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Katharsis as Clarification: an Objection Answered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Leon Golden
Affiliation:
Florida State University

Extract

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1973

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References

page 45 note 1 See Russell, D. A. and Winter-bottom, M., Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford, 1972), PP. 86–7.Google Scholar

page 45 note 2 See Golden, L., ‘Catharsis’, T.A.P.A. xciii (2962), 5160Google Scholar, and ‘ Mimesis and Catharsis’, C.P. lxiv (2969), 145–53.Google Scholar

page 45 note 3 Op. cit. 87–8. See especially n. 2, p. 88.

page 46 note 1 Zeller, E., Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Hildesheim, 1963), ii. 2. 784.Google Scholar