In my philosophy circle we are slowing reading Aristotle’s Nicomachaean Ethics, which is one of my favorite books. The conversation inspired the following reflection;
Theater, as I know you all know, began as a ritual for Dionysos. Tragedy, especially, has very spiritual purposes. It is a ritual to cleanse miasma, spiritual pollution, both from the individuals in the audience and from the society as a whole. Katharsis literally means “to clean.” During the performance of a tragedy, it moves the audience from phobos to eleos. The idea of this is that the natural, instinctual reaction to witnessing suffering is phobos, which is fear/revulsion. This is completely related to contamination revulsion and was understood to be part of our animal-instinct. So, that is our natural reaction to seeing suffering…to move away. But what they considered to be the higher human response to suffering is eleos, which is translated as pity. They did not think of this like sometimes we do as having an air of superiority. In this sense, to have pity means that in the face of suffering you have an inner desire to move towards the one who is suffering rather than away from them. It can obviously lead towards a desire to help, but often in the tragedies no one has the ability to actually help. The most important thing—the spiritually human thing—to do, is to move towards the one who is suffering and be there with them instead of moving away from them.
Gwendolyn Reece 