ABSTRACT
Kierkegaard’s use of Aristotle’s Poetics places him within an interpretive tradition which, even now, remains very much alive. As a text, the Poetics is incomplete, likely missing the second of its three books. The two most essential terms of its aesthetics, ἁμαρτία and κάθαρσις, likewise, due to a lack of context, have been the occasion of much debate ever since the neo-classicists reclaimed Aristotle in the sixteenth century as the aegis of an authoritative Greek aesthetics. Was the ἁμαρτία to which the tragic figure succumbed a moral fault? Was his suffering “poetic justice,” a crime rightly punished, the English critic Thomas Rymer (1643-1713) famously adjudged, or rather something more ambiguous?1 Related to the question of ἁμαρτία was that of κάθαρσις. Was the κάθαρσις which tragedy inspired in its audience a religious purification, or, similarly, a moral regeneration? Or was κάθαρσις merely a certain pleasure attached to the relief of tragic emotions, namely, pity and fear? Classical scholarship today regards Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81) in the wake of neoclassicism, as the origin of responsibly modern scholarship on the Poetics. This scholarship has always disregarded Kierkegaard’s role as an interpreter of the Poetics, perhaps wisely, since Kierkegaard’s use of classical texts, or of any text, for that matter, tends towards the synthetic. Nevertheless, as an enthusiastic student of Lessing, an exemplar of the “subjective existing thinker”2 philosophizing in the style of ancient Greece, and particularly his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, where the modern story about Aristotle’s Poetics begins, Kierkegaard plays an early and potentially significant part in its interpretation.3 He deploys the Poetics against G.W.F.
