Philosophy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 3

Philosophy - Essay Example Also the character’s downfall raises pity and fear and eventually a tragedy provides catharsis or release of these emotions. Aristotle composes ‘Poetics’ about 50 years after Sophocles’ death in 345 BC. His admiration for Sophocles’ â€Å"Oedipus the King† is well-known. Since he considers the play as a perfect tragedy, it is not a surprise that his definition of a tragedy fits the play most perfectly. But the underlying flaw to which Aristotle makes himself vulnerable to is to establish his entire premise for a tragedy on a single example of his choice and then to proceed further inductively to define tragedy depending on this single example. Aristotle’s induction is somewhat as following: ‘Sophocles’ â€Å"Oedipus the King† is a perfect tragedy and it has some essential features. Therefore all perfect tragedies should incorporate these particular features that this play has’. But Aristotle is apparently obli vious to the risk that such induction poses. If Aristotle faces with another example of tragedy, having different features, that seem to appeal him as tragic, most likely he would change some of the requirements of his supposed tragedy to make it more embracing. Though some of Aristotle-induced features of a tragedy are Sophocles’ play-specific, most of them are universal. They are essentially the universal dynamics of a tragedy. For example, if Aristotle would have been allowed to watch the plays like â€Å"Hamlet† or â€Å"Death of a Salesman†, most likely Aristotle would expunge the doctrine of the downfall of a person of noble status or high rank. Aristotle considers drama as an essential medium of tragedy. According to him, a tragedy must not be a narrative. That is, it will not tell anything, rather it will show. For him, tragedy deals with an elevated or philosophical theme through dramatizing what may happen. It is different from history, since it can dr amatize the law of probability or what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity† (Aristotle 13). But history cannot deal the law of probability, since it deals with particulars. Why history cannot be dramatized lies in the fact that the cause-effect relationship between any two events is a subject to interpretation. Therefore, it does not allow an author to arrange the events in a cause-and-effect chain. But in a tragedy, the author is endowed with the freedom to manipulate the events in a universal cause-and-effect chain that create the possibility of an event as an effect of any preceding event. The tragic hero who undergoes these cause-and-effect chains of events are supposed to arouse both pity and fear, since the audience can envisage themselves in the same chains, but with different events. Since Aristotle is mostly concerned with the dramatization of the events and actions according to the laws of probability, plot occupies the central place among th e features of a tragedy. For Aristotle, plot is not the story itself, rather the â€Å"arrangement of the incidents† in a story. Indeed the incidents in a story should be arranged