Introduction
The topic of ‘virtuous emotions’ might not seem the most obvious choice for a play featuring an unfaithful husband and a child-killing mother. Nonetheless, what I intend to consider here is how the emotional responses of various characters in the Medea shape our view of their moral character. The moral role of the emotions was clear to the ancient Greeks and, after a long interlude largely dominated by the idea that, as Kant claimed in The Metaphysics of Morals, ‘no moral principle is based…on any feeling whatsoever’,Footnote 1 moral philosophy of the past half-century or so has returned to seeing the emotions as a central part of human experience and ethical evaluation.
The emergence of ‘virtue ethics’ in particular has promoted the superiority of ancient, especially Aristotelian, views of the emotions over Kant's account of them as non-rational impulses. As Rosalind Hursthouse argues, the Aristotelian acknowledgement of the moral importance of the emotions relies on three basic claims:
(1) The virtues (and vices) are morally significant.
(2) The virtues (and vices) are all dispositions not only to act, but to feel emotions, as reactions as well as impulses to action. (Aristotle says again and again that the virtues are concerned with actions and feelings.)
(3) In the person with the virtues, these emotions will be felt on the right occasions, towards the right people or objects, for the right reasons.Footnote 2
To similar effect, the influential work of Bernard Williams has not only demonstrated the ethical implications of the fact that people are often subject to the power of their emotions, but has also championed the enduring relevance of Greek tragedy in particular for its portrayal of human psychology, emotion, and moral evaluation.Footnote 3
The first word of Greek literature that survives is mēnis (‘anger’) and, as the Iliad amply illustrates, the proper handling of emotion is central to a good and happy life. Like epic, tragedy's representation of, and appeal to, the emotions was central to its impact and popularity. Plato's exclusion of these prestigious and popular genres (epic and tragedy) from his ideal state was partly due to their depiction and arousal of emotion (Resp. 2.376d–3.400c), whereas Aristotle famously argued that their emotional impact was both beneficial and an essential part of their appeal (see, for example, Poet. 1449b24–8, 1453a1–13 on pity, fear, and catharsis). What I want to do here is to show that tragedy prefigures Aristotle in the sense that emotions are shown to be universal and intrinsic to us as humans, but not per se good or bad: it all depends on who feels them, and for what reasons. The problematic emotions of the Medea are expressions of broken human relationships – a breakdown which is the hallmark of tragedy and the source of its capacity both to horrify and to educate the audience.
What is an emotion in ancient Greek terms? Despite their many differences, Plato and Aristotle agreed that emotions involve beliefs as well as feelings – thus anger, for example, is a combination of a painful feeling and a belief that one has been wronged.Footnote 4 They also saw emotions as responses to external, especially social, situations and stimuli. Here too, ancient ideas have resurfaced in modern studies of emotion by philosophers and psychologists, most of whom now avoid purely behavioural accounts and instead see emotions as forms of intelligent, cognitive engagement with the world.Footnote 5 It is also widely accepted that emotions are simultaneously both neurophysiological processes and cultural constructs, since we and our brains are shaped by experience and have genes that are switched on or off by our environment. And just as the extent to which our emotions are shaped by our socio-cultural environment is now much better recognized by psychologists and philosophers, so too in moral philosophy and the history of ethical theory there is a parallel movement towards the idea that morality is best understood as part of the values and beliefs of specific communities rather than as an abstract, universal system of evaluation.Footnote 6 In short, the emotions are for us, as for the Greeks, ‘evaluative responses to external, typically social, states of affairs’.Footnote 7
What role, then, do the emotions play in our ethical judgements? What makes a particular emotion virtuous or not? For Aristotle, as we will see in a moment, the right emotional reactions are an essential part of the virtues. In that case, when we come to interpret the behaviour of characters in tragedy, their emotional reactions will act as a guide for how we should perceive and judge them. What emotions, then, do the various characters, especially Medea and Jason, display in the course of the play? And how do these emotions influence our evaluation of their character and conduct?
Perhaps the first thing to note is the pattern of emotional crisis and excess which is typical of the genre: tragedy deals with fraught situations and unbalanced emotions, and its monarcho-aristocratic protagonists are prone to excesses of all kinds, including their emotions. As the Nurse says in the opening scene of the Medea (119–21):
For Aristotle, the virtuous person has attained balance and appropriateness in her emotions. Indeed, his famous doctrine of the mean embraces the emotions (Eth. Nic. 2.6.1106b16–23):
By virtue I mean moral virtue since it is this that is concerned with feelings and actions, and these involve excess, deficiency and a mean. It is possible, for example, to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and pleasure and pain generally, too much or too little; and both of these are wrong. But to have these feelings at the right times on the right grounds towards the right people for the right motive and in the right way is to feel them to an intermediate, that is to the best, degree; and this is the mark of virtue.Footnote 9
So, for example, a person who did not get angry if she or her loved ones were insulted would be culpably deficient; but excessive anger is equally bad, and the ideal condition is ‘mildness’ (praotēs: see Arist. Eth. Nic. 2.7.1108a4–9). However, median or virtuous emotions, where a person's reactions are entirely appropriate to the situation, would probably lead to some pretty dull plays, since tragic drama is powered by conflict, excess, and mistakes. The protagonists of tragedy display many virtuous character traits, including justified anger, but typically their intense and excessive emotions lead to catastrophe and suffering for themselves and their loved ones.
My aim here is to look at a defined range of the most prominent emotions in the Medea. As we shall see, the emotions discussed – jealousy, love, gratitude, anger, grief, and pity – all have a doubly evaluative significance: for they are, as emotions, evaluative reactions to the evolving state of affairs in the (dramatic) world, and they also guide us (the audience) in judging the actions and character of the figures onstage. But before we turn to specific emotions, it is important to acknowledge the challenges of studying emotion in other societies and other languages. Greek terms like philia and charis have a semantic range that differs from the English words typically used to translate them (e.g. ‘love’ or ‘gratitude’), yet the lack of exact correspondence does not make comparison impossible, since there is enough overlap between Greek and English emotion terms to make analysis possible. In any case, we have no choice but to use our own language to analyse and interpret the terms used by other cultures. The best we can do is to be sensitive to the cultural differences, bearing in mind that different societies divide up the spectrum of emotions in slightly different (though largely overlapping) ways.Footnote 10
Jealousy
Let us start by considering in more detail one of the most important emotions in the play, namely jealousy. Right away we are confronted by the importance of language. In his seminal book on the emotions in ancient Greece, David Konstan not only argues for the absence of an equivalent term for our ‘jealousy’ in classical Greek, but also claims that ‘The very concept…may have been lacking.’Footnote 11 Although the closely equivalent term zēlotypia is not attested until the fourth century bc, this does not mean that the concept of jealousy was unknown in Greek culture before then. Such a prescriptive focus on a single Greek term is misleading and lies behind Konstan's implausible claim that jealousy plays no significant role in tragedy and women are not portrayed as jealous in this genre.Footnote 12 What about Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Sophocles’ Deianeira, let alone Medea? Konstan argues that ‘The motive of Euripides’ Medea…is not so much jealousy as anger at Jason's violation of his oaths and his want of gratitude for her services.’Footnote 13 He adds, ‘Medea's [concern] is focused throughout on the threat to her welfare, not on her amorous sensibilities.’Footnote 14
Unfortunately, the absence of the term zēlotypia has blinded Konstan to the fundamental role played by jealousy in Medea's decision to seek revenge. This is made clear by the Chorus and Aegeus as well as by Jason and Medea. The Chorus try to comfort the wailing Medea (155–9):
They describe Jason as ‘her evil-wedded husband, traitor to her bed’ (207), and sympathize with Medea: ‘you've lost your marriage-bed, your bed's unmanned…another queen rules in your marriage-bed, another is the mistress of your house’ (436–8, 443–5). Aegeus, too, condemns Jason's decision to leave Medea for another woman (692–5):
Μη. ἀδικεῖ μ’ Ἰάσων οὐδὲν ἐξ ἐμοῦ παθών.
Αι. τί χρῆμα δράσας; φράζε μοι σαφέστερον.
Μη. γυναῖκ’ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν δεσπότιν δόμων ἔχει.
Αι. οὔ που τετόλμηκ’ ἔργον αἴσχιστον τόδε;
Medea: Jason's unjust to me, though I've done him no harm.
Aegeus: What has he done? Tell me more clearly what occurred.
Medea: A woman over me is mistress in his house.
Aegeus: No! Has he really dared this shamefullest of deeds?
And Medea herself ends her first speech to the Chorus, in which she wins them over to her side, by saying (263–6):
Jason, meanwhile, tries to present Medea's jealousy as a typically female obsession with sex (555–6, 569–73):
The charge of ‘merely sexual’ jealousy is directly rebutted by Medea (1367–8):
Ια. λέχους σφε κἠξίωσας οὕνεκα κτανεῖν;
Μη. σμικρὸν γυναικὶ πῆμα τοῦτ’ εἶναι δοκεῖς;
Jason: And you saw fit to kill them [the children] for a marriage-bed?
Medea: You think a woman finds this torment trivial?
These statements concerning sexual insult and sexual jealousy are important (see also 998–1001), because they show that, although both the Chorus and Medea are no less focused on the dishonour done to Medea's social status as wife and mother by Jason's decision to leave her (e.g. 208–9, 659–62), they are relentless in insisting on the genuine importance and legitimacy of sexual jealousy as grounds for outrage and complaint. The Chorus's final lines of lyric in the play are significant in this respect too (1290–2):
These lines are delivered just after we hear the children's screams as they are murdered inside the house. The focus on the bed, at this horrific climax, underlines its importance, while Jason's immediate entry at line 1293 reminds us that his infidelity was the catalyst for the children's death.
A recent book on ‘virtuous emotions’ displays a blindness to sexual jealousy that recalls that of David Konstan. Kristján Kristjánsson remarks that
discussions of jealousy within psychology seem to have become more nuanced of late than they were for most of the twentieth century when the prevailing discourse was preoccupied with sexual jealousy, arguably the least philosophically complex and morally interesting form of jealousy.Footnote 15
As the Medea shows, however, sexual jealousy does not have to be philosophically complex to be morally interesting.Footnote 16 To deny the role of jealousy in the Medea (as does Konstan), or to dismiss the emotion as ‘merely sexual’ (as do Jason and Kristjánsson in their different ways), is to miss a fundamental aspect of Medea's motivation. It also obscures the basic appropriateness of Medea's emotional reaction to being replaced by another woman. Medea's erotic desire for Jason is certainly problematic: as the Nurse makes clear at the very start of the play, Medea's state of being ‘heart-struck with passionate desire for Jason’ (8) has proved to be a mistake. Nonetheless, her feelings of jealousy are shown to be both legitimate and admirable. In contrast to Kristjánsson, Peter Toohey's study of jealousy rejects the view that ‘the emotion is utterly abhorrent – a product of a warped character, unhinged fury or actual mental illness’, and he notes jealousy's role in ‘protecting relationships [and]…maintaining fair treatment’.Footnote 17 As Euripides makes clear, Medea's sexual jealousy may be (in Greek terms) stereotypically female, but it is also motivated by a desire to protect her closest relationships, and her demand for ‘fair treatment’ (that is, to be respected as both wife and mother and not to be supplanted in either role) is fully justified.
Love
Turning now to the feelings of love or affection (philia) that are supposed to unite husband and wife, and parents and children, it is clear that Jason is emotionally deficient in both relationships. In the opening scene the Nurse condemns Jason (16–18):
And again (82–4):
The Chorus, too, condemn Jason's breach of philia in language that evokes Hesiod's picture of the corrupt Iron Age (439–41; cf. Hes. Op. 190–4, 197–200):
And when the Chorus curse the man who fails to honour his philoi (659–62) –
– they do so just as Aegeus enters the stage, providing Medea with a refuge, a crucial element in her developing revenge plan.
According to Aristotle, ‘parents love their children as part of themselves’ (Eth. Nic. 8.12.1161b18) and ‘Children…are a bond between parents…For the children are an asset common to them both, and common possession is cohesive’ (Eth. Nic. 8.12.1162a.27–9). The contrasting emotions displayed by Medea and Jason towards their sons are indicative of their moral character. When the Tutor reports that Creon has decided to banish both Medea and the children from Corinth, the Nurse asks in disbelief (74–7):
Τρ. καὶ ταῦτ’ Ἰάσων παῖδας ἐξανέξεται
πάσχοντας, εἰ καὶ μητρὶ διαφορὰν ἔχει;
Πα. παλαιὰ καινῶν λείπεται κηδευμάτων,
κοὐκ ἔστ’ ἐκεῖνος τοῖσδε δώμασιν φίλος.
Nurse: Even if Jason's quarrelled with their mother, will
he stand by while his children suffer in this way?
Tutor: New family ties have taken over from the old;
that man is not a friend toward this house of ours.
And indeed Jason seems quite content to be separated from his children and makes no attempt whatsoever to change Creon's mind. By contrast, Medea's love for her children is intense: it makes her choice of revenge especially harrowing, and the suppression of maternal love gives her famous monologue (1021–80) its overwhelming emotional power. As Bernard Williams observed, ‘For some scholars, the famous final speech does not belong to the play. Their proposals offer a striking example of the pretensions of textual criticism when it is not controlled by a sense of its function.’Footnote 18 Medea's vacillation between decisiveness and despair (she changes her mind on whether to kill or spare the children several times – yes/no/yes/no/yes) is emotionally credible and appropriate to the enormity of her act, which violates the most fundamental bonds of philia – as Aristotle says, ‘Friendship between relations appears to be of several different kinds, but they all seem to be ultimately derived from parental affection’ (Eth. Nic. 8.12.1161b16–17). However, although Medea claims to live by the traditional ethics of helping friends and harming enemies, she fails to live up to her own morality, murdering her closest philoi.
Gratitude
Let us now turn to the feeling of gratitude, an emotion whose deficiency further demonstrates Jason's injustice to his dependents. In his discussion of gratitude, Aristotle describes a scenario which works well as a description of Medea's crucial role at Colchis in helping Jason retrieve the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by a great serpent (Rh. 2.7.1385a19–21; cf. Medea 480–2):
The favour is great if the recipient is in urgent need, or if what he needs is important and difficult, or if the conditions in which the favour is bestowed are important and difficult, or if the benefactor is the only one to help, or the first to do so, or the driving force.Footnote 19
In addition to her role as Jason's saviour and helper, Medea has borne him sons, fulfilling a wife's most important familial and social role, so is owed all due consideration by him. However, a notable characteristic of Jason is his materialistic approach to his duties as husband and father. In each of his major exchanges with Medea he offers her and his sons money (see 461–2, 559–61, 610–12) rather than the reciprocity of charis. Aristotle argues that what holds people and communities together is ‘proportionate reciprocity’ (Eth. Nic. 5.5.1132b33–33a5): ‘It is proportionate reciprocity that holds the state together…this is the distinguishing mark of gratitude, because it is right both to repay a service to a benefactor and at another time to take the initiative in benefaction.’
In other words, gratitude involves the return of good for good, but Jason has no feeling for this essential emotion of justice.Footnote 20 In place of genuine good, he offers a material substitute, as if this could compensate Medea, who sacrificed so much for him (her native land, her parental home, her own brother). As it happens, Jason's interest in money is matched by his new bride: she cannot resist the gifts (an embroidered robe and golden crown) brought by Jason's sons, and switches in an instant from hating the children to accepting them (1156–7):
Messenger: And when she saw the finery, she yielded and
praised everything her husband said.
Jason's materialism is also expressed in his passion (erōs) for social advancement (697–700):
Αι. πότερον ἐρασθεὶς ἢ σὸν ἐχθαίρων λέχος;
Μη. μέγαν γ’ ἔρωτα⋅ πιστὸς οὐκ ἔφυ φίλοις.
Αι. ἴτω νυν, εἴπερ, ὡς λέγεις, ἐστὶν κακός.
Μη. ἀνδρῶν τυράννων κῆδος ἠράσθη λαβεῖν.
Aegeus: Was it from passion, or from hatred of your bed [that he has taken another wife]?
Medea: A mighty passion; he's unfaithful to his friends.
Aegeus: Forget him, if he is as evil as you say.
Medea: His passion was to tie his family to the king's.
Obsessed with his own personal advancement, Jason ignores the extent to which his success depends on Medea and on his luck in meeting her in the first place. The moral relevance of external luck was recognized by Aristotle. For Plato (and the Stoics), virtue is necessary and sufficient for flourishing or happiness (eudaimonia). For Aristotle, by contrast, virtue is necessary but not sufficient for eudaimonia – one also needs external goods (wealth, power, family, friends, abilities, and so forth) which are a matter of luck (see, for example, Eth. Nic. 4.3.1124a21–4).Footnote 21 As usual, Aristotle is closer to the truth, and what makes Jason's attitude so infuriating is his inability to realize how lucky he has been. His flourishing has been secured by Medea (see 475–98), hence the particular outrage of his ingratitude.
Anger
One of the most important and pervasive emotions in the play (as indeed in many tragedies) is anger.Footnote 22 Jason tries to dismiss Medea's anger as merely the overreaction of a typically emotional woman (446–7; see also 589–90):
and again (614–15):
But it is made clear that Medea's anger is the right response to being humiliated and dishonoured. As Aristotle notes, ‘to put up with insults to oneself, and overlook those done to one's friends, is servile’ (Eth. Nic. 4.5.1126a7–8). Medea's right to feel angry is underlined by the heroic language of injured honour used to describe her condition (20, 33, 438, etc.); and her response, in line with the heroic code of retaliation, is to return harm for harm (807–10):
However, the risks and problems inherent in the heroic code of retaliation are clear from the very start of the Greek literary tradition. The anger that propels an individual to seek revenge may be, as Achilles puts it, ‘far sweeter than trickling honey, swelling like smoke in the breasts of men’ (Il. 18.109–10), but, as the Iliad itself shows, such wrathful vengeance has the potential to create as many problems as it solves. In tragedy the fifth-century Athenian audience repeatedly observe the disastrous consequences of heroic revenge and are encouraged to appreciate the benefits of their own social and legal processes.Footnote 23 The futility and dangers of private revenge are clearest in cases of kin murder, which is the most extreme version of killing within a polis community since it violates the closest bonds of allegiance. Crimes against kin are prominent in tragedy precisely because extreme cases offer a good testing ground in which to explore ideas of vengeance, punishment, and justice, and because they evoke the strongest emotional and moral responses from the audience. Killing innocent children is the ultimate horror, whether one's own (as in Medea) or those of an unrelated enemy (as with the murder of Polymestor's children in Hecuba).
The opening scene raises several times the possibility that Medea's anger could be unfairly transferred to the children (91–5; see also 36–7, 116–18):
Nurse: Don't take them near their mother while she's in despair.
I've sometimes seen her eye them like a raging bull,
as if she wants to act; she will not cease from rage,
I know, until she's crushed someone. Oh may it be
an enemy she acts against, and not a friend!
The Nurse's reaction to Medea's opening cry of lamentation is even more ominous (98–100):
The repetition of kinei (‘she stirs up’) in line 99 foreshadows the extreme ends to which Medea's anger will take her, but also emphasizes her own efforts in (as we might say) psyching herself up to commit such a horrific crime. Later in the play, in Medea's great monologue, her blunt observation ‘my anger is in charge of my plans’ (1079) shows her own awareness that extreme emotion is leading her to a self-destructive form of revenge.Footnote 24 As Stuart Lawrence puts it:
The full emotional implications of the filicide dawn on her during the Great Monologue, but she proceeds anyway because by now she is absolutely under the control of her angry thumos. She fails therefore to integrate her emotions into her moral stance, since her maternal feelings disrupt her ‘moral’ commitment to Jason's destruction.Footnote 25
To overcome her instinctive revulsion Medea deploys a perverse rationalization, telling herself that her infanticide is the lesser of two evils (1238–41):
Medea's initial plan was to kill Jason, Creon, and Creon's daughter (374–5), so why does she kill the children rather than Jason? Because killing him would not be enough for Medea; the point is to see him feel the kind of humiliation and despair that he has inflicted upon her, and for him to see his oikos (‘household’), present and future, completely destroyed.Footnote 26 But while her desire for revenge is fully in line with the Greek ethic of returning harm for harm, the problem lies in Medea's means of retaliation. Many Greek tragedies have revenge plots, and most portray the futility of personalized vengeance, of counter-killing; Medea's hyper-personalized revenge, killing her own children to punish her estranged husband, is the ultimate example of this tragic pattern. Her desperation evokes our sympathy, but her means of returning harm for harm are repulsive. So too with her pleasure at Jason's suffering, which ends the play. As Aristotle observed, ‘every instance of anger is accompanied by a certain feeling of pleasure based on the expectation of achieving retaliation’ (Rh. 2.2.1378b1–2). Yet Medea's form of revenge, her infanticide, makes her pleasure in the final scene, as she gloats over Jason's misery, grotesque and unsettling.
Grief
The death of the children is naturally cause for grief, but the broken relationships on stage mean that grief itself becomes problematic. As the killer of her own children, Medea's grief is mixed with guilt, which she attempts to assuage by establishing a festival in their honour (1381–3):
Medea even uses grief, or rather the denial of grief, as a further weapon against Jason, as she denies his request to bury and weep for the children (1377–8). As with Medea, so too with Jason, our reaction to his grief is coloured by his actions – a point made by Medea herself (1399–1402):
Ια. ὤμοι, φιλίου χρήιζω στόματος
παίδων ὁ τάλας προσπτύξασθαι.
Μη. νῦν σφε προσαυδᾶις, νῦν ἀσπάζηι,
τότ’ ἀπωσάμενος.
Jason: Oh! How I long to embrace the beloved
face of my children, wretch that I am!
Medea: Now you address them. Now you embrace them.
Then you rejected them.
Thus Jason's grief rings hollow, since his behaviour has violated the relationship of strong and irreplaceable attachment that underpins that emotion.
Pity
Finally, if we consider our own emotional reaction to the play, we can see the complexities involved in the archetypal tragic emotion of pity (eleos) itself. Unlike the children, who have suffered undeserved harm and are unquestionably objects of our pity, Jason and Medea are more problematic. In Medea's case, her predicament and reaction reveal that Aristotle's definition of pity is too narrow and schematic (Rh. 2.8.1385b13–16):
Let us take pity to be a feeling of pain aroused in oneself when someone is perceived as meeting undeservedly with trouble of a life-threatening or painful kind, which one might expect oneself or people dear to one to meet with, and which seems close at hand.
However, as Medea's infanticide shows, pity is elicited not only by undeserved misfortune: we can also feel pity at misfortunes that people have brought upon themselves. As Douglas Cairns has argued, Greek eleos or pity involves putting oneself in the position of another person, and so eleos overlaps with what we call ‘sympathy’.Footnote 27 Thus we can (and do) sympathize with and pity Medea's ordeal, even as we condemn her actions.
In Jason's case, he has broken his oaths (a recurring theme: 21–2, 160–3, 169–70, 209, 412–13, 422, 439, 492, 495, 698, 1352, 1364, 1391–2) and has met with the consequences laid down for such behaviour in Athenian thought – exōleia, or the destruction of his household (cf. Hom. Il. 3.298–301, 4.155–68). It is clear, then, that, like Medea, he has brought about his own misfortunes, but, unlike Medea, various factors guide us not to feel much (if indeed any) sympathy for him: first, he showed no pity for his wife and sons earlier in the play (unlike Aegeus and the Chorus); and second, our overriding emotion at his downfall is (I would argue) not pity but Schadenfreude (epichairekakia), which, as Aristotle notes, works against pity (Rh. 2.9.1386b34–87a5):
It is the same man who displays Schadenfreude [epichairekakos] and envy [phthoneros], since a man who feels pain if someone gains and has good fortune is bound to be pleased by its loss and destruction. Hence, although these emotions differ from one another in the ways I have said, they all tend to obstruct pity, and this means that they are all equally useful for counteracting feelings of pity.Footnote 28
In other words, the play's ending leaves the audience feeling a complex and invigorating mixture of emotions: sympathy for Medea despite her decision to murder her own children, terror at the thought of her imminent arrival in Athens, and pleasure at the ruin of the unfaithful Jason.
Conclusion: learning from emotions
In conclusion, literary forms such as tragedy give us valuable examples of well-formed and malformed emotions, and we can learn from both. Drawing on Aristotle's definition of virtue, we can consider virtuous emotions to be those that are felt ‘at the right times on the right grounds towards the right people for the right motive and in the right way’. The characters of the Medea display a variety of emotions, with varying degrees of appropriateness: Medea is right to be jealous and angry, for example, but her anger is misdirected against her children, while Jason displays no genuine feelings of philia or charis, alienating us and our pity. As Julia Annas observes in her discussion of the role of the emotions in the virtuous person's moral psychology:
We find a basic difference between ‘Aristotelian’ theories, which think that our feelings and emotions can be so educated by our developing reason that they become wholly transformed, and ‘Kantian’ theories, which think of our feelings and emotions as never wholly educable and transformable, and thus always representing a potential threat to our acting as we reason to be best.Footnote 29
Tragedy was recognized by Aristotle (I think rightly) as an especially valuable artistic medium for the education of the emotions. By observing tragic figures as they manage their emotions well or badly, the audience are not only guided to make judgements about the characters on stage, but are also given a source of emotional and moral guidance for their own lives outside the theatre.
