What is Culture For? by The School of Life

Author:The School of Life [Life, The School of]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999917944
Publisher: The School of Life Press
Published: 2018-04-18T22:00:00+00:00

The idea of rescuing failure from unjust contempt lies behind one of the world’s oldest and most impressive theories of art. The idea of Tragedy was developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics (384–22 BC). In the book, Aristotle wasn’t at all pretending that individual responsibility doesn’t matter. His goal was to show that even perfectly decent people can end up in horrific situations and that therefore they deserve to be regarded with tender pity rather than disgust. It’s not that it isn’t in some way their fault. These people are not merely unlucky. But the thing in their nature that leads to their downfall isn’t in itself all that different from our own failings. To capture this crucial point, Aristotle defined their failings as harmatia or ‘flaws’ – someone is a bit impetuous, they sometimes lose their temper; they let ambition get in the way of caution; they don’t properly listen to what another person is saying. These are imperfections, but they are very common. And sometimes these flaws have terrible consequences. We might lose our temper at the worst possible moment and shout at someone who turns out to have the power to wreck our lives; a hasty decision might lead to financial ruin; or we might brush aside someone who is trying to tell us something that turns out to be really important. These are the staple moves of Greek Tragedy as analysed by Aristotle. And his point is this: those who end up in horrendous trouble haven’t necessarily got any deeper flaws in their characters than we do in our own.

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