Aristotle and Schopenhauer's views on Tragedy and Life

 

Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa (by Hokusai)

Like many other relationships between teacher and student throughout history, the newer generations will always try to break the prior's paradigm. Sometimes the prior ideas were important and influential but no longer as relevant for the context of the future generation.

In the case of Aristotle and Plato, we see how the world of figures or forms offered a permanent influence on Philosophy; in a way, we all have to have an idea of something in order to recognize it in the real world. I wished that Plato was able to see our current technology in which the world of forms is expressed in the many virtual and 3d shapes we create for our convenience in the 21st century.

Human relations on the other hand are not as easily identifiable. Children are usually able to know how to respond to a particular situation by observing the behavior of 'others' and there is not a world of reference that we could look for in order to deliver an appropriate response. Social learning is usually obtained by observation, most of the qualitative research is performed by understanding or copying what others do or say.

Here is when Aristotle offers a viable solution to the problem: Tragedy. Contrary to Plato's opposition to arts and performance, Aristotle was clearly more connected to the way people learned many social behaviors and responses and he saw art and tragedy as an outlet for our daily accumulation of emotions. Through this week's assignments, I totally understood the sentence "Life imitates art" and vice versa; many of the plays, television shows, and documentaries offer us scenarios to which we have not been exposed, and offer particular social learning that we can definitively imitate.

In this line of thought, Art becomes a means to learn about life without the harm of life itself. Another interesting thing is that in a tragedy the plot is more important than the characters in the play, overall, if we are to understand an entire moral of a story, the story itself has to be meaningful to our life more than the existence or nonexistence of the characters contained in it.

The tragedy is meant to stir up the emotions, make us involved in the story and particularly with the main character who is meant to be a "non-perfect" hero for whom one defect turns around his own fate. The process of identification and emotional soup in which we find ourselves involved is called catharsis.

My closest connection in the subject of tragedy and art is Arthur Schopenhauer's interpretation. He sees art as an emotional release and salvation from suffering. I see it in the same way, art evokes catharsis but also can dissolve us into its magnificence. In the same way, when we walk by the shore, we feel small and insignificant by the tenacity and strength of the ocean, art has the power to change us from within.

That sensation of the ocean is probably what Schopenhauer associated with 'The sublime'. There is definitively a battle inside our minds, wondering if we indeed are as insignificant as we perceive; then we recognize that we are able to contemplate and make such assumptions and thoughts and that brings a strong sense of reflection in me, over life and how mundane matters (like missing the bus) are insignificant compared to what the world can offer us: art in every possible way.

The views of tragedy as learning (Aristotle) and tragedy as the feeling of the sublime (Schopenhauer) are both complementary to one another. The best example of their union is in films. We can both appreciate the vulnerabilities of the human spirit while also contemplating the magnificence of what is superior to us, and how our fate happens to be part of this large schema of things. Art can bring us to higher grounds or drop us in pity and fear, and such reflections or contemplations are important in a world where obtaining material things and money has become the norm.