The Significance of Catharsis as an Answer to Why We Enjoy What We Ought to Fear

Few if any other Greek tragedies can claim to have had a more profound influence upon modern

psychology as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a tragedy with a story so well-known its very name tells

its entire story, invoking a sense of pity, fear and perhaps also disgust in the modern reader. This

can mostly be accredited to Sigmund Freud’s famous psychoanalytical explanation of the myth1,

which in many senses came to change the way we look upon the world of psychology forever,

and thus a contemporary reading of Oedipus Rex can never fully get away from the fact that it has

come to represent something totally different from what it must have done when Sophocles wrote

the play, not to mention what it did in a pre-Freudian society. The fact that a Theban tragedy

written some 2400 years ago has survived the millennia and managed to make such an impact on

modern society is extraordinary in itself, but perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that we as

humans seem to enjoy the horrors of a tragedy, when shown on stage, ranging from the murder of

a father to the loss of a family, horrors which we would fear to witness in real life. In this essay I

intend to discuss this paradox by analysing parts of Oedipus Rex, focusing mainly on what

Aristotle would have called katharsis2, or the purgation of the soul through extreme emotions,

and investing whether Aristotle’s work, and its position as an answer to Plato’s dismissal of

poetry, in any way can be said to answer the question which in itself is as old as the Greek

tragedies. I wish however to ask the reader to keep in mind that Aristotle’s response must be seen

in its historical context, as it otherwise might seem outdated and strange to the contemporary

reader, a point which will be discussed further in the conclusion of this essay. Furthermore it

1
Freud; Sigmund, Die Traumdeutung, (Leipzig: Elibron Classics) 1995.
2
Please not that the spelling of catharsis (katharsis) used by the convenors of ENG9X3 will be used throughout this
essay.
must be remembered that scholars today still argue over the exact meaning of Aristotle’s term

katharsis, as he never truly gave an answer to this question in his Poetics3.

The concept of katharsis as discussed by Aristotle is a direct response towards

Plato’s harsh objection against poetry as discussed in depth in his masterwork The Republic,

where he claimed that poetry was an imitation of what already was a mimetic representation in

itself4. Plato strongly believed that mundane things where imitations of divine ideas, and that

virtually any form of poetry, in particular poetry dealing with comedy or tragedy, as such posed a

threat towards society, claiming that “… if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse in lyric or

epic, pleasure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law …5”. According to Plato any

mimetic representation, apart from dithyrambs and “praises of good men6”, was harmful, and yet,

he failed to fully explain indeed why people continue to enjoy tragedies on the stage, only briefly

mentioning that tragedies revoke feelings of sympathy in the viewer, and focused more on the

fact that tragedies fail to show us what we think is “the conduct of a man” in real life, and instead

stated that the behaviour of heroes that we are “praising in the theatre [is] that of a woman”.

Thus, when Oedipus exclaims that he is “misery! I, her best son, reared as no other son of Thebes

was ever reared […]7” he does not act as a man would do, or rather should do, had the tragedy

been a real life event, as any overtly expression of feelings was considered unmanly and

unrealistic by Plato’s contemporary fellow Greeks8. To Plato this accusation was one of his

strongest oppositions against poetry, and in many ways it is hard to dispute what he is proposing,

3
Leon Golden, “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art, Vol 31, No 4, (Blackwell
Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics : 1973) pp. 473-479.
4
Plato. Book X, The Republic [c.375], in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns, trans. by Paul Shorey, (Princeton University Press: 1961) pp. 828-832
5
ibid.
6
ibid.
7
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex in The Three Theban Plays, translated by Robert Fagles, (Penguin Books: London, 1982)
lines 1510-1511.
8
Thucycides, “The Funeral Oration of Pericles”, in The Peloponnesian War, trans. David Grene, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp.107-115.
for in one sense we cannot but agree with him. It is not hard to argue that we, as humans, fear to

find ourselves in either embarrassing or tragic circumstances, whereas we seem to take pleasure

in them from afar, and claiming that we should avoid tragedies for this very reason does not seem

like an all too preposterous suggestion.

Thus Aristotle had a difficult task to perform when he decided to respond to Plato’s

critique, for the principal objection against the art form seems justified, whereas it as such

appears rather odd to be defending someone’s right to enjoy the staging of a tragedy, when every

inherent instinct of ours tells us to look away and fear what we are seeing. This appears to be true

not least when we are dealing with the gruesome fate of Oedipus, but by reading Aristotle’s

Poetics it becomes somewhat clearer to us that tragedies, regardless of what Plato wants us to

believe, indeed seem to serve a purpose.

Aristotle claims that “tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of

life, […] and its end is a mode of action, not a quality9”. According to Aristotle a tragedy may

lack characters, but it is only through the actions, or the plot, that it truly becomes a tragic

representation in itself. Here Aristotle has a point, for without a plot with “a beginning, a middle

and an end10” we cannot stage a tragedy, no matter how tragic the speeches of a certain character

seems, for if this speech is not connected to a plot, it fails to evoke the katharsis that Aristotle

claims is the reason why we enjoy tragedies in the first place. If Sophocles had only focused on

how Oedipus eventually realises his sins, but without simultaneously providing the viewers of the

tragedy with the proper background information, slowly tracing the origins of the curse that has

been cast upon Thebes, we would not be nearly as influenced by Oedipus Rex. It is however

worth noticing that Sophocles version of the Oedipus myth does not follow a linear time line,

9
Aristotle, from Poetics [c.330], selections adapted from trans. by S.H. Butcher, (London: Macmillan) 1907.
10
Ibid.
instead Sophocles begins at the end, and work backwards until he, by reaching the origins of the

tragedy dramatically returns to the emotional and disastrous end of his play. By doing this

Sophocles, writing years before Aristotle published his Poetics, showed that following a linear

history line when writing drama, comedy or, as is the case with Oedipus Rex, tragedies, is

unimportant as long as the different stages of a linear history line is recognisable in the tragedy

itself.

Furthermore Aristotle claimed that tragedies served the purpose of evoking

katharsis among the spectators, that tragedies teach us as human how to control a number of

strong feelings, which are inherent in every man, whether or not these are feelings of fear and

pity, as is the case with tragedies. Katharsis, if evoked, works according to Aristotle as a kind of

relief and is a way to learn how to control extreme emotions. By being able to overtly express and

experience feelings of fear and pity through the viewing of tragedies, the spectator learns how to

control these feelings in real life, thus rendering him less emotional than he would otherwise have

been, and does not, as Plato claims, “establish[…] them [extreme emotions] as our rulers when

they ought to be ruled, to the end that we may be better and happier men instead of worse and

more miserable”(The Rebublic, pp. 828-832).

If we further analyse Sophocle’s Oedipus Rex, the play which Aristotle mainly used

in order to describe how one is to write a tragedy, it becomes clear to us that the entire play is

ruled by what Aristotle might have called moments producing katharsis. Indeed, as Page duBois

points out in her article “Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis”, the entire play’s initial

intention is to cleanse Thebes from the curse which has turned the city into a dying society11,

with the desperate chorus asking Oedipus to “act now – we beg you, best of men, raise up our

11
Page duBois, “Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis”, in Theatre Journal, Vol. 54, No. 1, Tragedy (The
Johns Hopkins University Press: 2002), p. 21.
city!” (Oedipus Rex, l. 57). The chorus desperation, and their cry for help is the first time that we

experience katharsis within the play, the relief being offered by Oedipus when he explains to the

people of Thebes that he has “sent Creon […] to Delphi – Apollo the Prophet’s Oracle – to learn

what [he] might do to save our city”(Oedipus Rex, l. 81-84). The main events producing katharsis

in Oedipus Rex however occur slightly later in the play, when Oedipus unknowingly has

sentenced himself to a fate worse than death by telling the people of Thebes that he will do

whatever it takes to find and sentence the murderer of the previous king Laius.

As the reader very well knows, Oedipus Rex is based on a story dealing with the

unfortunate tale of a prince, destined to kill his father and marry his mother, and how this very

same prince comes to execute the crimes he is predestined to carry out in a vain attempt to

counteract the prophecies of the Greek gods. The character of the play however is unaware of the

fact that his attempt to escape his destiny only brings the revelation of the fact that he has already

committed the crimes closer to him. Given these circumstances, I would argue that Oedipus

becomes somewhat of the archetype of a tragic hero. In one sense he is doing everything he can

to save his people, proclaiming his “curse on the murderer” (Oedipus Rex, l. 280), and at the

same time, only after the blind prophet Tiresias has asked him if he really knows who his parents

are and he has discovered the exact time and point of Laius’s murder, Oedipus wishes to make

sure without any doubt that he is not the one who slaughtered the previous Theban king, by

fetching the only living witness of the crime. Oedipus, fully aware of the fact that he might very

well have killed the king woes his destiny and evokes once again feelings of pity among the

spectators.

These feelings stir up a strong sense of katharsis among the viewers of the play, for

in Oedipus desperate search for the truth he unveils that he is not the son of the Corinthian king

he thought was his father, but that he indeed is the son of Laius, and that he has fulfilled the very
cruel destiny he has spent his whole life trying to outrun. Not only is it revealed that he indeed

killed his father and mated with his mother, but to add on to the katharsis evoked, the horrors of

the tragedy is emphasised by his mother’s suicide, and Oedipus’s brutal act of self-blinding

followed by his desperate cry that he is a “great murderous ruin, this man cursed to heaven, the

man the deathless gods hate most of all!” (Oedipus Rex, l. 1479-1480), and the tragedy ends with

Oedipus touching farewell of his children whom at the same time are his siblings and the chorus

final point that one should “count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.” (Oedipus Rex, l.

1684).

Our final question then would be if Aristotle’s answer to why we enjoy witnessing

the horrors of Oedipus’s fate, that the katharsis it evokes teaches us to control these feeling

among ourselves, could be said to be sufficient. Taken into its historical context, considering that

Aristotle was answering a question posed to him by his teacher Plato, we might state that his

response and explanation to why we enjoy tragedies proves a point, especially since the moments

of katharsis in Oedipus Rex are fairly frequent, and the play does evoke feelings of pity among

the spectators, but given the fact that Aristotle did not develop his argument further, and his ideas

were developed in a world which was incredibly different from ours, his ideas does not fully help

to answer the question why we to this day continue to enjoy tragedies. We must not forget that

Ancient Greece was a highly patriarchal society, and the role of both women and men have

changed profoundly since Sophocles wrote his play. It makes perfect sense to claim that tragedies

were a way to learn how to control emotional expressions through katharsis during Aristotle’s life

time; in a world where men are allowed to both cry and laugh publically it does however seems

like a weak argument. Thus I would suggest that anyone wishing to fully understand why

fictional tragedies continue to fascinate us today, and not just why they might have fascinated

people in Ancient Greece, would have to look beyond the explanation put forward by Aristotle in
his Poetics. I would argue that it makes sense to keep Aristotle’s initial idea in mind, namely that

dramatic representations of tragedies evokes katharsis, but that the reason why we take pleasure

in experiencing feelings of fear and pity in a contemporary world lies in something different than

a mere wish to learn how to control these emotions.

Bibliography
Primary Literature

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex in The Three Theban Plays, translated by Robert Fagles, (Penguin
Books: London, 1982)

Secondary Literature
Aristotle, from Poetics [c.330], selections adapted from trans. by S.H. Butcher, (London:
Macmillan) 1907.
duBois; Page, “Ancient Tragedy and the Metaphor of Katharsis”, in Theatre Journal, Vol. 54,
No. 1, Tragedy (The Johns Hopkins University Press: 2002), p. 21.

Freud; Sigmund, Die Traumdeutung, (Leipzig: Elibron Classics) 1995.

Golden; Leon, “The Purgation Theory of Catharsis”, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art, Vol
31, No 4, (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics : 1973) pp.
473-479.

Plato. Book X, The Republic [c.375], in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by Edith Hamilton
and Huntington Cairns, trans. by Paul Shorey, (Princeton University Press: 1961) pp. 828-832.

Thucycides, “The Funeral Oration of Pericles”, in The Peloponnesian War, trans. David Grene,
(Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp.107-115.