What do you think Aristotle meant when he said, ‘pleasure proper to tragedy’? Explain with reference to the essays in your course.

 It is doubtful whether Aristotle can be said to have a concept of aesthetic pleasure in anything like the modern sense of ‘aesthetic’. (He does, of course, have the concept of pleasure that is aisthêtikos in the classical sense of the word – that is, related to perception: EE 1220b13f.; DA 431a10f.; Phys. 247a16f.) Nor does Aristotle have a clearly demarcated category that corresponds to the modern concept of ‘art’. It is true that he habitually groups together many of the things that we would classify as art-painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry. But the shared feature which for Aristotle makes this a coherent grouping is imitation or representation (mimêsis, to which similarity is essential: these activities all, in Aristotle’s view, involve making likenesses). The fact that this requires a narrower definition of ‘poetry’ than is normal in either ancient or modern usage (Poet. 1447b9-23) is one indication that the match between Aristotle’s grouping and the modern classification is not perfect. Moreover, imitation is also a feature of activities, such as children’s play-acting games, which do not fall within Aristotle’s grouping. The continuity between the activities within the group and other human activities (which is an important feature of Aristotle’s theory) makes it impossible to define a pleasure that is distinctive to ‘artistic’ imitative activities. The pleasure which the activities within Aristotle’s grouping occasion simply by virtue of their being imitations will also be present in non-artistic imitation.

Nevertheless, although Aristotle does not have the concept of a distinctively aesthetic pleasure, pleasure does play an important role in what (for convenience) we may refer to as Aristotle’s ‘aesthetics’–that is, his thinking about the activities that fall within the group of imitative activities that corresponds roughly to the modern category of ‘art’.

Pleasure Proper To Tragedy

      The analysis of pleasure provides Aristotle with a number of resources for aesthetics. First, it can be used to make the activities in question anthropologically intelligible. By showing that the capacity or capacities which an activity exercises are part of human nature Aristotle can explain why human beings engage in that activity and find it pleasurable. This can be seen clearly in Chapter 4 of the Poetics, where two features of human nature are cited to explain poetry. The first is the instinct for imitation (1448b4-9); the second is the instinct for melody and rhythm. Aristotle states here that the imitative instinct differentiates human beings from other animals, and it is clear from another context that he also regarded the instinct to take pleasure in ordered sound as distinctively human .

Secondly, the concept of characteristic pleasure gives Aristotle a way of differentiating between different kinds of artistic activity. All are imitative, and since imitation is the exercise of a natural human disposition this makes them inherently pleasurable for human beings. But this pleasure is common to all imitative activity (including non-artistic ones); we have to push the analysis further to understand the range of diverse artistic activities that exist. Each exercises a distinctive additional set of capacities, and therefore has its own characteristic pleasure.

That point, thirdly, gives us a critical tool that can be used to determine what is appropriate to each kind of imitation. This has both an empirical and a normative dimension. Observing the participants in a given kind of artistic imitation (producers, performers and recipients) and the kinds of pleasure they derive from it allows one to determine what natural capacities and dispositions are being exercised. That in turn provides a basis for deductions about the best way to construct an imitation of that kind. So, for example, identifying the characteristic pleasure of tragedy (‘the poet should produce the pleasure which comes from pity and fear through imitation’) makes it possible to deduce the appropriate means of achieving that pleasure (the plot, not spectacle) and also opens the way to deductions about the kind of events most suitable to a tragic plot. 

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