Aristotle on Tragedy

0:00 Ellie: Hi, this is Ellie Anderson, philosophy professor and co-host of Overthink podcast introducing some key ideas from Aristotle's Poetics. The reader I'm using is this aesthetics anthology, which is what I've taught in the past in philosophy of art. Now, if you watch the introduction to philosophy of art video, you'll know that talk about Aristotle as having a view of aesthetics, like having a theory of art, is a bit anachronistic because the term aesthetics isn't coined until the 18th century. That said, Aristotle's Poetics is the most influential work of theater theory in history, and funnily enough, we only have part of it remaining today. There was originally a part on tragedy and a part on comedy, but the part on comedy is lost.

0:46 Tragically, we might say, so we only have the part on tragedy. Aristotle defines tragedy in this text as follows. First, he says that tragedy is an imitation of an action that is both serious and complete in itself. We can use a common example here, which is Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. A little bit of an anachronistic example, of course, but why not? So in Romeo and Juliet, there is an imitation of a love story that ends in the lover's death, right? And to say that it's an imitation doesn't mean that it has to be based on a true story, but it does mean that the theatrical depiction of the story involves imitating action. So Romeo is not literally killing himself when he does so on stage. He is imitating killing himself.

1:33 Juliet is imitating giving a soliloquy outside of a window, In addition, tragedy uses the medium of language with pleasurable accessories. Basically, a tragedy has to be conveyed in beautiful words. Think about the poetry of iambic pentameter that Shakespeare uses in Romeo and Juliet. If there weren't any words in a tragedy or if there were words, but they were very unpleasant to listen to. Then for Aristotle, this wouldn't rise to the level of a tragedy. Next is the idea that a tragedy is depicted in a dramatic form rather than a narrative form. The other things we've said about tragedy so far, namely that it is an imitation of an action, and that it involves language, specifically language with pleasurable accessories could also be applied to say a novel also in anachronistic example,

2:20 because novels didn't exist at the time that Aristotle was writing this. But you get the idea. To use a less anachronistic example. Tragedy is not the same as epic poetry. In Aristotle's time, one could hear poets recite the Iliad, for instance, but that recitation wouldn't have a dramatic form, right? It would be a person delivering the narrative rather than people acting it out on stage. And finally, tragedy involves incidents, arousing pity and fear that produce what is known as catharsis. Very famous word associated with Aristotle, but sometimes misunderstood about, which we will say more in a moment. For Aristotle, the point of a tragedy is to provoke these feelings of pity and fear combined.

3:08 You pity the character, you feel terrible for Romeo and Juliet, and you also feel fear. You feel fear that the same thing could happen to you, even though pity and fear don't exactly sound like pleasant emotions in and of themselves. Aristotle says that the ultimate effect of their combination in a tragedy is tragic pleasure. So we feel this sense of relief or release at the end of a tragedy, and that is pleasurable. And this of course depends on the fact that we know, that the actions that have just happened are not real actions, but that they are dramatic depictions or imitations of actions. Pity and fear specifically have to be the result for Aristotle of plot points, incidents within the plot that are unexpected and that make sense in relation to each other.

3:53 And so it is, for instance, the decision of Juliet to take this sleeping potion that leads to Romeo killing himself because he thinks that Juliet is actually dead, and so on and so forth. So there's a sequence of events that follow from one another, but that nonetheless are unexpected, and that combination gives rise to the tragic pleasure of pity and fear. And just a quick note on catharsis. A lot of people take Aristotle's mention of catharsis to mean that the emotions of pity and fear ultimately resolve or purify themselves. Catharsis involves a purification or a cleansing, um, but Aristotle himself is a little bit vague on what catharsis means. And so it's not entirely clear whether he actually imagines the situation of total

4:40 peace at the end of a tragedy or not. Bottom line though is this tragic pleasure that is produced at the end of the tragedy, thanks to this paradoxical combination of pity and fear. Aristotle says that there are six parts to a tragedy. The first and most important is the plot. The combination of incidents in the story where there's a beginning, the middle, and the end. And all three of those things have what Aristotle calls magnitude. They're not huge in scope, like it's not the history of the world that the tragedy is telling, but there nor are they too small in scope. It's not the story of somebody trying to find their keys. I don't know, actually, maybe that could be kind of interesting. Maybe this is like a modern topic for a tragedy, but he thinks that the magnitude needs to be somewhere in the middle. He also thinks that there should be a good length to the plot and that the plot

5:28 should be probable, believable. The second and second most important is the characters. The characters Aristotle says, reveal the moral purpose of the agents, the sorts of things that they seek or avoid, where it's not obvious. So you get a sense of the characters of Romeo and Juliet, like, who are these people? What are their motivators throughout the play towards the very beginning, right? That is set up and it deepens over time. And so the characters have to be rich, believable, and compelling because they're really the drivers of the most important aspect of the tragedy, which is the plot. The third element that Aristotle notes is thought. The third element that Aristotle notes is thought, which he defines as the power of saying whatever can be said or what is appropriate to the occasion. And so the tragedy needs to have an underlying thought that comes out

6:18 in the various things that are said by the different characters, right? This is a little bit weird, but I tend to think of it as a kind of unifying theme of the play. If other people have a different interpretation, let me know. The fourth element is the diction of the personages, and this is the expression of their thoughts in words. Uh, whether the play is in verse or in prose. Aristotle says The diction is really central to the tragedy itself, and I think you see this given the care that playwrights take with the words that they are using in their, in their plays. The fifth is melody, which might seem a little bit random from a contemporary perspective, given that a lot of tragedies don't have any music in them. And the sixth is spectacle, the spectacle of the show, right?

7:04 Whether that's, we might say the set or the costumes or something. I'm extrapolating, he doesn't say that explicitly. Doesn't really go into that much detail here. He does say though that this is the least important thing because you can get the tragic effect without a public performance and actors. But nonetheless, he does still think that spectacle is an element of tragedy. I wanna say a little bit more about plot, even though we've said some things about it a moment ago, because like I said, Aristotle thinks that it is the most important element of a tragedy. He says that the plot has to have a unity of action, and that plots have various components that, really help drive the tragedy. The first is that a plot in a tragedy has a reversal of fortune or what's known as a peripeteia in ancient Greek. The reversal of fortune

7:52 You can see over the course of the plot in say, Oedipus, where Oedipus goes from being king to gouging his eyes out being dethroned and having to walk around in exile because he's realized that he killed his father and married his mother, or the reversal of fortune in Romeo and Juliet, where there's this gorgeous, gorgeous love story and then suddenly there is death. And so this peripeteia or reversal of fortune happens at a particular point in the plot and the point at which that shift is integral to the tragedy as tragedy. He says that this reversal fortune is one of the biggest attractions of tragedy and is characteristic of a complex plot. The second other big attraction of tragedy is what Aristotle calls the discovery, where there's a change from ignorance to knowledge.

8:38 The most classic example here again is Oedipus, where Oedipus. Begins in ignorance. He doesn't realize that he has killed his father and married his mother, but he ends by having a moment of recognition, and this moment of recognition is deeply, deeply tragic. I would say that in Romeo and Juliet, a good example of this is when Romeo kills himself, and Juliet has that moment. I would say that in Romeo and Juliet, a good example of this would be right after Romeo has killed himself. Juliet wakes up, and this is nicely depicted in in the movie Shakespeare in Love Where they look at each other and recognize that something has gone deeply wrong because Romeo believed that Juliet was dead, which is why he killed himself. But in fact, Juliet is alive. But by the time they realize that Romeo is already dying at the hand of his own sword. Now, also important, although less important than the peripeteia and the

9:26 discovery for Aristotle is suffering. A tragedy has action of a destructive or a painful nature. This perhaps is obvious, given that a tragedy is the opposite of a comedy. Now, there's lots of other stuff that Aristotle says about tragedy in this text. This is just a quick introduction to what is already an excerpt of the Poetics. So definitely check it out in your own, if you so definitely check it out on your own if you haven't already. And if you're following along with me for these lectures on philosophy of art, then make sure to check out the aesthetics anthology.