The Paradox of Tragedy

By Robin Phillips - Febuary 2003

When David Hume wrote the treatise “On Tragedy”, he addressed a paradox that has can claim to be one of the oldest philosophical questions in existence. Unlike many philosophical questions that have nothing to do with actual life, this question is firmly rooted in our life and experience.

The question to which I refer is this: why do human beings derive pleasure from apparently unpleasant emotions, as they do when they watch tragic drama? Hume suggests that it seems strange that we should take pleasure in disagreeable emotions such as sorrow, terror, anxiety, etc., when they are presented in a well written tragedy. Yet, as Hume observes, people “never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swollen with the tenderest sympathy and compassion.” It sometimes seems that the greater the unpleasant element, the more satisfaction the audience receives.

In addressing this question, Hume is taking up a dialogue that goes back to the beginnings of philosophy. The philosopher Gorgias addresses the paradox in his Helen and Plato addresses it in Ion, Philebus and the Republic. Even before formalized philosophy, we find reference to the pleasures of sorrow in one of the oldest literary works, namely the Homeric poems.[1]

Before presenting his own theory to account for this phenomenon, Hume reviews a number of other suggested explanations. First he considers L’Abbé Dubos’ idea that an unpleasant state of mind is preferable to the boredom of not having anything at all to occupy the mind. Hume acknowledges some truth in this, but he thinks that it fails to provide a full solution. Hume points out that if the events portrayed in tragedy were to happen in real life, we wouldn’t enjoy them even if they drove away boredom.

With that Hume goes on to consider Monsieur Fontenelle’s idea which does take into account the difference between something painful happening in real life vs. the same thing happening in fiction. According to Monsieur Fontenelle, we enjoy the later and not the former because we never lose the sense that it is all falsehood. Too much pleasure turns into pain as in tickling, and too much pain turns into pleasure if a little moderated, as in tickling. Hence, pain that is slightly diminished can turn into pleasure as when the heart likes to be moved by melancholy objects, or even by something disastrous and sorrowful if it is sufficiently moderated. The theatre moderates it sufficiently by virtue of it’s non-reality.

Again Hume acknowledges some truth to this while suggesting that it doesn’t provide a full solution. Hume points out that for a distressing narrative to give pleasure it does not necessarily have to be fiction, as in the case of Cicero’s speeches about Verres which the audience thought were true. So, concludes Hume, fictionality is not necessary for receiving pleasure from a distressing narrative.

With that, Hume presents his own theory. According to Hume, tragedy is pleasurable because the impulse of negative emotions are overpowered and converted into pleasure by virtue of the eloquence used to depict such things. The subordinate movement (distress), is converted into the predominant movement, (beauty, eloquence). Hume attempts to find other examples of a subordinate movement being converted into a predominant movement. He points to how the predominant aspect of novelty can transforms a subordinate subject into something agreeable; also when difficulties increase passions. So disagreeable emotions are smoothed, softened and mollified when elevated by the finer arts. According to Hume, this occurs in tragedy, with the added aspect that tragedy is imitation, and “imitation is of itself always agreeable.” Although there are many aspects that cause the unpleasant emotions to be converted into something enjoyable (artistry, skill, eloquence, imitation, etc.), Hume maintains that the enjoyment we feel is a single, uniform sense of pleasure.

In order for this conversion process to happen, Hume suggests it is essential for the subordinate emotions and the predominant emotions must keep their proper place. If, for example, a tragedy makes the disagreeable emotions stronger than it makes the force of imagination, we do not find it entertaining. So the movements of the imagination must be predominant above those of the passion or else the movements of the imagination become converted into the disagreeable passions. This would happen if we were to exaggerate with the full force of elocution the loss of a parent’s favourite child. Or when the terror and emotional pain of Verres rose in proportion to the eloquence with which Cicero described it. Or when the Lord Clarendon passed quickly over the narration of the king’s death, though in a later age it might be made the subject of eloquence. Therefore, if an action in tragedy is too atrocious, then no amount of eloquence can turn it into pleasure. Hence, in order for drama to be satisfying, virtue must be converted into a noble and courageous despair, and vice must receive its proper punishment.

With that Hume gives some more examples of subordinate movements being converted into predominant movements. He mentions the way too much jealousy extinguishes love, too much difficulty renders us indifferent, too much sickness and infirmity disgusts a selfish and unkind parent. All these examples, according to Hume, support his conversion theory.

In ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, Susan Feagin approaches the problem from a completely different standpoint. First, Feagin suggests that Hume accurately articulated the paradox involved, but failed to give an adequate explanation. She points out that it is unclear how Hume believed that the dominance of imagination and expression was to be achieved. It is not assured through fictionality, for Feagin points out that Hume discusses a fiction that is so gory that it cannot be softened through expression. Hume never explains the actual mechanics of converting unpleasant feelings into pleasures. How can the aesthetic pleasure, by being predominant, convert negative emotions into itself while still retaining a vehemence that makes the aesthetic pleasure all the greater? Nor is it clear, Feagin points out, how this conversion process actually works. She feels that Hume’s theory merely substitutes one paradox for another.

Feagin believes that there does exist a “straightforward solution.” The key to this solution, she believes, rests in a distinction between a direct response to a work of art and a meta-response which is a response to our own direct response. Just as Hume had tried to show that conversion happened in everyday life, so Feagin attempts to show that both kinds of responses happen in every day life. When we are pleased, disgusted or embarrassed, at how we react to situations, we are experiencing a meta-response about a direct-response. We use the same kind of language to describe both kinds of responses.

Having established this distinction Feagin then argues that in tragedy direct responses are genuinely unpleasant both for those who enjoy and for those who do not enjoy tragedy. The pleasure comes not from the direct responses but from the meta-responses. That is, we enjoy our awareness of our unpleasant direct-responses. Why? Because we are pleased to see that we are ethically sensitive enough to find certain things distressing. We enjoy being reminded that we are the sort of person who would find this sort of thing distressing. Also this emphasizes our common humanity with others who would feel similarly, and consequently this helps us not to feel alone in the world. We feel connected to others who feel the same emotions. As she writes,

…pleasures from tragedy are meta-responses. They are responses to direct responses to works of art, which are themselves painful or unpleasant. But given the basis for the direct response, sympathy, it gives us pleasure to find ourselves responding in such a manner.

According to Feagin, this way of looking at tragedy explains why tragedy has been considered greater than comedy. It is not because tragedy is more true than comedy, so that the pleasure we feel is a morbid delight in the nastiness of life. Rather, at the core of tragedy is the same feeling that is at the core of moral action: sympathy for human beings and especially for friends and family. We consider tragedy great because we consider morality great. Comedy, on the other hand, relies on laughing at people and at insignificant defects. If the defects were significant, than comedy would become like tragedy and invoke unpleasant emotions which, in turn, would give rise to pleasant meta-responses.

Having developed her argument Feagin then considers a couple of objections to this theory. If tragedy is enjoyable because our unpleasant direct responses give us the enjoyable meta-response of knowing that we are ethically sensitive, etc., then why can immoral people enjoy tragedy? Because they either enjoy pretending to have feelings or because they do care for others but not as much as they care for themselves. In tragedy one can care for others without any risk to oneself. Still further, such a person may feel concern because he identifies with a character’s suffering, and the emotion exists only because of that identification. The second question is why do people who are not aesthetically sensitive but are morally upright enjoy tragedy? Because such a person is unimaginative and it takes more effort to respond to a work than it does to respond to real life.

Feagin then asks why we get pleasure in tragic fiction and not when tragedy happens in real life? Because in fiction no one really suffers. In real life we feel pain at human suffering we cannot respond to the importance of sympathy as a separate phenomenon since it feeds on the misery, and if we could do that then we wouldn’t be sensitive. In real life we do not contemplate our feelings but live them. To do otherwise would indicate a smugness, self-satisfaction and complacency with what one has felt. However, in life we might have meta-responses of displeasure to our lack of sympathy.

I believe that Feagin’s theory is just as unsatisfactory as Hume’s. Though her theory begins by finding a moral basis for our pleasure to tragedy, she ends by saying that it is not morally acceptable to react to real life suffering like we react to suffering in tragedy. This seems rather strange. I would argue that the kind of meta-responses Feagin describes are not only inappropriate in real-life situations, but also inappropriate in reaction to works of art. She suggests that if one experienced these meta-responses in real life it would indicate a smugness and self-satisfaction, whereas I want to suggest that to feel these things in tragedy is no different in this respect since it is indicative of being pleased at oneself and therefore of a kind of personal pride. Whether such pride is ultimately wrong or not will depend on whatever ethical theory one is using, yet the fact that Feagin acknowledges such things to be inappropriate in real life does suggest that even within her own ethical framework she is not being consistent.

She says that it real life we do not contemplate our feelings but live them. Is not this true of tragedy as well? Do not the best tragedies take us outside of ourselves, so to speak, so that we are utterly unselfconscious being completely absorbed in the drama? If my own experience is anything to go by, it is the times that we are most moved, most emotionally engaged in a tragedy, that we are less aware of our own selves. The tragedy ends and we are brought back to earth with a jolt, aware of our own selves again. We may feel momentarily disoriented because we had almost become one with the characters in the drama, having completely forgotten our own existence. Remembering ourselves again and coming back to the real world is difficult. Yet, if Feagin’s theory is anything to go by, the more we enjoy a tragedy, the more preoccupied with ourselves we are, since we are thinking about what kind of people we are and observing our own responses. But surely this is a strange way to watch tragedy! If one is watching a performance of Oedipus and shedding tears as the tragic events unfold, it would spoil the effect completely if one began thinking about oneself. One’s tears would immediately be replaced by a wry smile of satisfaction.

This experience I have noted of self-forgetfulness, of feeling drawn outside of oneself as we become absorbed into a drama, forms the basis for my own explanation as to why tragedy is pleasurable.[2] By moving our emotions a good tragedy is able to pull us into the events of the drama, to make us feel that we are really there going through the things that the characters are experiencing. Surely this is the real reason why tragedy is pleasurable, because in moving our emotions it causes us to forget about ourselves and to feel that we are participating in something bigger.

Human beings have always been drawn to things that move them outside of themselves and give them a sense of being part of something bigger. This instinct is fundamental to human nature and is shared by all, from the most holy saints to the most repubate sinners. Whether it be food, prayer, sex, alcohol, sports, poetry, witchcraft or bungee-jumping, human beings crave that forgetfulness of self that comes through identification with something external. It is not merely in tragedy that we experience this. We experience it in any fiction that is able to draw our emotions, whether our emotions are moved through the portrayal of positive events or negative events. Tragedy seems to be the issue, but only because it is easier to move the emotions (and hence to cause us to forget about ourselves) through the portrayal of unpleasant events, yet a good author can move the emotions through depicting pleasant events. I rarely shed tears during tragedy, but I have been known to shed tears in novels at points of great joy. Not too long ago my wife read a novel to me detailing the lives of two sisters and the tensions that developed between them. In the end of the novel there is a very moving scene in which one of the sisters apologizes to the other and the two sisters embrace. When that scene was read to me I just couldn’t stop crying, not because I was sad but because it was so wonderful…so beautiful. My point is that when joy and beauty move our emotions it affects us similar to the way tragedy moves the emotions. In both cases we may shed tears, in both cases we feel completely encapsulated in the story and utterly un-self-conscious. In both cases, the line between joy and melancholy, pleasure and sadness, become ambiguous. Why this is, and the psychology behind it, hardly interests me. I only observe that it is the case and that we enjoy arts that move the emotions and, in so doing, give us the feeling of leaving ourselves behind and of being drawn into the story, the music, the painting, the drama, the poem, etc.. Feagin’s theory cannot explain this. Her theory cannot explain why being stirred very deeply by a moving event of great joy in a story feels qualitatively very similar to the sensation we receive when a very moving incident occurs in the story that is, so to speak, unpleasant.

By mentioning various arts in this connection, we find another problem with Feagin’s theory. If her theory is correct, it merely explains why we enjoy tragedy. It doesn’t explain why there is similar experiences across all the arts. Why, for example, to people enjoy melancholy music? My theory that people enjoy tragedy because they like to have their emotions moved in such a way that allows them to forget about themselves and be drawn into something, suggests an explanation. It also suggests why those with no sensitivity to beauty and no taste for the more delicate emotions, find enjoyment in such things as thrillers, horror movies or sex fantasies. In each case, these things give one the opportunity to move outside themselves, to experience emotions that give one a sense of self-forgetfulness for a while. This can be edifying to the soul or it can pollute the soul, but in each case it moves the soul. This is a theme that will figure prominently in my next two essays.