On Mere Suffering: Hume and the Problem of Tragedy

Abstract

Hume begins his essay on tragedy by remarking that it ‘seems an unaccountable pleasure’ to watch a ‘well-written’ tragedy (216).¹ The problem Hume confronts is often identified as an early announcement of the so-called paradox of tragedy. The notion of paradox is not the strict notion, familiar from logic, whereby a contradiction is apparently derivable from uncontentious premises and thereby calls the coherence of those premises into doubt. But the alleged paradox of tragedy bears a resemblance to the logicians’ notion. In the explanation of tragedy, there is supposed to be a problem that logical adepts are specially good at recognizing, and it involves a tension between the pleasurableness of the events shown in the tragic representation and the painfulness of those events were they real (as we might say) rather than represented. The tension threatens to alter the enjoyment of tragedy by changing our understanding of it, and the change can be characterized in terms of potential motivation: given our responses to real-life tragedies, why would a person want to watch a dramatic tragedy?