In Aristotle's view, human beings are doing three major things: cognition, practice and creation, which leads to three kinds of sciences: theoretical or speculative science, practical science and productive science. Theoretical science (physics, mathematics, metaphysics, etc. ) belongs to the category of cognition and is a truly self-sufficient science. Practical science (politics, ethics, etc. ) contains the purpose of action, but they do not directly guide specific production and production activities. Poetry (broadly understood as art) belongs to the category of production science or technology. The task of production science is manufacturing, and its purpose is embodied in products other than production activities. Production science is a big concept including craft and technical production (for example, shoemakers make shoes), so Aristotle further divided a smaller category called "imitation art" in it.
Aristotle's so-called "art of imitation" refers to the art with aesthetic value in a strict sense, such as epic, painting, music, tragedy, comedy, De Sulanbos (a kind of celebration song and dance to worship Dionysus) and so on (the first chapter of Poetics). The so-called "imitation" refers to the function of art to reproduce real life, that is, to imitate "human actions and life" (Chapter VI of Poetics).
Then, Aristotle distinguished drama from other art categories according to media, objects and methods. Regarding the media, he said that "some people imitate with colors and shapes" (painters and sculptors), "some people imitate with the help of sounds" (singers and chanters), some people imitate only with rhythm (dance) and epic "only with language", while drama "uses all the above media, namely rhythm, aria and metrical text". Regarding the object of imitation, he pointed out the different selectivity of various arts in expressing characters (people who are better than ordinary people, people who are worse than ordinary people, ordinary people). Even within the drama, the imitators of tragedy and comedy are different. "Comedy tends to behave worse than today, and tragedy tends to behave better than today." As for the way of imitation, he said that epics "can be narrated as well as entered into characters", while other poets except Homer "tell in their own tone without changing their identity", while drama requires actors to "imitate the characters in action with actions" (Chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Poetics).
In this way, Aristotle distinguished drama from other art categories through cocoon analysis, thus revealing the basic characteristics of drama-"imitating people in action and doing something."
His definition of tragedy is this:
Tragedy is an imitation of a serious, complete and long action. Its medium is "decorative" language, which is used in different forms in different parts of the play. Its imitation mode relies on the actions of characters, not narration, and alleviates these emotions by arousing pity and fear.
In this definition, Aristotle poured his profound and rational thinking on tragedy into a long sentence. We might as well try to break it down a little:
Tragedy is an imitation of an action. The general criteria for choosing this action are seriousness (different from comedy), integrity and a certain length;
Language is an important means of expression and the main medium of tragedy;
Language is used in different forms in different parts of the play (prologue, chorus, play, chorus and exit);
With the help of actors' performances, tragedy is the basic way of presentation;
The main function of tragedy is to ease feelings and achieve this goal by arousing the audience's pity and fear.
Obviously, this is a very complete definition of tragedy. What I am most interested in and want to analyze is the last sentence: Alleviate these feelings by arousing pity and fear (the word alleviate is translated as "purification" by Mr. Luo Niansheng).
Aristotle reached the above conclusion after carefully examining the psychological state of the tragic audience. He believes that tragedy should arouse the pity and fear of the audience, which further reveals the essence of tragedy from the psychological effect. In this sense, Aristotle's poetic thought or drama theory already contains audience psychology and reception aesthetics.
In the thirteenth chapter of Poetics, he explained pity and fear like this:
The object of pity is people who have suffered misfortunes that they should not have suffered, and fear arises because people who have suffered misfortunes are people like us.
So, what are the characteristics of the people referred to here?
Aristotle believes that a successful tragic figure should have the following characteristics:
"The unfortunate people are similar to themselves", but "better than today's people";
"Moral quality is not the best", that is, not a perfect person;
"The misfortune of the characters is not because of their own evil, but because they have made some serious mistakes";
"Don't suffer misfortune, but suffer misfortune".
That is to say, a good man who is close to the audience, but one level better than the audience, and at the same time imperfect, has suffered a tragic situation that he should not suffer because of some fault, which is the characteristic of Aristotle's ideal tragic figure. Such a character is a good tragic character. Because even if a heinous person suffers some kind of frustration, "it may cause sympathy, but it cannot cause pity and fear." If the wicked deserve it, they can't even arouse people's sympathy, but applaud, and it becomes a comedy. On the other hand, if this person who is better than ordinary people has no flaws in both subjective actions and personality, and is only a purely accidental trouble, it must be superficial and cannot cause real shock to people.
Moreover, pity and fear are the psychological characteristics of the audience when they appreciate the tragedy, not the purpose of the tragedy. The purpose of tragedy is to sublimate and alleviate the audience's feelings by arousing their pity and fear.
Tears, sighs and fears should fill the audience who watched the tragedy, but when the audience left the theater after watching the tragedy, they should not continue to be in tears, sighs and fears. They should be more calm than when they are at the theatre, and this calmness should be more holy than before entering the theatre.
This kind of sacredness must experience pity and fear, and not stop at the emotional sublimation of pity and fear.
In contrast, Aristotle talked about tragedy as well as comedy. In fact, according to the author's explanation in the sixth chapter of Poetics, comedy was supposed to be discussed in detail in the future, but unfortunately it has long been lost. However, in the existing poetics, there are also many introductions about the characteristics of comedy, and most of them are compared with tragedy.
For example, he thinks that "tragedy describes people who are better than the average person, and comedy imitates people who are worse than the average person"; "Comedy imitates inferior people; These people are not evil gangsters-being funny is just a sign of ugliness. Funny things, or contain fallacies, or ugly, but will not cause pain or harm to people. A ready-made example is the comedian's mask. Although ugly and strange, it will not bring pain. " (Chapter 5 of Poetics)
Here, the author reveals that comedy characters are "inferior" and "funny" rather than bad, and comedy ugliness is not evil and will not bring people pain. Comedy is more suitable for a happy ending: "The biggest enemies in comedy, such as Orestes and Ecclesiastes, can all become good friends in the end, and no one kills or is killed". He believes that "the pleasure generated in this way is not the pleasure of tragedy. This structure is more suitable for comedy. " Because he didn't pay attention to comedy at that time, Aristotle also took a more contemptuous attitude towards comedy.
Today, we know that although comedies are usually interesting, there are many ironies behind them. After laughing, people sometimes feel ill and feel pain. This is what Aristotle did not write.
Note: This article mainly refers to Poetics translated by Mr. Chen Zhongmei and Historical Draft of Drama Theory by Yu.