Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance ii: audience and embodiment 183
In according emotional engagement a central role in audience response
to theater, Woodruff might seem to be endorsing what is usually termed
an “Aristotelean” conception of theatrical performance. This would then
seem to commit him to opposing the alternative “epic” conception of
theater defended by Bertolt Brecht. But Woodruff claims that the differ-
ence between Aristotelean and epic theater is in fact best accommodated
within his own model of audience response, the difference lying in the ways
in which emotions are enlisted for cognitive purposes.^4 To clarify what is at
issue here and to assess Woodruff’s claim, we must say something about the
two conceptions of theater in question.
The Aristotelean conception is so named because it informs the discus-
sion of tragedy in Aristotle’s Poetics (1941b). The aim of the tragic work,
Aristotle maintains, is to produce a particular kind of emotional response
in the spectator. The performers’ task is to present events that arouse pity
and fear, but in such a way as to produce a catharsis of these emotions. There
is some dispute as to how catharsis is to be understood. Some view it as
a purging of the emotions, where the latter are conceived as harmful to
one’s moral health, while others take it to be a purifying of the emotions to
bring them into harmony with a rational assessment of things. What is clear
is that catharsis is supposed to be a good thing, and that dramatic works
are socially valuable in virtue of their capacity to produce such an effect.
This supports the “purification” reading of catharsis, given Aristotle’s more
general views about the proper place of the emotions in human agency (see
Aristotle 1941a). Thus read, the Poetics can be seen as in part an answer to
Plato’s (1941) charge that theater is morally harmful because it leads us to
mimic the flawed characters that are presented to us on stage.
Aristotle holds that if a play is to both arouse pity and fear and produce a
catharsis of those emotions, it must meet certain conditions. First, the cen-
tral character – the “tragic hero” – must be a person with whom we can both
identify and empathize, otherwise the emotions of pity and fear will not be
elicited. This means that the central character must be a fully developed indi-
vidual, psychologically speaking, whom we can come to understand through
the dialogue and the action. The central character must therefore be a person
who is basically good, but with some failing of character that explains why
a bad fate befalls him or her. For, Aristotle argues, we would be repulsed,
rather than moved to pity and fear, by evil happening to a completely good
person. And we would rejoice, rather than feel pity or fear, at the prospect
of a thoroughly evil individual coming to a bad end.
In order to produce a catharsis of the emotions of pity and fear, the
plot must proceed with a certain inevitability, given our understanding of
the laws that govern the world of the play and the psychological profiles of
the characters. The fate that befalls the central character must strike us as