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Chapter 5 - Poetry and the passions: two Stoic views

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Martha C. Nussbaum
Edited by
Jacques Brunschwig  and
Martha C. Nussbaum
Jacques Brunschwig
Affiliation:
Université de Paris I
Martha C. Nussbaum
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

The spectator of the dramatic theatre says: ‘Yes. I have felt the same. I am just like this. This is only natural. It will always be like this… I am weeping with those who weep on the stage, laughing with those who laugh.’ The spectator of the epic theatre says: ‘I should never have thought so. That is not the way to do it. This is most surprising, hardly credible. This will have to stop… I am laughing about those who weep on the stage, weeping about those who laugh.’

Bertolt Brecht

Stop wanting your husband, and there is not one of the things you want that will fail to happen. Stop wanting to remain in Corinth. And in general stop wanting anything else but what the god wants. And who will prevent you? Who will compel you? No one, any more than anyone prevents or compels Zeus.

Epictetus, addressing Medea

There is surely no principle of fictitious composition so true as this, – that an author's paramount charge is the cure of souls.

Henry James, ‘Miss Prescott's Azariarn’ (1865)

Listening to poetry, wrote Plutarch, is like eating fish-heads: absolutely delicious, but it can give you bad dreams (How the young person should listen to poetry 15bc). Believe this, as all the major Stoic thinkers do, and what follows? A lover of fish-heads would prefer, clearly, to discover a way to go on eating them in good health, without suffering the disturbing consequences.

Type
Chapter
Information
Passions and Perceptions
Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind
 , pp. 97 - 149
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

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