Abstract
David Hume famously noted a puzzling aspect of our engagement with works of tragic drama:
It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.1
EDGAR: O thou side-piercing sight!
KING LEAR: Nature’s above art in that respect … .
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Notes
David Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, (ed.), E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1987 [1757]), 216.
See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990).
See Susan Feagin, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1983): 95–104.
Hume’s interpretation of l’Abbé Dubos. Compare this to measures employed by psychologists of subjects’ dispositional desires for emotionally provocative experiences: Gregory Maio and Victoria M. Esses, ‘The Need for Affect: Individual Differences in the Motivation to Approach or Avoid Emotions’, Journal of Personality 69(4) (2001): 583–614.
As proposed in interpretations of Aristotle’s notion of catharsis. See Alexander Nehamas, ‘Pity and Fear in the Rhetoric and the Poetics’, in Amelie Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
See Flint Schier, ‘Tragedy and the Community of Sentiment’, in P. Lamarque (ed.), Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983). In some accounts, this enlightenment is identified as conducive to moral value of some sort.
See Aaron Ridley, ‘Tragedy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. J. Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
and Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (London: Penguin, 1995).
See Samuel Johnson’s ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765) in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), i.77–78.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), Book I, Part III, section IX.
Peter Lamarque, Fictional Points of View (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 163.
That we may characterize the tension characteristic of tragedy in terms not just of emotions, but also desires, has been noted by some recent commentators. See Alex Neill, ‘Fiction and the Emotions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 30(1) (1993): 1–13.
My focus on desires here and throughout is heavily indebted to Gregory Currie, ‘Tragedy’, Analysis 70(4) (2010): 632–638.
(For an earlier, not entirely dissimilar, treatment of the problem, see Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], chapters 5–7).
See G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957);
and Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
See the attention-based theory of desire in Tim Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
On our attachment to characters in tragic works see Catherine Wilson, ‘Grief and the Poet’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53(1) (2013): 77–91;
and Jonathan Gilmore, ‘Grief and Belief’, British Journal of Aesthetics 53(1) (2013): 103–107.
Although it is not clear that the concept is always employed in the same way, such imaginative counterparts of desires are variously identified as i-desires [Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan, ‘How We Feel About Terrible, Non-Existent Mafiosi’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 84(2) (2012): 277–306)];
desire-like imaginings [Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)];
and desires held off-line [Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)].
See Peter Carruthers, ‘Why Pretend?’ in Shaun Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 99.
Thus, some accounts of the rationality of desires do not address them qua desires but for the beliefs or epistemic processes upon which the formation and holding of the desires depends. See Richard Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).
Some philosophers argue that desires ‘aim for the good’. Whether this is adopted as a conceptual constraint or a norm of rationality, both internal and external desires for tragedy would pass muster. See, for instance, Anscombe (1957). But for contrary arguments, see Michael Stocker, ‘Desiring the Bad -An Essay in Moral Psychology’, The Journal of Philosophy 76(12) (1979): 738–753;
and David Velleman, ‘The Guise of the Good’, Nous 26(1) (1992): 3–26.
See Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000): ‘[W]e can in general understand desire as a response to a perceived reason’, 38.
See Jonathan Gilmore, ‘Aptness of Emotions for Fictions and Imaginings’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92(4) (2011): 468–489.
This kind of criticism of such a desire would fit with those accounts in which desires are construed as truth-apt in virtue of presenting a state of affairs as good. In this view, a desire that p is an impression or registration in some way that it would be good if p. See Dennis Stampe, ‘The Authority of Desire’, Philosophical Review 96 (1987): 335–381.
This point was first made by Harry Frankfurt in ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 5–20.
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Gilmore, J. (2014). That Obscure Object of Desire: Pleasure in Painful Art. In: Levinson, J. (eds) Suffering Art Gladly. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313713_8
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