"Don't Cry for Me" - Aristotle
by Peter Cresswell
Allow to me to pull on your coat about something: a wee story about Art, Tragedy and Catharsis.
You’re watching a good ‘weepy’ with a box of tissues on hand, and you cry your eyes out – that’s what we call ‘catharsis,’ isn’t it? As everyone knows, catharsis is a healthy purging of all your repressed emotions – you see a devastatingly good film or heroically moving play and there ain't a dry eye in the house. Aristotle himself suggested that’s what happens when you see good drama – particularly a good tragedy like Medea or Oedipus Rex where the stage ends up littered with corpses, and the hero ends up … well … we all know where Oedipus ended up and what he did with his mother, don’t we. Who wouldn’t be weeping over that?
So, we all know about catharsis. We got it from Aristotle, who argued in his Poetics that catharsis is in fact the number one reason for good drama and good literature.
Ayn Rand didn’t agree. She said the number one reason for literature, and indeed for all art, is that it anchors us to existence. Art, she argued, shows us in concrete form what our world-view actually is.
We experience a performance of Tosca, for example, or we look at a statue of David or a painting of Icarus Landing, and we say to ourselves (if we’re healthy): “This is the way I see things. This is the way I feel about the world.” In short, when art truly touches us we say to ourselves: “This is me!” And it is.
That is why art is so crucially – selfishly - important for us; because the human mind operates on the conceptual level, we need art to help us integrate our broadest abstractions, and to bring them before us in concrete form. We need art to concretise for us - in a painting, a story, a piece of music - the way we view the world around us and how we fit into it. The artist selects elements of reality to re-create and integrate into his work based on his own most profound choice of how he sees the world – if we see it the same way we experience almost a shock of recognition.
So art, according to Ayn Rand, is a re-creation of reality. The elements in each art-work are selected according to the artist’s view of what he sees as fundamental – as being of real metaphysical importance. “By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represent man’s fundamental view of himself and of existence.”
So we have two views of art that appear to be in fundamental disagreement. So it seems. But … what if we got Aristotle wrong?
What if Aristotle didn’t actually say what we thought he said? Well, arguably he didn’t. Leon Golden, Professor of Classics at Florida State University and described as “the single most influential living authority on Aristotle's Poetics” argues on this subject we’ve got Aristotle wrong, and since 1962 he’s written a book and several articles arguing the case. The Greek word katharsis, he argues, has been mistranslated leading to our misunderstanding of what Aristotle was actually saying.
Based on some elegant philological detective work, Golden suggests that tragic katharsis is neither medical purgation, nor intellectual purification, but "intellectual clarification":
Katharsis is that moment of insight which arises out of the audience’s climactic intellectual, emotional, and spiritual enlightenment, which for Aristotle is both the essential pleasure and essential goal of mimetic art. What does Aristotle mean by ‘mimetic art’? He means art that re-creates reality. As Leon Golden has it, mimesis comes from a fundamental "desire to know." People derive a pleasure of "learning and inference" from mimesis; a katharsis far different to one commonly understood by the word. This is a view that must surely resonate with Objectivist aestheticians.
Golden concludes his argument:
For Aristotle art is neither psychological therapy for the mentally ill nor a sermon directed at imposing an appropriate ethical and moral discipline on an audience. On the contrary, his aesthetic theory explains our attraction to tragedy and comedy on the basis of a deeply felt impulse, arising from our very nature as human beings, to achieve intellectual insight through that process of learning and inference which represents the essential pleasure and purpose of artistic mimesis. It seems that the position of Ayn Rand and her teacher were once again not very far from each other. When Rand talks of art 'recreating reality' we can see her standing once again on Aristotle’s shoulders - one giant standing upon the shoulders of another.
One final word: none of this means you that you aren’t allowed to cry at the movies if you want to. If that’s your bag, then I wish you good weeping.
Aristotle on Tragic & Comic Mimesis, by Leon Golden, 1992, American Philological Association, Scholars Press, Georgia
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