Suffering Art Gladly

The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art

Jerrold Levinson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137313713
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esthétique en philosophie

A collection of newly composed essays, some with a historical focus and some with a contemporary focus, which addresses the problem of explaining the appeal of artworks whose appreciation entails negative or difficult emotions on the appreciator's part - what has traditionally been known as "the paradox of tragedy".

Part I

Historical Perspectives

1

Aristotle on the Paradox of Tragic Pleasure

Pierre Destrée

The paradox we usually call the paradox of negative emotions in art is quite plausibly at the very core of Aristotle’s approach to tragedy: since pity and fear, as Aristotle details them in his Rhetoric, are painful emotions when experienced in the real world, why is it so obviously and yet mysteriously the case that we nonetheless usually do enjoy attending tragic plays where pity and fear play a central role? Might it be the case that in fact our emotions in theatre are not ‘real’ emotions? Or that the way we experience such negative emotions is not the same as when we experience them in the real world? But it seems to be the case, as Plato and other ancient writers report, that a theatre audience does experience pain when crying and lamenting loudly. Isn’t it the case then that the paradox must be internal to the very attending of a play? If so, then how are we to explain the fact that we nevertheless also experience pleasure in watching such a spectacle? Might it be that the pleasure we get from watching a play compensates in one way or another for the pain we experience at the same time? Or might it rather be the case that something helps transform that pain into pleasure?

Aristotle was certainly aware of such a paradox. Gorgias had already pointed it out when he said that there is ‘a longing for lamenting’ (Helen, 9), and Plato explicitly condemned the pleasure we get from attending a tragic play for being mixed with pain (see Republic X, 605d, and Philebus 48a). In the Poetics we find at least two passages, soon to be discussed, that clearly allude to this paradoxical feature. But every reader of the Poetics must admit that Aristotle himself doesn’t seem to have given the explanation that modern philosophers, at least from Batteux and Hume on, have tried to provide their readers. Therefore, on the basis of what Aristotle says in the Poetics and elsewhere, there is no other option but to try to reconstruct the route he might have taken to address this puzzle.

In this chapter I will offer a possible, hopefully convincing, ‘Aristotelian’ way of solving the puzzle, which I think might still be of philosophical interest today. But before doing that, I will first quickly reassess the importance of pleasure in Aristotle’s approach to tragedy in his Poetics, and second, I will critically review the answers interpreters have given to our question.

From Homer on, it has been acknowledged as uncontroversial by all ancient writers that the aim of poetry, and of other arts, was to procure pleasure for their recipients. Plato never tires of repeating how pleasurable works of art are, especially when it comes to tragic and comic theatre. In the Republic, he even considers that giving its recipient pleasure essentially defines what poetry is, and it is there that he forges his memorable expression hêdusmenê Mousa, ‘the pleasurable Muse’, or ‘the Muse that aims at pleasure’, in describing poetry (X, 607c). Even though he obviously did not adopt the negative tone of Plato, who harshly condemns that pleasure (in fact, ‘the pleasurable Muse’ also signifies the ‘alluring’ Mousa, as a prostitute allures her client), Aristotle takes for granted that pleasure is at the core of aesthetics.

In the Poetics, pleasure is mentioned in numerous places. Besides the most common and general hêdonê and cognates, Aristotle uses various other words, with various connotations, that are sometimes quite difficult to get a precise grasp of: there are the verbs euphrainein and chairein which are basically interchangeable with hêdesthai, and the verb psuchagôgein (and the adjective psychagôgikos), which seems to refer to emotional pleasure.¹ But that is not all: there are also, quite obviously, various pleasures that Aristotle associates with poetry. There is the pleasure of the spectacle, of the music, of the speech itself.

Now among these pleasures there are those that Aristotle calls the ‘proper’ pleasures which are explicitly named and distinguished from one another: a proper pleasure of tragedy and a proper pleasure of comedy. These pleasures are both what constitutes the very aim of the two genres, and the very core of our problem. Putting aside the difficult and obscure katharsis to which I will come back in a moment, these proper pleasures undoubtedly constitute (although this is not always stressed by commentators) the direct and explicit aim of dramatic poetry. As Aristotle says in his very first sentence, the aim of his study is to ‘discuss the art of poetry in general and its genres – the effect which each genre has’, and correlatively, ‘the correct way to construct plots if the composition is to work well’ (1447a8–10), that is, how to construct plots if one wants one’s composition to fulfil its function, or achieve its effect. Aristotle does not explicitly tell us here what this effect amounts to, but as they proceed, readers quickly understand that emotions must be at stake here, as well as the pleasure spectators (or readers) of poetry, especially dramatic poetry, get from it. For, as he will explicitly say, in the case of tragedy, the emotions of pity and fear are what the poet must evoke through the presentation of fearful events and their pitiable aftermaths, and precisely those emotions are to give the audience tragedy’s proper pleasure. The poet, Aristotle summarizes in a crucial passage that will be at the core of my inquiry, ‘should not seek every pleasure from tragedy, but the one that is proper to it’, that is, he should ‘produce the pleasure which comes from pity and fear through representation’ (14, 1453b10–13). Whatever this last phrase ‘through representation’ (dia mimêseôs) might amount to, which I will return to later, one thing at least seems quite clear: the poet is expected to construct tragic plots that are calculated to provide his audience the properly tragic emotions, namely pity and fear, which is in turn the means of providing them with pleasure, the very pleasure that comes from these emotions and which constitutes the proper pleasure of tragedy. But pity and fear, as Aristotle himself describes them in his Rhetoric (II 5, II 8), are ostensibly painful emotions which, at least in reality, one wants to avoid or to get rid of. So our central passage from the Poetics, which explicitly defines the pleasure proper to tragedy, constitutes at the same time the very core of our paradox. How is all this supposed to make sense?

* * *

Let’s first briefly review three ways in which interpreters have suggested resolving this paradox.

Traditionally the most common if not always explicit solution to our paradox is by way of transformation. This solution relies on the concept of katharsis.² Without getting into the vexed question of its possible meaning or importance in Aristotle’s conception of tragedy (and comedy, since we know from later authors that Aristotle used the word in that case too), suffice it to remember here that at least in the context of medicine, a katharsis, or purgative, is typically described as accompanied or followed by a pleasure of relief. And indeed, in the famous passage of the Politics, where Aristotle briefly evokes the katharsis emotionally troubled people go through during some musical events, he explicitly adds that their katharsis provides them with ‘a pleasant feeling of relief’ (VIII 7, 1341b14–15). It is much disputed whether Aristotle did or did not intend to use the word katharsis here in a metaphorical way, but whatever the case, one may be very tempted to conclude that, at least if we draw a parallel between this text and the Poetics, katharsis in the case of tragedy must be the very process by which the pain of emotions like pity and fear is transformed into pleasure. Moreover, if one agrees, as I do, that pleasure is the aim the poet must seek, such a conclusion might seem to accord perfectly with the definition Aristotle gives of tragedy, ‘Tragedy is a mimesis ... that effects, through pity and fear, the katharsis of such emotions’ (Poet. 6, 1449b27–28). That is, tragedy stirs up pity and fear in a high degree and then operates a katharsis of those emotions (or perhaps of that portion of them that is excessive), which transforms the pain linked to these emotions into the pleasure of relief that Aristotle will name, in Poetics 14, the ‘proper pleasure’ of tragedy.

However, several strong reasons argue against such an interpretation. First, such a model supposes that all through the process of the stirring up of such emotions, that is, actually all through the play, the audience will experience the pain linked to them. But how can we plausibly think that people would be willing – or, as Plato figuratively put it, ‘craving’ (Republic X, 606a) – to attend a tragic play? Pleasure must be present from the start and provided more or less throughout the play, and not only at the end. Or at least this is most certainly what Aristotle, following Plato, assumes, since he not only never tires of repeating that this is the aim the poet must seek but also takes as his main task advising the poet on how to create such pleasure. Second, since katharsis is a feature common to tragedy, comedy, and certain sorts of music, it could hardly constitute the pleasure proper to tragedy. This is not to deny that katharsis, however one interprets it, does afford a certain pleasure of relief, but this seems rather a sort of additional pleasure that comes at the end of the play, or perhaps even after the play has concluded.³ A third, more precise, reason is the very fact that, although Aristotle repeatedly names or alludes to proper pleasures of comedy and tragedy, besides its fleeting appearance in Poetics 6, there is not one single other mention of, or unmistakable allusion to, katharsis in the whole rest of the Poetics, and, very strikingly, as we have seen, when he explicitly describes the pleasure proper to tragedy, Aristotle says that this pleasure must come ‘from the emotions of pity and fear through mimesis’, and not through katharsis, which he certainly would have said had he intended such a transformative role for it.

A final argument comes from the way Aristotle talks about relief pleasure linked to medical remedies: in his Nicomachean Ethics, he clearly states against Plato’s conception of pleasure that curative pleasure is only accidentally good or valuable as such (NE VII 13, 1152b33–34), for it does accompany, or emerge from, a process towards restoration of an imperfect state. In other words, no one would choose to go under a curative process such as katharsis if he is seeking pleasure! Again, by this I do not want to deny that the pleasure of relief that one does get from katharsis would be a pleasure which tragedy may at some point provide its audience with. But it could hardly be the proper pleasure we are seeking when attending a play. And, indeed, it is quite striking that when in the Nicomachean Ethics he builds his own definitions of pleasure against Plato who holds such a curative or restorative view on pleasure, Aristotle precisely gives the examples of contemplating visual artworks and attending theatre plays, in which cases he also uses the expression ‘proper pleasure’ (see especially X 4, 1175a28–b16). If we apply the same pattern that Aristotle uses there to what he says in his Poetics, it is quite evident that he could have hardly thought, without contradicting himself, that tragedy’s proper pleasure should consist in the relief pleasure katharsis procures.

These are very strong reasons, I think, why one should not appeal to katharsis as one persuasive way to solve our paradox.

More recently, many if not most interpreters of the Poetics seem to have switched their focus from the perhaps hopelessly obscure katharsis to the somewhat clearer concept of mimesis, or representation. And, indeed, this is certainly a much more promising line of approach if we want to take the expression ‘pleasure coming from pity and fear through mimesis’ seriously into account. Very roughly, there have been two quite different ways of doing this: one that advocates purely and simply dissolving our paradox, and the other that ends up with either a transformative or a compensatory explanation.

First, then, dissolving the paradox. Before reappearing in our expression as stated in Poetics 14, the first allusion to our paradox the reader of the Poetics encounters is to be found in the famous chapter 4 where Aristotle states what he considers to be the ‘natural’ causes of poetry. Here is the most important passage for our purposes:

All human beings naturally enjoy imitations. What happens in the case of art works is evidence of this: we enjoy contemplating the most accurate possible figurations of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as the shapes of the vilest animals and of corpses. The reason for this too is that understanding is extremely pleasant not only to philosophers but likewise to others too, despite their limited capacity for it. This is the reason why people enjoy looking at figurations: what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I Historical Perspectives
• Part II Contemporary Perspectives
• Index