“The relationship with the other” can perhaps sum up many of the problems we face in the era of identities.
The earliest cultural response to this issue might be Aristotle’s. Indeed, the “master,” who wrote “The Poetics” 150 years after the era of Athenian tragedies, took the opposite position of Plato, who expelled the poets from his ideal republic because they misrepresented reality, suggesting that we “do away with the wailings and lamentations of men of repute.”
Plato did not believe in art that represents and mimics reality, seeing it as nothing more than imitation (mimesis) and deception. As for Aristotle, he saw otherness and the representation of others as being behind imitation. At the outset of his book, he argues that they make representation possible.
However, if poetry is imitation, that does not mean it is the replication of what is being imitated. Rather, poetry fictionalizes its subject from another vantage point. This instinct is ingrained within beings since childhood. It enables them to learn to speak and walk by imitating those older than them. If this learning brings benefit and joy, then works of imitation, like art, painting, and sculpture, certainly should make us happy.
Otherness, on the other hand, cannot be isolated from social responsibility and a vision for refining how the city-state operates.
Plato believed that the citizens of the republic would feel sadness and harmful negative emotions upon seeing the protagonist desperate and despondent. As for theater in which fathers and mothers are killed, it leaves the audience overwhelmed by a desire for revenge. In contrast, Aristotle’s concern was demonstrating that poetry and theater can play an instructive role in society, while presenting tragedy in particular is “an imitation of an action that is serious and complete.”
Yes, poetry and drama could stir sharp emotions, but we do not carry these emotions into our daily lives. Rather, through contemplation, sympathy and fear, we turn to catharsis and free ourselves of the nightmare of these emotions.
Centuries later, Freud and his colleague Joseph Breuer integrated this idea of “catharsis” into their psychoanalysis and developed it.
Indeed, literature, according to Aristotle, offers us a domain in which we can experience powerful emotions before getting them out of our system. Thus, the death of a character on the stage in front of us deters us from killing more than it encourages us to.
Since catharsis makes us sympathize with the tragic hero and fear ending up in a similar situation, it is a painful, traumatic process. However, it is healthy, just like the comfort one feels after crying because of a scene that evokes strong emotions.
In fairness, before Aristotle, this instructive assignment was an Athenian national sport that brought the rulers and the ruled together. At the time, in the sixth century BC, the authorities closed official buildings and suspended the activities of the courts to allow residents to watch the plays that were followed by a debate and dialogue that included 20,000 spectators.
The audience’s primary motivations were educational and therapeutic: They knew how the story would develop because the tragedies were based on tales and myths familiar to the ancient Greeks. Even those who had never heard of the story would be familiarized with it by the “chorus” at the beginning of the play. They thus did not watch these plays to follow the story or to find out how it ends, but rather to think and reflect.
And since the subject matter is serious, it had to be dealt with seriously. And so, in contrast to how they would subsequently go on to be glorified, especially in the romantic era, violence and killing on stage were forbidden.
Aristotle was not a fan of melodrama, as he believed that it trivialized tragedies, in which entertainment ought to be constrained by the plot of the tragic action. The action takes precedence over the protagonists of the play who, despite their eloquent speeches, are not behind the catharsis and reflection, the sequence of events is.
The otherness is pushed further and further in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy, as his book was among the very first works of literary criticism (the volume about comedy is not available to us).
Works cannot be considered tragic without a central protagonist who makes a mistake that is difficult to correct and leaves him in a miserable situation. However, it evokes sympathy for him and fear of meeting the same fate ourselves if we were to make the same mistakes.
Our fear for ourselves and sympathy for the tragic hero are part of a single process that gives rise to a strong sense of responsibility and the role of human action: while the tragic hero fails to benefit from waking up to his mistake late on (anagnorisis) or to rectify it, the reflective audience can. So long as the mistakes are the result of human action, they can be resolved through different human actions.
Here, we always see transformations propelled by human action repudiating essentialism. Tragedies usually involve becoming aware of the falsehood of what had previously been considered certainties. As the plot develops, the moment Aristotle called peripeteia emerges, reversing the previous course of events, changing the world of the play, and pushing the hero in a different direction.
For this reason, it was vital that citizens watch tragedies on a regular basis to resist their powerful tendency to make predetermined judgments of others and give empty moralistic sermons.
This identification with the experiences of the other, the sense of responsibility for what unites us, and sympathy for those who err and learn from their mistakes go against the actions popularized by ideological parties, tabloids, and some on social media, especially arguments that descend into slander, in which those who claim to speak the “truth” rush to paint everyone who disagrees with them as a traitor and relish in schadenfreude when others make mistakes.
Twenty-five centuries ago, Aristotle presented us with a laudable vision. This would not have happened if the Athenians had not been politicians who used tragedies as a mediator that helped them flip things on their heads, that is, to move their perspective to one side and put themselves in the position of the other.
For example, Aeschylus, who died before Aristotle was born, wrote a tragic work called “The Persians” eight years after the defeat of the Persian invaders in the Battle of Salamis. Despite the fact that he probably fought in the war, Aeschylus was able to see it through his opponent’s eyes and present it to the Athenians from his enemies' perspectives.
This thinking of the other, with him, and about him has become among the most prominent concerns of contemporary political thought, though it is among the most marginal of politics and politicians’ concerns.
