers to be the most powerful, argument against the tragic poets is that they possess a power within their poetry that harms even good men when they listen to it, which is a terrible thing in and of itself. Plato gives the example of listening to Homer, or any of the tragedians, in which we are told the story of a sympathetic hero of whose suffering the poet draws out in a long tale, and it stirs our feelings so much as to make our heart break. The more excellent the poet, the greater our emotional investment in the story; we lose control of our emotions and are swept up in the rapturous moment. This, Plato believes, is to give in to our womanly side. He thinks it manly to maintain self-control and patience; in losing control of ourselves to indulge in our emotions, he feels we bring upon ourselves shame and that, in any other circumstance, we would bitterly regret this loss of self-possession.

It is in this excitement of our passions that the tragic poet’s work looks most like sorcery, to Plato. The poet commands a power over even good men to lose control of themselves and this is dangerous to the well-being of the well-ordered State as a whole. He also holds this view for the comic poets as well: we laugh at jokes that would otherwise make us feel embarrassed, lowering ourselves to a risible standard and acting like fools. Instead of educating the Greeks, Plato feels that poetry will instead make pleasure and pain the rulers of the State, causing it to fall into disorder as people who are enthralled to their passions profligate lies which cause havoc and deceit where harmony and truth should reign.

For these reasons, he feels that all comic and tragic poets should be disbarred from the State, and only hymns to the gods and virtuous tales of famous men be the only poetry which should be permitted to enter into public life. These are those forms of poetry which he considers speak the truth. The state, being similar to a human body, must be composed of virtuous and honest men as our body is composed of healthy parts; tragic poetry is, in Plato’s estimation, a creeping and corrupting force that acts like a disease of the body politic, changing men from good and honest into evil liars, and once they become the majority, the State is doomed to injustice and tyranny.

For philosopher Ernst Gombrich, however, the “lower reaches of our soul” are not something repugnant to be rejected as irrational; they are philosophically interesting in an exploration of art. Gombrich observed that, for Plato, the distinction between truth and falsehood was a moral problem that was compounded by the untruth of the tragic poet.

Gombrich basically agrees with Plato that illusion does indeed engage with these lower reaches, but these are not the source of the destruction of our civilisation, they are a place for us to engage with the ideas and feelings art invokes within us. In fact, it is by deliberately not reasoning through our ability to identify fact from fiction and engage in a willing suspension of disbelief that we are able to engage in a fantasy world of our imagination, and learn lessons about ourselves and the world to which we might otherwise not have been privy. This appears to be an exercise of our reason in service of our emotional selves.

As he describes it, the artist is forging some kind of “master key” that opens the locks on the doors to these lower reaches. Once the key is forged, any other artist can copy it to delve into and explore those same parts of the soul that are otherwise inaccessible to reason. This master key gives us repeated access to our emotional states in order that we can gain repeated access to this knowledge.

Gombich thinks Karl Popper was right about science, that knowledge is gained by repeated testing of hypotheses, and this renders Plato’s dichotomy between opinion and knowledge as untenable: the lower reaches of the soul are not to be spurned as repugnant. As he puts it, there is no contradiction between reflex and reflection but instead a spectrum between them in which they interact upon one another.

The lower systems give material to the higher systems to reflect upon. If Plato was right that art exploits our lower systems, our uncritical reactions, Gombrich believes it is because we are less concerned with what is than with what might be, and so we enter into illusion easily. We have crafted a domain of fantasy and exploration called art, which we can enter into safely, and by doing which we can learn about ourselves.

It seems that Plato has allowed himself to roam into the realm of his forms far too much and thus detached himself from reality entirely. It’s reasonable to think that self-control is an important aspect of manliness, and womanliness I would venture to say, but I think suppressing our emotions can’t be good for our mental wellbeing and finding a controlled expression for them would probably be good for our mental health.

Expecting people to live in a stratified, calcified society upon which each is nothing more than a function of the State is obviously ludicrous and would naturally be doomed to failure. From Plato’s own account, to live in a city that was constructed by and dominated utterly by reason would be a joyless place; such an artificial suppression of human nature surely can’t last long. I suppose this is why Aristotle was far more convincing in his definition of “man”; to look at us as mere featherless bipeds is to see us only as organic robots and fail to understand or respect the essential soul that resides within. Aristotle’s definition of man as a “rational animal” speaks to both aspects of Plato’s dilemma here: not only do we have a rational side, we also have an animal side, and both sides must be understood and nurtured if we are to flourish.

Plato’s objections seem to be, in some sense, rather irrational, then. It is impossible for us to construct his republic of reason and probably unwise to attempt to suppress our animal instincts for fear of them overrunning our ability to think well. This seems to be born of his own, rather ideological, assumptions that do not appear to map well onto reality.

Aristotle distinguishes epic and drama from one another by the scope of the narratives: drama focuses on a single person over a single lifetime, whereas epic weaves many narratives together and covers a large period of time or space. Within drama, he distinguishes tragedy from comedy by the seriousness of the subject: tragedy is serious whereas comedy is, of course, comedic. Where comedy is focused around presenting man as worse than he really is for humorous effect, tragedy presents man as better than he is in order that the calamities he suffers through the narrative have a more stark and impactful effect on us. Though he doesn’t properly explain it in his Poetics, Aristotle assumes the standard for judging whether a thing is good or not by virtue of how well it performs its function that he laid out in his Ethics: a good knife is a knife that cuts well, etc. In this vein of thought, a good tragedy is one that elicits from us what he calls the “proper pleasure of tragedy”, a unique kind of pleasure for which there is no substitute.

This gives rise to what is usually called the paradox of tragedy. A tragedy is a tale in which the sympathetic protagonist is put into a bad situation through their own choices, from which they cannot escape. The destruction caused by these bad decisions is carried through to its logical conclusion; there is no other purpose to the story other than for us to vicariously experience the extreme personal suffering of the protagonist. This, naturally, can be very upsetting, and it is remarked by David Hume in Of Tragedy that the more powerful and expertly-crafted the story, with small glimmers of hope for relief for the main character, the more devastating the effect on the audience when the inevitable finally happens…and they love it.

The paradox is the question of why we gain a unique, sublime kind of pleasure at watching a sympathetic figure suffer for no other purpose than suffering itself. What could attract us to such a show? Does it speak to moral failures of our own? Are we sadistic?

Hume observes that we would be rightly reviled if such scenes were happening before our eyes in reality, and it is only through this fictitious medium that we can gain such pleasure, although even then there are some stories too gruesome for us to enjoy this way. There is a certain known falsehood to this imitation of life that never quite leaves our consciousness, and so we settle into an emotional state that we would otherwise seek to escape if this were not a simulation of sorts. Somehow, though Hume does not properly explain why, the pain is sublimated into pleasure and the audience thereby enjoys the experience and it is in the weaving together of multiple passions that brings the pleasure of tragedy to life.

Professor Susan Feagin found Hume’s account incomplete, and proposed further reasoning on the subject. Not only do we enjoy the first-order experience that is the rush of emotions that is the direct aesthetic experience of the tragedy itself, but we also dwell on second-order reflections of how we reacted to the piece. We contemplate our own in-the-moment reactions and assess them for their moral rectitude, finding them appropriate or inappropriate and growing in character as a result.

Feagin posits that our appreciation of tragedy is contingent on our ability to empathise and sympathise with our fellow man, and is directly linked to the same impulses that form in us at least part of the reason we feel pleasure from tragedy comes from our ability to form an emotional bond with the person who is suffering the tragic circumstances, not that we are feeling pleasure because we enjoy watching someone suffer. The enjoyment we have watching a tragedy comes from our ability to form a “moral commitment” to another person.

Feagin believes that the greater “aesthetic significance” of tragedy over comedy is due to the fact it “calls forth” these feelings in us, and what tragedy is tapping into is actually the basis of morality. Since comedy requires a “butt” of the joke, it can’t be based on feelings of morality as by definition it requires someone to whom we are not giving moral consideration: we are instead, ridiculing them. Feagin also observes that the characteristics targeted by comedy are considered to be “insignificant”, and if we were to turn comedy towards the significant, it would gain the “air of tragedy” and seem cruel. Because of the insignificance of comedy, we do not usually have a meta-response to analyse after it. It was, after all, insignificant.

Aristotle, unlike Plato, did not despise dramas and approached the issue with a much more even hand and more in line with modern thought on the issue. He was in line with Hume that there was an innate pleasure that human beings felt through imitation, as well as through melody and rhythm, and this was one of the reasons we enjoy art of all kinds. Aristotle agreed with Plato that genuine knowledge is knowledge of universals, and not particulars, but disagreed in the epistemological validity of poetry as an art form and of the purpose it plays in our moral education. Where Plato thought dramas were a form of immoral deception, Aristotle viewed them in a way that actually renders them as a form of knowledge-gathering: we learn skills through imitation. It is through the acting-out of certain kinds of behaviours in controlled environments that we learn what the effects of such behaviours are.

This is why, for Aristotle, the poet must show how the events of the tragedy must grow from the motives of the character, and the motives of the character must be a product of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Where Plato was unable to justify the proper skill of the poet, Aristotle has validated their knowledge base as being an expertise in human psychology. Without the knowledge of what people, in the real world, are actually like, the poet is unable to craft narratives that have a persuasive verisimilitude and conjure the illusion that the events portrayed could be an imitation of a genuine reality we might experience.

Aristotle also thought there was a psychological benefit to tragedy, as he described that through “pity and fear” there was a “proper purgation” of our emotions. Aristotle is quite brief on this point, but it is taken to mean there is a kind of emotional release (called catharsis) which enables us to flush them from our system, experience them, and engage in calm reflection after the fact which, in a sense, clears our heads and gives us room to engage in a second-order analysis of how we felt. In this way, Aristotle is suggesting that, far from being a deceptive and beguiling spell that will prevent our ability to reason, enjoying a tragedy in fact facilitates our ability to reason by calming our emotions and providing us with emotional data to process, where Plato would have us repress this instinct.

I believe now we can satisfactorily answer the question as to why we enjoy tragedy. It is at once an enjoyable shared experience which teaches us in safety about aspects of the human experience that we will not, with any luck, have the misfortune to actually endure. Not only do we have the pleasure of being entertained, we are also the recipients of wisdom about the human condition from the poet, and the mechanism of the work takes us on a journey into the emotional depths of our own souls which might otherwise be inaccessible, and therefore rendered mysterious and unknown. Through this facsimile of reality we can experience an emotional rollercoaster which enhances our ability to be empathetic by tapping into and forcing us to analyse the essence of what it is to be a moral being. Moreover, it is probably good for us to destress by purging these intense emotions from time-to-time, and entering into a satisfying state upon which we can contemplate what we just experienced.

As Aristotle and many other philosophers believe, tragedy provides us a unique emotional experience and it seems to carry with it benefits that cannot be obtained elsewhere. If you enjoy tragedies, it isn’t that you’re morally defective, it might actually be a demonstration of your moral depth.

PREMIUM: The Moral Root of Tragedy

From Only £5/month

Comments