“Hamnet”: Cynical Manipulation… or Just Healthy Catharsis? Could It Be Both?
Last week in the post about the film “Hamnet,” I mentioned the “debate” between Plato and Aristotle about the ability of drama and story to create an outpouring of emotion. I don’t know if they actually debated in person during their two-decade relationship. But the teacher Plato wrote extensively about the weakening effect of drama, and Aristotle responded with the claim that the “cartharsis” of tragedy and comedy is in fact healing.
Plato and Aristotle were the middle two of a 4-generation education sequence. Socrates (born about 470 BCE) taught Plato (born about 427 BCE), who taught Aristotle (born 384 BCE), who taught Alexander the Great (born 356 BCE). So we’re talking about a really consequential century of philosophy! Also, this (5th and 4th Century BCE)– was the golden era of drama– Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes were great tragedians, and Aristophanes was the great comedic dramatist.
And of course, looming over all of them was the great bard Homer (three centuries earlier), who created the epics The Iliad and The Odyssey, which profoundly shaped the Greek cultures and thought.
Now many of the literary and philosophical works of that period were lost, but those that survived are still being studied today. For example, Aristotle was the first known literary analyst, and I still use his analysis when I teach writing and reading of fiction. Homer’s works are even now continually adapted (director Christopher Nolan is filming The Odyssey for release in summer 2026, in fact). And of course the Socratic/Platonic dialogues remain foundational in philosophy. (We don’t actually have original material written by Socrates. He was a real person, but we experience him mostly as the main character in the Dialogues written by his pupil Plato. It’s a bit confusing, but we have to assume what Plato transmits is as close as we’ll get to what Socrates actually said.)
The Great Debate
So here we have the teacher/student duo of Plato and Aristotle. But while Plato revered and (presumably) faithfully echoed what his own teacher Socrates taught, Aristotle evolved a thought approach that in some ways was almost the opposite of his professor. To be quite reductive, Plato was an “idealist,” believing that the real world was a vastly imperfect reflection of “the realm of forms/ideals” like justice, beauty, and goodness, an eternal, unchanging, and perfect realm to which we can but aspire. The only way we can approach this ideal realm is through philosophy. Plato’s thought process was also “deductive,” that is, starting with a principle or general rule (like “philosophy is the way to approach the ideal”), and deducing from that what we should do (study philosophy, natch).
His pupil Aristotle, in contrast, was “inductive”– that is, looking at the real-world evidence and figuring out from that what is happening and what the result will be. (*And again, I am REductive– simplifying a complex debate!) He was reputedly the son of a physician, and something of a scientist himself, and so started with looking at what was there, analyzing it, maybe experimenting with it, and then explaining the results. From that, he came up with recommendations of how to live and how to write and how to be a good person.
Both were concerned with living a good life, but they differed on what constituted “a good life,” and how it should be achieved. And one intense point of difference was “the poetics,” which is the general term Aristotle used for drama, poetry, and story.
Both discussed the power of drama to evoke emotion in the viewers, but while Plato thought that was a bad thing (“weakening” men by making them vulnerable), Aristotle concluded it was a healthy way to process and share the traumas and tragedies inherent in the human condition.
(You can find a much better discussion of their differing understandings here at Robin Bates’s Better Living Through Beowulf blog.)
Weakness or Catharsis?
Plato’s argument centered on the weakening effect that Homer’s work might have on warriors. You might be thinking what I thought– but wait! Homer chronicled the great Greek victory over Troy! He celebrated the heroism and mastery of great warriors like Achilles and Ajax! Well, yes, but that’s not all Homer did. He showed the disguised Odysseus weeping at the blind bard’s account of his Trojan horse strategem. And Plato focused on a passage where Odysseus travels to the underworld to congratulate the dead Achilles on his fame and honor in the world above. Achilles scorns this, saying that he “would rather be a serf on the land of a poor man than rule over all the dead.”
Plato read this as a revelation that even the greatest warrior could turn craven in the end, choosing the lowliest of lives over the great honor of dying heroically. This would be a bad example to young warriors who read about Achilles’s regret and might also choose to quit being warriors. While his Socrates couldn’t bring himself to ban Homer from his imagined Republic, he did suggest revising the epics to delete the lines he considers deleterious, and adding in more morally acceptable passages. (Interesting that a philosopher devoted to “truth” would change Homer’s truth!)
So from this view, the more powerful the drama, the greater the risk that it might tempt men into “weakness,” tempting them to weep or emulate the bad actions of the characters.
In contrast, Aristotle thought that the power of drama was exactly that– to get the audience to identify with the characters, to experience their emotion, and in that way to “purge” their own sorrow and trauma. As Robin Bates explains, “Catharsis, Aristotle tells us, is brought about by a combination of pity and fear: we pity what the tragic hero is enduring and we fear that the same could happen to us. If classicist Edith Hall is right that 5th century Greek tragedy captured the conflict between individuals seeking control over their own lives and circumstances that inexorably crush them (see last Thursday’s post), then spectators felt themselves understood and therefore less alone. They were crying for themselves.”
Aristotle– the physician’s son– thought of this emotional “catharsis” as having the same benefit that physical purging (meaning using laxatives and emetics!) has on the body– eliminating toxins and blockages (emotions like unresolved grief). He also thought the character identification — the empathy– of drama was a positive, teaching us to understand other people and the human condition. He also pointed to the prospect of “imitation”, that viewers could learn from the experience of the characters in the stories.
I have to say, though I am at base an Aristotelian, I have sympathy for Plato’s position. I admire stoics, and have recently been inspired by the examples of “stiff upper lip Brits” in the show Foyle’s War, set during the Blitz: “Keep calm and carry on!” Then again, I guess that means I am with Aristotle, using the experience of fictional characters to inspire and instruct me.
What do you think? I’m afraid it’s hard to be a reader or writer of fiction without approving of the cathartic effect of good stories. Anyway, in the next post, I’ll try to show how this very debate plays out in the film “Hamnet,” and also in the varied responses in audiences.
