Mimesis and Katharsis

Abstract

HE long and as yet unresolved debate T over the real meaning of Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis continues vigorously today. If ultimate truth has not yet been achieved, our understanding, at least, of important aesthetic problems has become sharper as we have debated the merits and flaws of the various interpretations of Aristotle's enigmatic doctrine that have been put forward. The present paper is a resumption of an argument presented in an earlier article in which Aristotle's use of catharsis in the Poetics was reinterpreted to mean clarification.' Subsequent to the writing of that article I found that a version of the intellectual interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis had been made by a German scholar, S. 0. Haupt, in a monograph published in 1915.2 Haupt associated some sound arguments with other rather eccentric ones, and his work, virtually unknown today, has had no effect on the mainstream of criticism of the Poetics. Also, in an article published in 1966, H. D. F. Kitto, who does not mention and