Tragedy as Emotional Vaccination
Why would anyone enjoy tragedy in fiction while no one would like tragedies to happen to us or our friends in life? Isn’t there something perverse in the pleasure of watching people’s suffering on the screen or reading about their misfortune in a novel? Comedy, in contrast, makes more sense. What we wish for the heroes and heroines in the story, such as happy endings and good fortune, we would also like to happen in our own life.
Aristotle, in his Poetics, the earliest treatise about tragedy and fiction, coins the term catharsis to identify the effect of tragedy. The word derives from the medical procedure of cleaning, purgation, or purification. It is used to specify the pleasure we get when we shed tears for the tragic heroes and lament their misfortune. However, it is far from clear in what way catharsis is pleasant. In his Birth of Tragedy, the German philosopher Nietzsche takes a different route. He argues that people invent tragic stories not because it is pleasurable, but because we have to. We need tragedy to face our own fear, in order to be courageous, in preparation for the actual misfortune in life. As he puts it:
“The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence: in order to be able to live at all, he had to use the brilliant Olympians, born of dream, as a screen. [...] How else could that people, so sensitive in its emotions, so impetuous in its desires, so uniquely equipped for suffering, have tolerated existence, if the very same existence had not been shown to it, surrounded by a higher glory of the gods?”
-Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
He suggests that in order to cope with the suffering of life, the Greeks let heroes and gods suffer in tragedies. By sympathising with their (fictional) pain, we can better endure our own suffering. Tragedy, then, is conceived as the necessary coping mechanism. It is not entertainment at leisure, but the fundamental tool for survival. But the question is how, exactly, by seeing fictional characters’ suffering, by imitating the real pain in stories, do we better endure the actual suffering? I would like to use both Aristotle and Nietzsche’s ideas to suggest that we can understand tragedy as a form of emotional vaccination. This analogy is inspired by a podcast series “What is Tragedy?” by Oliver Talpin and Joshua Billings.
The thought goes like this: in the case of vaccination, one takes a weakened virus into one’s body, so one’s immune system can develop immunity against the actual virus. In the case of tragedy, we take the fictional suffering and pain into our experience. By sharing this experience and sympathising with it, we feel fear and pity. By facing that fear and pity, we cultivate the virtue of courage and endurance. In this way, its effect is to cultivate our ability to be steadfast against suffering. Not in the sense of being able to eliminate suffering, which is not up to us, but to be able to face it courageously when it comes.
However, for this analogy to work, we need to find the equivalent of the immune system in our emotional experience. If the body has an immune system that is able to resist harm from the external environment, what is the immune system for our emotions?
I suggest we should consider our virtues as such an immune system. Nowadays, we prefer to talk about mental health or emotional strength to capture our mental ability to cope with life. Virtues, for Aristotle, are the attitude that we have towards feelings. For example, courage is a certain attitude towards fear. It does not mean the elimination or rejection of fear, but the acceptance and endurance of fear while doing the courageous thing. Therefore, someone who is fearless is no more courageous than a coward, since the former has too little fear and the latter has too much.
In this sense, virtues are intrinsically vulnerable: they enable one to be exposed to feelings in a certain way, according to one’s personality or character. By vulnerable, I do not mean only in relation to the negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety or anger, but also positive feelings such as joy and love. In Aristotle’s understanding of emotions, it does not matter whether they give us pain or pleasure, we suffer them alike.
However, to be vulnerable does not mean to be fragile. On the contrary, to be vulnerable means to be resilient and enduring. Vulnerability, then, is the power that enables one to suffer emotions without being overwhelmed, paralysed, and destroyed by them, as much as physical health does not mean not being infected by diseases but being able to resist them.
If virtues, thus understood as the attitude and preparedness we possess towards feelings, then tragedy functions like emotional vaccination. It trains our virtue, that is, our vulnerability, by affecting us with fear and pity towards the characters in the story, just like vaccination affects us with a small dose of the virus in order to achieve immunity. Of course, the major difference is that vaccination can be effective according to the mechanism of the human body; tragedy can only work according to the mechanism of human understanding.
It takes knowledge to train our virtues. That is why feelings not only need to be felt but also understood. This understanding depends on our recognition that virtues are not the apathetic rejection of feelings, but as the reasoned acceptance of them. As much as the fully vaccinated body would give us the courage to go out and put us in possibly infectious situations; virtues, trained by tragedy, would also give us the courage to be vulnerable to emotions, to feel them adequately. It would give us the conviction to accept tragic feelings, because now we know we can take them.
In this way, we can understand why Nietzsche thinks the Greeks “knew and felt the terror and horror of life,” because only people who understand and feel the terror and horror can appreciate the courage and try to find ways to cultivate it. That is why Nietzsche says “[h]ow else could that people, so sensitive in its emotions, so impetuous in its desires, so uniquely equipped for suffering, have tolerated existence,” because to be sensitive to emotion and to be impetuous to desire makes one more vulnerable to suffering, hence, “so uniquely equipped for suffering.” Then we can also account for Aristotle’s explanation of tragic pleasure as catharsis. Just like the pleasure we have from the restoration of health after vaccination, the end of tragedy gives us pleasure because we have survived the overwhelming emotions and now we know that we can take them.
If we can face fear, we could also face what is fearful. As such, tragedy as vaccination is education and the training of emotions. It is through experiencing the full array of emotions, and accepting them as valid experiences that deserve to be understood, that we cultivate our virtues, and become who we really are.
1st/3rd image - welcome library / CC-BY