The philosophical plausibility of Jacob Bernays’s medical interpretation of tragic katharsis

Abstract

In 1857, the German classicist Jacob Bernays published the essay “Grundzüge der verlorenen Abhandlung des Aristoteles über Wirkung der Tragödie” in which he intervened in the complex debate surrounding the concept of tragic katharsis. At that time, two main hermeneutical paradigms dominated the discussion of this notion: the moral one, most fully articulated by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and the aesthetic one, developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Bernays’s interpretation departed from both, approaching katharsis from a medical-pathological perspective.The present study will attempt, after briefly outlining the central ideas of the interpretations from which Bernays distanced himself, first to present the position of the German classicist, and subsequently to discuss its philosophical plausibility. More specifically, the latter part will consist in comparing Bernays’s analysis with some of Aristotle’s most significant positions in the ethical and poietic domains.