Me 207people doing the same thing, thereby giving implicit approval to the entire
undertaking.
The two me‟s generally fight over feelings of guilt.
The me of identification wants to identify with nice memories.
The me of the physical body insists upon sticking with the facts.
As the physical me grows, the emotional me loses its ability to identify.
This forces me to live with feelings of guilt.Second, I make sure that the mental fabric is nice and clean. Therefore,
the play will center upon a tragic hero who is “a person of eminence and in
enjoyment of marked good fortune.” “The stories of the gods and
heroes...in accord with opinion. They are suitable material for the artist,
and in spite of their ethical inferiority may be idealized and ennobled by
artistic treatment.” This combination of pleasant surroundings together
with the emotional status of heroes and gods leads naturally to Mercy
identification: In the hero portrayed on stage, “we see ourselves, and in his
fate our possible doom, and we weep and shudder accordingly.”
Now that the fabric has been constructed and pulled into the internal
world of Mercy strategy, it can be used to repair mental furniture. The key
here is that the tragic hero is similar to me and that he experiences the
same downfall as me, but without the stain of guilt. In other words, the
piece of fabric fits but has no dirt: “The hero must be neither too good nor
too bad, and his misfortunes must appear „brought upon him not by vice or
depravity, but by some error in judgment,‟ due to inexcusable carelessness,
or a fit of passion, or some other weak spot in an otherwise upright
character...To produce the best tragic effect, the downfall of the hero must
be sudden and unlooked for.” Tragedy is sudden so that Mercy
identification receives no warning that might cause it to disengage
prematurely.
The result of all this effort is “to turn a normally painful situation into
an esthetically pleasurable or, in other words, into a beautiful one.” This
means that the furniture has been repaired and that the blot of guilt has
been removed.
Now that Aristotle has told us the method, let us see if we can analyze
why it is so effective at removing guilt. First, let us remind ourselves of the
underlying mental mechanism: Guilt occurs when Mercy strategy has
identified with some experience and Perceiver thought believes that this
Mercy experience will lead to some future undesirable result. With this in
mind, let us walk through the steps described by Aristotle.
First, we have a pleasant Mercy milieu filled with important people.
After all, how could Aristotle add more emotional status than by casting
gods and other heroes. The result in Mercy strategy is identification.
However, what about the Perceiver observer standing next door? Chances