What Is Catharsis for Plato?

Catharsis (Greek katharsis) means “purification” or “cleansing”. The idea that catharsis is an emotional release brought about by watching tragedy comes from Aristotle, not Plato. Aristotle says in the Poetics that tragedy, through pity and fear, accomplishes the katharsis of such emotions (1449b24-28). Plato does not hold this view and does not use the word that way. For Plato, katharsis is the purification of the soul, either by turning it away from the body (Phaedo) or by clearing out false belief through questioning (Sophist). On tragedy and the emotions Plato in fact takes the opposite side: he fears that poetry feeds feelings rather than relieving them.

What does katharsis mean in Plato?

In ordinary Greek, katharsis and its relatives were used for religious purification, medical cleansing, and the removal of dirt. Plato takes over this vocabulary and applies it to the soul in two main passages.

1. The Phaedo (67c-69c): the soul separated from the body. Facing death, Socrates describes purification as the separation of the soul from the body as far as possible (67c-d). The philosopher spends his life practising this by refusing to be ruled by bodily pleasures and fears, and by relying on thought to reach what is real. Socrates goes on to say that virtue itself is a kind of purification (69b-c): temperance, justice, courage and wisdom, properly understood, are cleansings, and wisdom is the thing that does the purifying. The Phaedo also presents this as the preparation of the soul for what comes after death. See the Phaedo summary.

2. The Sophist (226d-231b): refutation as purification. In the last of his divisions the Eleatic Visitor arrives at an art of purifying the soul, which he hesitantly calls ‘sophistry of noble lineage’ (231a-b). Just as bodily cleansing removes what is harmful from the body, there is a purification of the soul that removes badness, and the Visitor identifies refutation (elenchus) as its highest form (230b-e). The idea is that a person cannot learn what he thinks he already knows, so the false conceit of wisdom has to be cleared away by questioning before real learning can start. This is the Socratic method described as a kind of medicine for the soul. Compare Socratic questioning and the Sophist.

What does Plato think of the emotional effects of tragedy?

Plato does talk about the effect of poetry on the emotions, but he does not call it catharsis and he does not defend it. In Republic X (603c-606d) he argues that tragic poetry feeds the part of the soul that is eager to weep and lament, a part that reason ordinarily holds in check. Watching another person’s suffering from the safety of the audience, we let that part loose, and Plato claims the habit carries over into our own lives, making us less able to bear misfortune (606a-b). Poetry, he says, “waters” the passions that ought to wither. The point is stated in the context of his larger critique of imitation; see Plato’s critique of poetry and why he might still allow poetry in a community.

Put simply, where Aristotle sees tragedy as a discharge or clarification of pity and fear, Plato sees a risk of strengthening them. How far Plato actually disagrees with Aristotle is a matter of scholarly argument, partly because Aristotle’s own meaning of katharsis is disputed.

Did Plato use the idea of emotional release anywhere?

Not as a theory of art, but there is one place where something like it appears. In the Laws (790c-791b) the Athenian discusses the rocking of restless infants and the treatment of Corybantic ritual frenzy, where wild music and movement quieten a person in a disturbed state. Plato describes a kind of therapy in which a violent inner motion is settled by another outer one. It is a ritual-and-medical observation, not an account of tragedy, and the passage does not use the word to build a theory of drama. Anyone who wants to claim it as “Plato’s catharsis” is reading Aristotle’s category back into it.

What did Aristotle mean by catharsis?

Aristotle’s Poetics (1449b24-28) defines tragedy as an imitation of a serious action that, through pity and fear, accomplishes the katharsis of such emotions. He never says exactly what he means, and later readers have proposed purgation (a medical reading), purification, and intellectual clarification. In the Politics (VIII, 1341b32-1342a16) he also mentions cathartic effects of certain kinds of music and promises to explain the term in the Poetics; the surviving text does not do so. The medical “release of pent-up feeling” reading was put forward by the nineteenth-century scholar Jacob Bernays and is part of the background to the later therapeutic use of the word.

What about “catharsis” in modern therapy?

The modern sense, a release of pent-up emotion, comes from that nineteenth-century medical reading of Aristotle and was taken up by Freud and Breuer in their early “cathartic method”. It descends from Aristotle’s term, not from Plato’s. There is no Platonic theory of emotional discharge, and connecting Plato with Freud on this point should be done with caution. For a point of real contact between them, see the tripartite soul, which Freud scholars often compare with the id, ego and superego, though the resemblance is loose.

Summary

• Catharsis as the emotional effect of tragedy is Aristotle’s idea (Poetics 1449b).
• In Plato, katharsis means purification of the soul: from the body (Phaedo 67c-69c) and from false belief by refutation (Sophist 226d-231b).
• Plato fears that tragedy strengthens unruly emotion (Republic X, 603c-606d).
• Calling Plato’s view of poetry a theory of catharsis confuses two different traditions.