Aristotle, the purging claim faces all of this and more. For one thing,
Aristotle has a particular view about what it is to be a virtuous person:
namely, a virtuous person has the right sort of emotional responses at the
right time. He will be afraid when it is appropriate to be afraid, and so
on. He is not somebody who doesn’t have any emotional responses.^65
Thus, a virtuous person sounds like exactly the kind of person who
doesn’t need a purge at all; a purge might do him harm, by getting rid of
the very emotions in virtue of which he is virtuous. But (2), above, sug-
gests that the people who experience the benefits of catharsis are those
who need a purge. Thus, either we say that only non-virtuous people
experience catharsis, which most (although not all) Aristotle scholars wish
to avoid; or we say that purging can’t be the right metaphor for cath-
arsis.^66 A second objection relates to Aristotle’s claims (elsewhere) about
the emotions. Fear, he suggests, is not just a feeling; it is attached to
particular (fearsome) objects at particular times.^67 I don’t just‘feel fear’
(he thinks); I feel fear because of (say) the tiger that is coming towards
me. So it’s not clear how fear, in general, could be purged. I ought to be
afraid of that which is fearful; because whatever was fearful before the tra-
gedy is fearful afterwards, Aristotle probably doesn’t think that purging
would (or should) take place.^68
Purification
In a religious context,‘purification’seems to have meant something like a
ritual cleansing of a person or a place. We can compare this with the
thought of‘washing away’sins, or purifying a place of worship with holy
water or incense. In any case, the intuitive connection is between every-
day hygiene and religious or spiritual hygiene: making things clean.
Whereas it’s fairly obvious what a purging of the emotions would involve
(even if it isn’t obvious that this is what Aristotle had in mind), it’s not at
all obvious what a purification of pity, fear or any other emotion would
be. So just what exactly does Gerald mean when he tells Anabel that‘we
shall hate ourselves clean at last, I suppose’?^69 The purging metaphor is
one of quantity. We have a pretty good idea of what having more or less
of an emotion involves: I can be more or less afraid, angry and so on. But
the purification metaphor is one of quality. So what does it mean to have
purer fear or purer pity? The religious context is of little use to us,
because there’s no obvious analogy, in the spectator’s emotion, for the
ritual purification of a person, place or object. More so than accepting the
purge metaphor, accepting the purification metaphor in itself gives us
nothing much to work with.
One thing it might mean, of course, is that the fear or the pity is
somehowbetter. Thus, a more speculative account of catharsis has been
154 From the Stage to the World