So this week, we're going to talk about Aristotle's poetics and one of the things you could bear in mind in reading the poetics is that it's a fragmentary work. So originally it encompassed more than what we've got. It's believed that some of the missing parts dealt with comedy, which would've been interesting and possibly other genres of poetry as well.
The portion that we have deals primarily with tragedy and says some things about comedy and about epic and a very small amount about other forms of poetry. So the focus in the fragmentary thing that we have is on tragedy. And it's also important to bear in mind. Well, it's quite obvious when you start reading it, is that the work is not polished. A lot of people think this is Aristotle's lecture notes for the lectures he gave in his school.
So with that in mind, I thought it would be worth saying a little bit about what the aims of the poetics appear to be on the evidence of what we got. And based on what Aristotle says that he's going to do in politics. So these are on your handout. And I think you sort of form an overview of the work. So I'm going to go over these. Just in summary form first and then I'm going to focus on a few during the lecture. So the first name is evidently to explain how poetry and its genres originated.
Second, to define at least some of the genres of poetry, notably tragedy in the material that we have to identify the main elements, parts and species of these genres and sometimes the sub elements, sub parts and subspecies of these to say what makes a poem a good poem? This is very important. And finally, in the very last chapter, to rank at least some of the genres of poetry. Aristotle makes a case that tragedy is a better form than epic.
That's the overview. I'm not going to focus on the third one, identifying the elements, part species, subspecies of the different genres of poetry. It's not so much philosophical interests, not irrelevant, but not of great interest. And I'm also not going to focus on the last one. They're the ranking of the two genres of poetry there, if you're familiar with other aspects of Aristotle's work. Some of these aims will remind you of what he describes as the four causes.
So this is the way it's often translated, the four causes. Actually, what he's talking about, our four kinds of explanation that you can offer of a phenomenon. So one of these kinds of explanation is to explain something by reference to its origins. So this is what Aristotle describes as the efficient cause, and that would correspond, obviously, with the first of these aims. So, for example, you could explain why there is a crater outside by saying, well, a meteor struck there some time ago.
Second, what he describes as the formal cause of something or how that is translated is to explain is an explanation of something by reference to its essence as given in the definition of it. So, for example, you could explain why this shape has a 180 degrees internal angles. By saying it has that because it is a triangle, clearly also. Aristotle provides us the materials with which to understand poetry in these terms. By giving definitions and providing the essences of certain genres of poetry.
And he also talks about explaining something by reference to its purpose. So you could explain why this implement is sharp. By saying that it is for cutting. That's why it's sharp. And Aristotle also gives us the materials with which to understand poetry in these terms. By talking about the aims that different forms of poetry should have won. The final one or the last one? That's not obviously present in the poetics is explanation by reference to the material constitution of the thing.
So you might explain why this object conducts electricity by saying that it's made of metal and metal conducts electricity. It's not self evident quite whether Aristotle's providing us the materials of this sort with. Which to understand poetry. But I think at least the first three types of explanation clearly are related to what he's doing in the poetics. OK. So that's a bit of background and overview. So now I want to get into the first one about how poetry originated.
So Aristotle has a very brief story about how poetry in general originated. And a number of more detailed stories about how the different genres originated. And I'm just going to focus on how poetry in general originated. So he attributed it to causes. First of all, it's from our natural propensity to imitate. So Aristotle thinks that this is one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals is that we have a natural inclination to imitate others.
Furthermore, he says that there's a reason why we have this inclination. And that's because it enables us to learn. We learn. We take our first steps in understanding, as he puts it, through imitation. And this is, of course, something that is going to remind you rightly of Plato's discussion throughout the poetics. It's worth thinking about which aspects of his discussion are meant as responses to Plato.
And as we saw last week, Plato very much downgrades the epistemic status of poetry, cognitive value of poetry. Here, Aristotle is suddenly differentiating himself from this, saying that actually poetry comes from the very same impulse that drives us to discover, not to seek knowledge and to acquire knowledge. Second source of poetry, he thinks, is the pleasure that we take and contemplating imitations.
So he also says that we even enjoy very precise or accurate images of things whose sight in itself causes us pain. So, for example, dead bodies. The example he gives. And once again, he ties this to our desire for knowledge. So he says we enjoy contemplating imitations even of things whose sight in itself causes pain. Because we get to apply reasoning and our understanding to the imitations themselves. And so we identify this part as the eye.
And this part is the nose. And we find that very pleasurable. And the thought is this is once again connected to our desire to know. That's a very important theme for Aristotle. As he says, at one point, all men by nature desire to know. Now, he may have been generalising a bit too much from his own case. But this is clearly something that he frequently appeals to in order to explain why we're motivated as we are at various stages. OK. So far, that's fairly brief discussion of this first point.
Longer discussion is of the definitions of different genres of poetry. So Aristotle opens the work by talking about how you can define I am my Medek art form. So he says that's any memetic art form can be defined by identifying three things. First of all, by identifying what sort of thing it represents. And it's worth noting that in Aristotle, the basis seems to me tends to mean representation a lot more clearly than it does even in Plato.
So we talked about last week, but I'm not saying there's no difficulties of interpretation there. Second, what you identify is what the art form uses to represent what it represents. So the medium. And third, you say how it uses the medium in order to represent what it represents. And so he thinks any memetic art form can be defined by identifying these three things, or at least genres of poetry. And it's on this basis that he provides us with his definition of tragedy.
So the object of tragedy, that is what it represents, he says, is an action which is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude. Now he explains this, a serious action. It emerges means and ethically serious action, killing your father and sleeping with your mother. For example, a complete action seems to mean an action whose beginning, middle and end is represented. So it's not just a snapshot, but it's the whole course of the action represented in the tragedy.
All this certain magnitude, as far as I can make out, seems to mean that the action takes time. It's not an instantaneous action as some. And some actions perhaps are it's one that endures. So that's the object, the medium of tragedy is language in spoken metre and in lyric song. So the speeches of the actors in Greek tragedy were spoken, but in metre and choruses of Greek tragedies use lyric sang in lyric poetry. The mode is that of dramatic enactment.
So this harkens back to Plato's distinction in Book Three of the Republic in which he talks about the different kinds. Well, what he's effectively talking about other modes where he distinguishes between narrative, direct speech and imitation and a mixture of the two Aristotle drawing on that, saying it's not in their narrative in tragedy. It's a dramatic enactment. So what Plato described there as mimesis. That's another reason for thinking that Aristotle tends to mean representation.
Find the basis, since this is just one kind of mimesis here, namely dramatic enactment. But that's what Plato described. I identified with Mace's at least in book three. OK. So far, so good. Then we run into a passage that has caused an enormous amount of controversy. So having set out what a definition should be, then it should have these three elements.
And then he gives us these three elements. He add something. He adds that the aim, or at least as far as I understand it, he's talking about the aim, is to produce through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions. Now, the word catharsis has passed into English and has a meaning of its own. In English, the Greek word catharsis that it comes from as used by Aristotle in this passage.
Nobody really knows what he means here. He's clearly speaking metaphorically and he's using a noun derived from a verb that means to purify. But he's talking about emotions and then being purified. I mean, literally, that's what he's saying now. And it's making sense of this metaphor of the catharsis of emotions that has exercised a lot of commentators on Aristotle.
Even one hundred years ago, articles written on this were saying, I'm so sick of all the people who spent time talking about catharsis, and it's only continued ever since then. So the reality probably is nobody really knows what he means. But you can make a case and I'm going to go through some of the different interpretations of what has been meant by catharsis.
One reason this excites a lot of people is that it seems to provide a response to Plato's criticisms of the emotional effects of poetry on people. People have tried to see in this some sort of description of beneficial emotional effects of tragedy.
So by producing pity and fear and the catharsis of such emotions, that's evidently a good thing that people have tried to read in such a way that it answers Plato because the rest of the poetic Plato Aristotle doesn't talk a great deal about the emotional effects of poetry in terms that would answer Plato. That would satisfy Plato. Perhaps here he's doing that.
One interpretation that's been offered is just to say, well, OK, this is a purification of emotions and what is a purification of emotions? Well, pity and fear, a painful and at the end of tragedies, you often feel a kind of relief and the pain is gone. And so maybe the point of the metaphor here is that pity and fear are purified in that the pain is removed from them.
This Tali's very well because as we'll see, this Talley's very well with other things, Aristotle says, because as we'll see, Aristotle thinks the tragedy is supposed to produce, as he puts it, the pleasure deriving from pity and fear. So perhaps the pleasure deriving from pity and fear is the pleasure you get when you are relieved of pity and fear. That's the thought, anyway. And of course, this.
Seems to tally, as I say, with that point of Aristotle's, one objection raised to it is that it doesn't seem to make sense to say that pain is an impurity in pity and fear, pity and fear are supposed to be painful, and particularly the events toward which we're feeling pity and fear and tragedy. On an Aristotelian view, we're supposed to be feeling pain towards them. That's one objection. Not saying it's decisive, but that's one that's been raised. Not a lot of people support that view anymore.
The one that they primarily support is one offered by Jacob Bernays in the 19th century, according to which tragedy cording, which catharsis, rather, is to be understood in terms of purging as a purging metaphore. So the word catharsis was often used in medical contexts to talk about purging the noxious fluids of the body and thereby purifying the body. But you purge the fluids from it, and the thought is that the emphasis should be on the purging of the emotions.
And as I say, this was advanced by Jacob Bernays, who was I think it was the uncle of Sigmund Freud's wife. And he drew attention to the passage, which is on the back of your hand at the others place in Aristotle, where he talks about catharsis at a lot more length. This is from the politics. So Aristotle writes, their music should be studied not for the sake of one, but of many benefits.
That is to say, with a view to education, to catharsis and the word catharsis we use at present without explanation. But when here after we speak of poetry, we will treat the subject with more precision. Evidently, we don't have that discussion. Music may also serve for intellectual enjoyment, for relaxation and for recreation after exertion, for emotions such as pity and fear or again, enthusiasm exists very strongly in some souls and have more or less influence overall.
Some persons fall into a religious frenzy and we see as a result of the sacred melodies when they have used the melodies that excite the soul to mystic frenzy restored as though they had found healing and catharsis. Those who are influenced by pity and fear and every emotional nature must have a life experience and others, insofar as each is susceptible to such emotions and all receive a sort of catharsis and are relieved with pleasure.
The cathartic melodies likewise given innocent pleasure to men. So for Bromet Bernays, he thought that this is what we should use to make sense of what the poetics is saying that he thought. That's the key point in this passage, or a key point in this passage is that Aristotle was talking about people influenced by pity and fear, which he understood as being very susceptible to pity and fear. Emotional people, fearful people, pity inclined people.
And that what tragedy offers is an outlet for these people who are always sort of in this emotional state on a bit on edge in the theatre. They get a release. They get to feel the emotions that they're inclined to feel. And then they feel calm, at least for a time. So it's an outlet for people who are afflicted by this kind of morbid tendency to these emotions and gives them a kind of healing by giving them this outlet.
So in that sense, they're they're purged. Now, what he also says is that you shouldn't understand the catharsis, the passage that's translated as the catharsis of such emotions to refer to the catharsis of such occurrences, of emotions. But as the catharsis of such inclinations to feel emotions. So what gets purged here is the inclination by producing an occurrence of these emotions and giving them relief as a result.
And he thinks this deals very well with the politics passage. And we should understand a similar thing in the case of the poetics. Now, one obvious problem with this is that it seems to imply that the aim of tragedy is just to have this effect in overemotional people. Why would Aristotle identify this as the aim of tragedy and even put it in the definition of tragedy? To say that it's addressed to people who are overemotional, who are inclined to feel pity and fear.
I mean, it's interesting, if you wanted to push this view of catharsis, there's an interesting there's an easy fix to this. Of course it's not. It's to forget the stuff about people who are naturally inclined to feel pity and fear and just to say you purge pity and fear, you feel pity and fear and then you're done. You're relieved of them in the tragedy, whether or not you're the type of person who's overemotional or not. That would be quite an obvious alternative.
If you wanted to avoid this objection, then everybody, normal people over emotional people, cetera, are addressed by tragedy. They caused pity and fear. It causes pity and fear in them and relieves them of it. That seems to be an obvious alternative to the way Bernays develops the purgation interpretation. So that, as I say, is the purgation interpretation very influential. Lastly, there is the view. The catharsis is a kind of clarification or education of the emotions.
So famously, Aristotle thought that it's part of being a virtuous person, that you feel the right sorts of emotions towards the right objects to the right degree at the right's times, and that it's a sort of education, education and something Monteil that he's talking about here by presenting somebody, namely the tragic hero who deserves pity and presenting an event that is genuinely fearful and getting us to feel those emotions towards the right objects in those cases training us.
And that seems to offer a rather clear response to Plato. If you Buyers' Sato's general view that part of being a virtuous person is feeling the right sorts of emotions towards the right objects. That's an advantage, and it seems also to have the potential of explaining the pleasure that we get in tragedy. So we understand a bit better. What sort of things deserve pity and fear than we did before? The thought goes. But I mean, one difficulty with this.
And again, I'm not saying it's decisive because nobody really quite knows what's going on here is that in the passage from the politics, education is listed alongside catharsis as one of the kinds of effects that music can have. So at least if you push it a bit too hard on the reading of it as educating the emotions, it seems that he's distinguishing catharsis from education in this passage. As I say, that's one of the standard objections. Maybe it's not so great.
Maybe people who take this view don't have to insist on describing this as an education and they can get around the politics passage that way. OK, so those are the kinds of issues that arise out of his definition of tragedy. Virtually all of them centred on this bit about catharsis. Now, let's go on to his discussion of what makes something a good poem or a good poem of its kind.
Now, last week when we talked about Plato, I think is worth making a distinction here between what Aristotle's doing for the most part in this and what Plato was doing. So Plato was talking about whether poetry is a good thing or not. Aristotle, for the most part, is talking about what makes something a good poem. And it's important to see that these are not exactly the same questions.
So here's an analogy. If I tried to tell you what makes something a good method of torture, I might mention causing fear, causing pain, causing sadistic pleasure, keeping the population under control. Cetera, et cetera. And you could agree all that stuff makes something a good method of torture while disagreeing that good methods of torture are good things. It's not good that there are good methods of torture around, analogously, perhaps slightly less dramatically.
Plato could say, yeah. Okay, all of that stuff is the standards that a poem has to meet in order to be a good poem. But even so, it's not good for there to be poetry either, because he thinks most poetry doesn't meet that standard, which, as we'll see, is roughly his view or because doesn't matter to him whether something meets the standards that it takes to be good poetry.
Still not a good thing for there to be things around that meet those standards, just as we might say, not a good thing that there are methods of torture that meet the standards that make something a good method of torture. So this difference between what makes something a good poem and whether poetry is a good thing is an important distinction to keep in mind. Aristotle is very much talking about what makes a poem a good thing.
Now, as I said, Plato's concern is the other question, but he's not entirely unconcerned with what makes a good poem. So in a passage that we didn't discuss last week from the laws which I put on the handouts, which I don't think I will read, I'll just summarise the main points from it. Plato is talking about what appears to make something a good poem. The key points that emerge from this, rather unsurprisingly, is that good poetry represents things correctly.
Good poetry also is morally valuable and also the pleasure that it produces is irrelevant. And the reason he says this in the passage is that it's a mimetic art. If it weren't trying to represent things and if it didn't cause any harm, various other conditions, then we could judge it by pleasure, by whether it produced good pleasure and whether it produced pleasure or not. So things like this path as translated that are made for the sake of charm.
You can judge those by whether they produce pleasure or not. But not representational art. The standard for them is whether they represent things correctly or not. So this is a useful contrast, I think, with what Aristotle says about good poetry. So one thing that Aristotle says about good poetry is that what it's got to do is plausibly represent what the poet intends to represent. Now, a corollary of this is that it's not necessarily a flaw in a poem if it represents things as they're not.
And if it represents immoral actions. So he says, for example, representing things as they're not is permissible if obviously following from what he said, what the poet intends to represent is thereby represented plausibly. For example, he might be trying to represent things as they once were so obsolete military customs. One is one of his examples might be trying to represent things as they are said or believed to be or again, things as they should be.
As, for example, he thinks Sophocles was doing. It's also permissible so that so those are some conditions under which the poets can represent things as they're not. That's not clear. Air was always addressing Plato here. He wrote a work in which which has now been lost called Homeric Problems, in which he was addressing a whole range of often very weird objections to Homer. And some of this material appears to have gotten into Chapter 25 of the poetics.
So it's not quite right to say that he's always talking to Plato here. He seems to be talking to a range of people who raised objections to Homer in this passage here. It's also OK to represent things as they're not provided, that there's no better way or no equally good way to get the emotions appropriate to the genre of poetry.
We'll come back to that in a second. Furthermore, representing immoral actions is also permissible, i.e., not a flaw in a poem provided once again that what the poet intends to represent is represented plausibly. So maybe the poet intends to represent a bad person and bad people do bad things. It wouldn't be plausible to represent them as doing good things. And so it's OK to do that, at least as far as the question of whether it's good poetry is concerned.
Otherwise, poets should be representing things as they are and should not be representing immoral actions. But that's a very loose constraint. So it's essentially saying it's not a plausible representation of what the poet intends to represent, then it's bad to represent immoral actions or things as they are not. But that's very loose constraints.
And really, it doesn't seem as though the problem is that they're immoral or that their things is represented as they're not, but that it's not plausible representation of what the poet intends. OK. And the other point he makes is that good poetry rep produces emotions that are appropriate to the genre. So for each genre, there are some emotions appropriate to it. So there's emotions appropriate to comedy. And as we'll see the tragedy as well, or as we've already talked about.
And it's OK, or at least not altogether a flaw. If the poet produces those, even if he produces some things that are undesirable in other respects, that's very important for him. Now, he applies this then to tragedy. So remember the plausibility criterion? I take it he's applying to tragedy by saying the tragedy ought to represent a probable and necessary sequence of events.
So each event in the tragedy after the beginning should be either a likely consequence or a necessary consequence of what went before it. That's I was general principle applies to tragedy. He derives from this very interesting point, which does seem to at least be talking on the same ground as Plato, dressing the same kind of question as Plato regarding the epistemic value of poetry. So he adds this comment that poetry represents universals. Now, as he explains, universals are kinds.
So kinds of person kinds of action. Actually, what he says, the poetry speaks of universals, doesn't say that represents universals. What does he mean by this? Well, I think he is kind of onto something here. So think, for example, about the Merchant of Venice, often regarded or criticised as a racist anti-Semitic play. No one has ever tried to defend it. As far as I know, we're not inclined to defend it by saying, no, no, it's not saying that Jews are greedy.
It's just saying Shylock is greedy. So what happens to be a Jew? But he's a fictional character, one fictional character. The only thing the Merchant of Venice is saying is the Shylock is greedy. Why are we not even inclined to defend the Merchant of Venice in that way? Now, whether we're inclined to defend it at all is another question. But that doesn't seem even to be on the table as a defence of the Merchant of Venice.
It seems just evident that you can't just say what the play is saying about Shylock is that he's greedy. There does seem to be implicit in it. This claim that Jews are a kind of person, are greedy or tend to be greedy and Shylock is representative of them. This, I think, is what aerosolize talking about when he says that poetry speaks of universals, speaks of kinds, despite, as he puts it, the addition of particular names.
So what Merchant of Venice is speaking of is not just what Shylock did, but he's saying something anti-Semitic about Jews. Now, the fact that this seems to be a feature of poetry raises all kinds of interesting questions. So if the play had said Shylock is six feet tall, it doesn't seem to make sense to say. It's saying that people six feet tall tends to be greedy or enormously greedy.
So which kinds? It's saying something about and how we determined that I think are very interesting questions that arise. Once you recognise or acknowledge that this phenomenon of speaking of universals, despite the addition of particular names, as Aristotle puts it, occurs. So not saying that it speaks of every single time that every single character belongs to.
By any stretch of the imagination, I'm not saying it's easy to figure out why we select certain claims about kinds of people as the ones that the plays. Clearly, it's conveying but does seem to occur. And Aristotle seems to be right about this. Is that plays representational art are not just about the particulars portrayed in it, as Plato sometimes seems to be implying. It is speaking of kinds of things. What's tends to be true of individuals of this kind? Now, Aristotle connects this.
He thinks this is somehow connected to the fact that poetry is trying to represent a probable or necessary sequence of events. So quite apart from the plausibility of the claim, the connexion between that and the claim about probability, necessity, I think is worth dwelling on. When you think about what the poet must know in order to make his characters act as they must or as they would be likely to in that situation, I think you can start to see that the poet has got to know certain facts.
First of all, he's got to know what kind of person the character is and what kind of situation they're in. So he's got to know if he's face of the problem, how it Oedipus B like to be likely to act or how much Oedipus act in this particular situation. He's got to know what kind of person is Oedipus, what kind of situation is he in. And furthermore, he's got to have general knowledge about how people of that kind tend to behave would be likely to behave in situations of that kind.
Now, given that it's common knowledge between the poet and the reader that this is what the poet is aiming to do. We can assume that the poet believes that people of these kinds or of some kinds to which the character belongs would be likely to or even must behave this way in a situation of that kind.
So we can take it that the poem is implying, despite being about particular individuals also, that individuals of this kind are likely to or must behave in these ways, because in order to construct probable or necessary sequence of events, the poet must draw on their knowledge or their beliefs any way about how individuals of that kind are likely to behave or must behave.
So I think this is how we get from the claim that the aim of poetry is to represent probable and necessary sequence of events to the claim that poetry speaks of universals. And we can come back to that at this time at the end. So very pointedly, he draws from this claim, any claim that poetry is therefore more philosophical than history. And this does seem to be aimed directly at Plato and incidentally, seems kind of unfair to history on ourselves.
View history, just records what particular individuals did. No claims about how individuals of that kind are likely to behave or tend to behave. It's how they actually behaved, whether it was likely that they would or not. But it's because poetry encodes in this way that we've talked about claims about how people of a certain kind tend to behave or must behave in situations of a certain kind that is more philosophical than history.
And if you look at the third quotation on the handout, there is a passage from the metaphysics that is relevant to this. So he writes, all knowledge deals either with what holds always or with what holds for the most part. For example, that honey water, for the most part, benefits. The feverish experience is knowledge of individuals. Scale of universals, knowledge and understanding belong to skill rather than to experience. Scale arises when for many notions gained by experience.
One universal judgement about similar objects is produced for to have a judgement that when Callas was ill of this disease, this did him good. And similarly, in the case of Socrates and in many individual cases, is a matter of experience. But to judge that it is done good to all persons of a certain constitution marked off in one class when they were ill of this disease, for example, to phlegmatic or bilious people when burning with fever. This is a matter of skill.
Men of experience know the thing is so, but do not know why, while others know the why and because we do not regard any of the senses as wisdom. Yet surely these give the most authoritative knowledge of particulars. But they do not tell us the why of anything e.g. why fire is hot. They only say that it is hot. This is the significance that general knowledge, knowledge of how people of certain kinds tend to behave, likely to behave or how objects tend to be.
That's the significance that knowledge of those truths enables you to. Well, that is the significance of knowledge of those troops. What it enables you to know is why certain things happen. So if I give you this liquid, it cause you have the fever, you can understand why. If you know that it's honey water and if you know the general truth, honey water tends to benefit the feverish.
It's in terms of these generalisations that poetry, as I said, seems to encode in a certain way that we understand particular phenomena. It's in terms of these sorts of things on this picture. And so it's in this sense, the poetry, as he puts it.
It's much more philosophical than history, because on this caricature of history that he has here, it's like the man of experience that he's talking about in this passage from the metaphysics there does getting knowledge of particulars, but not getting knowledge of why the particular events happened. The particular things are as they are. OK. So that's a rather subtle reply, I think, to Plato dealing with the epistemological side.
Now, in terms of the emotional effects of poetry, as we saw, he thinks that part of the thing. One of the things that makes something a good poem is the. That it produces the emotional effects appropriate to the genre. One of these effects is, as he puts it, the pleasure deriving from pity and fear. In the case of tragedy. Now, Aristotle doesn't say much about the pleasure deriving from pity and fear. He says a good deal about what enables a tragedy to produce pity and fear.
So he talks about what kind of person the tragic hero has to be. And he talks about certain plot devices. But it doesn't say a great deal about the pleasure deriving from pity and fear. And this has attracted a lot of controversy. So how is it that essentially painful emotions can have pleasure derived from them? How is it possible for pleasure to derive from essentially painful emotions like pity and fear? And this is a problem not limited to tragedy.
So we enjoy going to see horror movies, all kinds of things that produce what are essentially painful emotions. But it seems we derive pleasure from them. This is puzzles, lots of philosophers. How is this possible? One tempting answer is to appeal to catharsis. So it seems to be he's saying both that the aim of tragedy is to produce catharsis and that its aim is to produce the pleasure deriving from pity and fear. So natural thought is that it's catharsis that's pleasurable.
And then you take whatever your view of catharsis is to explain this phenomenon. So maybe, for example, that's the relief of the emotions that's pleasurable. So pleasure can derive from pity and fear. In that once you're done with pity and fear, the relief you get is pleasurable. That's one thought. Another thought is to appeal to the notion of understanding that Aristotle talks about.
So we find it pleasurable, as he put it earlier, to contemplate images even of dead bodies, which we wouldn't like to see in real life. Is the use of understanding. Those are two possibilities relate to Aristotle. But quite apart from a quest as a question about the interpretation of Aristotle, there's still the kind of philosophical problem and a lot more answers have been provided to that question. So Hume, in an essay called Of Tragedy, provides a very idiosyncratic solution to this problem.
So he thinks that there's all kinds of elements of a tragedy that are very pleasurable and unproblematic, pleasurable. So the skill with which the artist represents what he does, the beauty of the language, the force of expression and the imitation. So harkening back a bit to Aristotle's claim. He says the thing is about this in a good tragedy, the pleasure we get from these things is stronger than the negative emotions, the pity and the fear.
And that when this happens, the pain of these emotions is converted into pleasure because there is concurrent emotions that are pleasurable along with the negative ones. And that's because they overpower the negative ones, converts the pain of those ones into pleasure. And so the aggregate emotion is very pleasurable indeed, because you get the energy of the negative ones, which is no longer painful, converted into pleasure, combining with the pleasure of the independently pleasurable ones.
And that's why we just love tragedy. This is a really weird view. I don't understand why he said this very odd psychology. One of the problems with it did point out by Malcolm, but in a very good discussion of this. And it's common to some other answers to this question as well, is that it seems to deny that there is anything painful in the experience of tragedy. It's all pleasure. And that seems to misrepresent the problem somewhat.
There does seem to be an element of pain or suffering in the experience of these tragic emotions. And generally these negative emotions in ours. And the problem is, how can pleasure derived from that not? The question is not why is there no pain? It's where does the pleasure come from? Even though there is pain, you can raise a similar criticism against an answer to this question offered by Butcher, who suggests that it's because of the fiction that there's no pain.
We know we're not in danger, so there's no pain there. It's also pleasurable, he says, because we enjoy identifying with superior characters like tragic heroes are again subject to the same objection at least. So a good answer, it seems hard to not deny that there is a kind of a painful element to this. So these kinds of experiences, or at least to some of them that we have in response to rewarding experiences, we haven't response, rewarding works of art.
Susan Fagan has suggested that the pleasure is actually pleasure in our response of pity, in our painful response of pity. And the reason we take pleasure in the fact that we are feeling pity towards the person represented on stage is that we are pleased that we're the sort of person who's sympathetic to that type of event. So we're pleased to discover we're compassionate. After all. Or if not to discover it, then at least to have it affirmed.
Problem with this view. One problem this raised, well, it doesn't kind of seem like that's what we're thinking about when we enjoy a tragedy. Doesn't seem like there's a second order response to our first order responses. It's going on, but kind of apart from the fact that doesn't seem to capture it. It would at the very least be limited in application. So it may explain why we take pleasure in pity.
But what about fear? It doesn't seem to be anything particularly pleasing to learn that we can be scared by terrifying events. I mean, if you were concerned that you might be incapable of that. That would be different. But that's a bit odd. There is the other concern that this kind of makes it a bit self-congratulatory.
The experience of tragedy, that we're doing it because we're so pleased with ourselves, not being pleased with ourselves is the pleasure deriving from pity and fear then that really kind of seems to misrepresent the experience. I last few I mentioned on this is Budd's view, Malcolm, but discussion in values of art is well worth reading. He thinks that we should kind of reconceived this question.
So he thinks that even if some tragedies don't produce this kind of pleasure deriving from pity and fear, there are better reasons to value the overall experience of the thing than the pleasure we get from it. So it seems to kind of misrepresent the value of tragedy to focus just on the moment at which we get. Or the aspect from which we get pleasure. Because the interesting question is really what reasons are there to value the experience of tragedy overall?
The second reason it misrepresents it is that that's just one part of the overall experience. So it fixates on one part to the exclusion of the whole. Now, it's an integral part, in Budd's view, of a lot of the experiences of tragedy. But it is just a part and but gives a number of reasons why a tragedy might be valuable. Why the experience of it might be valuable. I should say and he thinks this is because, frankly, tragedies are quite varied and very different from one another.
And we shouldn't expect one answer to apply to all of them. Certainly not if we reconceive the question in this way. And one of the answers he gives, which is kind of interesting and kind of Aristotelian, actually, is to point out that at least in some tragedies, one reason why experiencing them is valuable is that it enables us to enter much more fully than we otherwise could into the mind of suffering person.
This is for a number of reasons, one of which it appeals to the kind of fiction ality of it is that we're not invested in it, or at least to the fact that it's a representation. So we have a certain detachment because it's a representation and not a real situation. So we wouldn't be able to contemplate it if it were a real event before our eyes. We have certain obligations and other factors would prevent that.
But also because very striking feature of tragedy that Nichelle also pointed out is that tragic heroes are eloquent in a way that real suffering people never, ever are. They're very, very articulate about what it is like to suffer and to undergo catastrophically horrible things. And because of this and for other reasons, too, we're able to enter into the mind of a suffering person to identify with them in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
This is a valuable experience because we value truth, because we value insight and particularly insight into these sorts of experiences. But it's our reward that we can only get this insight on condition that we suffer to some extent with the tragic hero. But it's worth it. In Bud's view, because of our attachment to truth. Thanks very much.