1 Introduction: Plato's Challenge

Notes 1 Introduction: Plato’s Challenge 1. A key difference being that Steiner does not consider this move to be a cause for pessimism, but of hope and modern progress. 2. Halliwell is referring here to Aristotle’s displacement of the religious with the secular and to those disposed toward a secular reading of the fifth-cen- tury Attic playwright, Euripides. 3. Steiner is not suggesting that suffering is absent from modernity. His point rather is that as a form of drama, tragedy is particular to the classical Western tradition. He argues, for example, that the death of a Christian hero can be an occasion of sorrow, but not of tragedy because it leads the soul toward justice and resurrection (1961: 332). This move from fatalism toward hope is exemplified by the treatment of tragedy in Dante’s Divine Comedy where all ends well. Steiner’s assertion has been the cause of much debate, as dem- onstrated by Raymond Williams’s provocative text entitled, Modern Tragedy (1966). 4. This is not to suggest that the hero’s decline is simply the result of exter- nal forces. The notion of hamartia—used here to denote a missing of the mark—is suggestive of the fact that the hero is responsible for their suffering, even if their downfall occurs through ignorance, human blindness, or an error of judgment (see Williams on Shame and Necessity (1993)). 5. From this perspective, to benefit from the security and perceived advantages of the “social contract,” “enlightened” rational individuals were required to submit to a common sovereign power and, in so doing, bridle their passions and renounce the “brutish” appetites that comprised their biological psychic condition—the “State of nature.” 6. The standard cultural motif of the forbidden fruit—the one forbidden thing—also informs the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), as exemplified by their universal concern with the “fall of man” and “Original Sin.” Despite their universal reference to a transcendent being, the mythologies that inform these religions are distinct from the idea of the universal in Eastern traditions, such as, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zen, and Shinto, revealing that cultural differences persist in the religious dimensions of experience. What you get instead is a mythology based on 186 Notes duality that tends to structure societies around ethics as exemplified by the dualistic relationship between sin and atonement, good and evil, right and wrong (Campbell, 1996), dichotomies that persist even in secular political landscapes (Durkheim, [1912] 2001). 7. Precipitated by the News International phone-hacking scandal, the Inquiry aimed to ensure the highest ethical standards: Lord Justice Leveson opened the hearings on November 14, 2011, declaring: “The press provides an essential check on all aspects of public life. That is why any failure within the media affects all of us. At the heart of this Inquiry, therefore, may be one simple question: who guards the guardians?” (The Leveson Inquiry, 2012). 8. “If there is meaning in life at all,” wrote Frankl ([1942] 1962), “then there must be meaning in suffering.” 9. My reason for referring to the original Greek spelling of the term is a delib- erate attempt to endorse Aristotle’s ethical paradigm. This is in contrast to contemporary lexicons, which tend to conflate “catharsis” with Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of emotional repression. 10. Eudaimonia is interpreted as well-being or human flourishing. The Greek terms eu and daimon translate into the words “good” and “spirit,” respec- tively. This has lead to common equations of the concept with happiness, although modern notions of happiness as subjective pleasure neglect the ethical foundation of the term. 11. The Republic is not to be read literally as a manifesto, but rather as a treatise probing into the nature of Justice as a conduit for the “Good life.” 12. In Book X of the Republic, Plato elucidates his ambivalence toward mimetic poetry: “But if not, my friend, even as men who have fallen in love, if they think that the love is not good for them, hard though it be, nevertheless refrain, so we, owing to the love of this kind of poetry inbred in us by our education in these fine polities of ours, will gladly have the best possible case made out for her goodness and truth, but so long as she is unable to make good her defence we shall chant over to ourselves as we listen the reasons that we have given as a counter-charm to her spell, to preserve us from slip- ping back into the childish loves of the multitude” ([1935] 2006: 467–49). 13. The chorus were fundamental to the way in which Greek tragedy was con- ceptualized in the ancient world, which is to do with individuality versus collectivity, democracy as a shared project and individuals as a threat to that project. The chorus dramatize the formation and the collapse of the social collective. To remove the collective is to lose that dynamic of the individual versus society. 2 What Is a Social Tragedy? 1. “Friend Homer, if you are not at the third removed from truth and reality in human excellence, being merely that creator of phantoms whom we defined as the representor . what city credits you with having been a good legislator and having benefited them” (Plato, [1935] 2006: 437). Notes 187 2. Plato contends: “The imitator knows nothing worth mentioning of the thing he imitates” ([1935] 2006: 447). 3. For over two and a half thousand years, the controversy confounding katharsis has been perpetuated by various interdisciplinary interpretations, cultural changes and the fact that modern audiences receive the Poetics as a fragmentary text with many of Aristotle’s additional writings lost or damaged. As a result, katharsis is commonly overlooked in contemporary literature or confined to Freudian vocabularies within the domain of psy- chology. The problem is that psychological paradigms tend to conflate katharsis with Freud’s hydraulic theory of emotional repression (i.e., the concept “catharsis”), neglecting the pedagogical origins of the term and the extent to which it was “accomplished” through performance as a civic mode of moral instruction. The contemporary state of academic scholarship on katharsis not only reflects specific disciplinary interests but may also be contextualized in relation to a series of broader historical developments that have had an enduring impact on modern social life. Foremost are evolving conceptions of eudaimonia (well-being or human flourishing) from the Greek’s moral concern with “being good” to modern therapeutic endeavors to “feel good.” Whereas pleasurable feelings were considered important for the Greeks in so far as they disposed one toward virtuous activity, they have become the primary object of most psychological analysis. In addition to abstracting the pedagogical role of katharsis to a mode of subjective well-being, the term’s moral foundation has been challenged by post-Enlightenment val- ues of rationality, democratic sensibilities, and technological innovations that problematize the dissemination and reception of tragedy amid relative systems of virtue ethics in an increasingly global world. While the cur- rent climate of cultural pluralism encumbers Aristotle’s ethical paradigm, this chapter resituates katharsis in its traditional, instructional context as a mechanism of civic eudaimonia by analyzing the term from a sociological, rather than purely introspective standpoint of repressed emotional energy. 4. “Those who use spectacle to create an effect not of the fearful but only of the sensational have nothing in common with tragedy, as it is not every pleasure one should seek from tragedy, but the appropriate kind” (Aristotle, 2005: 75); the emphasis on “appropriate” pleasure a direct reference to Aristotle’s ethics. 5. The term refers to a device conventionally employed in Greek tragedy to alter the plot suddenly by lowering an actor (resembling a god) onto the stage. 6. Unless reserved for events outside the play. 7. Aristotle (2005: 49) defines ethos as “that in virtue of which we ascribe certain qualities to the agents, and “thought” to cover the parts in which, through speech, they demonstrate something or declare their views.” 8. Although Aristotle was Macedonian, he resided, studied, and taught in Greece for a significant period of his life. 188 Notes 9. Aristotle’s reference to the universal points to a profound disconnect between modern and classical approaches to tragedy. It was premised on a conception of the cosmos as a general unity, which informed the Greeks’ conception of truth and reality. The Greeks approached the pursuit of truth as an adequate response to the Real, to be in communion with what most truly is (Milne, 2013). This is why Aristotle associates the quest for knowledge with the intel- lect and the virtues. Knowledge, in his view, is an active exercise. Without virtue—the appropriate qualities of being that one brings to their actions— real knowledge is not possible. Tragedy must be experienced (albeit vicariously through coming into communion with reality), to be known and understood. What Aristotle is pointing to here is a correlation between the quality of being in the knower (moral virtue) and what can be known; echoing Plato’s claim that only like can know like. Only those who exercise the virtues—the ability to act according to the truth of things—will have the capacity to contemplate the truth. This is why prudence—the capacity to rightly discern things—is extolled in Greek ethics (Milne, 2013: 18). It is misperception and acting out of accord with nature that leads to tragedy. In this regard, the Poetics aligns with Aristotle’s conception of human nature as an ordered whole. Tragedy subscribes to a framework of causal intelligibility, facilitating an aesthetic experience in which judgment and emotion are in harmony.

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