Other Selves in Fiction: Philia, Eleos and the Ethics of Narrative

The paper is divided into four parts. After briefly discussing Aristotelian philia and some of its most important conditions, I claim that these conditions give us good reason to believe that Aristotle’s notion of philia implies what I define as an emotion of sympathy. I argue that in an Aristotelian perspective sympathy as an emotion has at the same time an ethical and aesthetic nature and that for this reason our inclination to enter a fictional world and sympathetically engage in it resembles and improves our ability to become ethically involved in real-life egalitarian interactions, such as those between friends. Finally, I turn to the emotion of eleos arguing that a parallel reading of the ethical notion of philia and the poetic conception of eleos can provide us with a fresh perspective on the much discussed concept of mimetic pathos.