deserving of my attention. Second, even supposing that plays give some
special emotional insight, there’s a gap between gaining emotional
insight into the lives of others and using that insight for good. As it
happens, Alexander of Pherae wept for the Trojans and left the theatre–
but one might imagine such a tyrant learning from the emotional
insights of the great playwrights and using them to further his cruel
ends.^32 In fact, Plutarch’s story suggests that Alexander, far from learning
to be more merciful, was concerned that the theatrical performance was
making him appear weak. Alexander echoes Plato’s concern that theatre makes
us sympathetic to feelings that we pride ourselves for avoiding outside that
context. For Plato, then, the emotions that we experience at the theatre
certainly can have an effect on the way we feel when not in the theatre: but
that, for him, was exactly the problem.^33 Emotional responses that we
wouldn’t experience or respect under everyday circumstances should not,
he thought, be given some special status just because we feel them in response
to plays. Hence Rousseau (familiar, of course, with Plato’s criticisms)
questions why we should risk emotional moral training at all–that is,
why reason shouldn’t be sufficient for loving virtue and hating vice.^34
One further suspicion, already evident in Plato’s writing: whereas
modern philosophers have tended to focus on the novel and its effect on
the individual reader, the typical spectator at the theatre is part of an
audience and subject to a kind of group psychology. We feel things in a
group, which we probably wouldn’t feel on our own. This seems true
both for what wefind moving and for what wefind funny. Philosophers
in general, it is fair to say, have often been suspicious of‘the crowd’:
Chrysippus the Stoic is reported to have said, when asked if he was fol-
lowing the crowd to hear a speaker, that if he had wanted to follow the
crowd he wouldn’t have studied philosophy.^35 For Plato, the fact that we
wouldn’t feel such things on our own was reason to be suspicious of
group emotions; hence, Martin Puchner has suggested that Plato’s dialogues,
read aloud to small groups of students, should be understood as an
attempt to escape from the perils of the theatrical crowd.^36 Against Plato,
of course, we could maintain that the mere fact that I wouldn’t feel a certain
way unless part of a group does not entail that that feeling is illegitimate.
There are many things that we can achieve only as part of a group, and
many things we dare to do only as part of a group. These achievements
should not thereby be discounted. If I do or feel, as part of a group,
something that I would avoid on my own, there’s no reason to suppose
that the latter judgement cancels out the former.
In summary, although nobody doubts the ability of the theatre to move
us, we are a long way from thinking that being moved entails a lasting or
significant moral effect at all–let alone a positive effect. And even if we
did think that some plays could morally educate through the emotions,
110 From the Stage to the World