It’s Chris Tudor here again – and this week I want to think through what Aristotle might mean by catharsis. Few ideas in literary criticism loom as large – or feel as elusive – as catharsis. The term is everywhere in discussions of tragedy, and yet when you go back to its source, things are not quite as straightforward as you might expect.
Like hamartia, catharsis comes from Poetics. And here is the striking thing: Aristotle barely explains it.
In Chapter 6, he defines tragedy as:
“Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament [...]; through pity and fear effecting the proper 'catharsis' of these emotions.”
And that's the sum total of what Aristotle writes about catharsis.
I have used the Loeb translation of this passage, which translates the word catharsis as 'purgation'. But I’ve left the term untranslated here, because what catharsis actually means is – ironically – not entirely clear.
At its most basic level, catharsis refers to the physical ‘cleaning’ of something. In the Odyssey (20.152), the verb (kathairō) is used for the ‘cleaning’ of cups and bowls, while Aristotle (1250b) uses the adjective (katharos) to describe 'clean' clothes.
So far, so good. But the word also develops a metaphorical sense of purification.
In The Histories (1.44), for example, Croesus recalls the time he ‘cleansed’ (ekathēre) someone of blood-guilt, while Athena in the Eumenides (474) describes Orestes as a 'pure' (katharos) suppliant. Here the language of cleaning becomes moral and religious.
But, the word can also be used in a technical medical sense. The body may be ‘cleansed’ by vomiting (Hippocrates, Epidemics 1.64), by menstruation (On Superfetation 33), by childbirth (On the Diseases of Women 1.78), and so on. In these contexts, catharsis is something like a physical purgation.
But there is yet another sense: intellectual clarity, i.e. speaking or thinking 'clearly'.
In Aristophanes’ Wasps (1045), the Chorus complains about the audience’s lack of ‘clear understanding’, and the word is used in the same sense by Plato (Phaedo 66e).
So catharsis can mean cleaning, purification, medical purgation, or intellectual clarification. Which does Aristotle have in mind?
There are good reasons to think that Aristotle may be using catharsis in this intellectual sense.
If we go back to Aristotle's mention of catharsis (quoted above) we'll notice that the passage starts with a mention of tragedy as the 'imitation' (mimesis) of an action. Tragedy is an imitation of an action. And Aristotle has quite a lot to say about imitation.
In Chapter 4 of the Poetics, he argues that human beings delight in imitation because through imitation we learn. As he puts it, "through imitation, [man] learns his earliest lessons."
He continues: "The reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is because in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps 'Ah, that is he.'"
In other words: we like mimesis (things like tragedy and comedy) because we *learn* from it.
So when Aristotle returns to tragedy in Chapter 6 and speaks of the ‘catharsis’ of pity and fear, perhaps he does not mean a simple ‘cleansing’ or ‘purging’ of those emotions — perhaps he means that tragedy gives us a clearer understanding of them.
Through watching Oedipus, or Agamemnon, or Medea, we do not rid ourselves of pity and fear; we come to understand them better. We see how they arise, how they operate, what they feel like, and what their consequences can be.
The famous mantra in Aeschylus is 'pathei mathos' (basically: 'learning through suffering'), which everyone takes to mean 'learning through one's own suffering'. But maybe there's another kind of learning going on – learning through *someone else's* suffering.
If that is right, then catharsis might not be a medical purgation or an emotional venting. It might be something closer to intellectual clarification – a sharpening of our understanding of pity and fear through the structured experience of mimesis.
Just a thought.