David Hume famously remarked on a curious response we have to certainworks of art that cause us to feel unhappiness or distress:

It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of awell-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and otherpassions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The morethey are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with thespectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, thepiece is at an end. (1757 [1987: 216])

This odd connection between the simultaneous pleasure and distresscaused by tragic drama is remarked upon in Aristotle’sPoetics, the earliest philosophical attempt in the West toconstruct an aesthetic theory. The problem also features in laterthinkers such as Burke (1757), Kant (1798; 7:241 [1996: 232]), Batteux(1746 [2015: 48]), Schopenhauer (1818; 1844: ch. 37), and Nietzsche(1886: 229; Price, 1998), but the framing of the contemporary focus onthe problem is mainly inherited from Hume. After a preliminary attemptinSection 1 to precisely state the paradox, we will turn to various kinds ofsolutions inSections 2 to 6.

• 1. Statement of the Paradox
• 2. Compensatory Solutions
  • 2.1 Hedonic Compensation
  • 2.2 Hedonic Meta-Response
  • 2.3 Non-Hedonic Compensation
• 3. Contextual Solutions
  • 3.1 Distance
  • 3.2 Control
• 4. Conversionary Accounts
• 5. A Broader Approach to the Phenomenon
• 6. Revisionary Solutions
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Statement of the Paradox

At first glance, it shouldn’t be puzzling that works of art canelicit both pleasure and pain, for that conjunction arises in a widerange of ordinary non-aesthetic contexts. Frozen fingers, e.g., oftencome with playing in the snow. Hume’s enigma is that in certainartistic engagements our pleasure seems to be internally related toour distress. Pain is not merely a regrettable feature of theexperience, the elimination of which, insofar as the pleasureremained, would be favored (Neill 1992: 153). Rather, for Hume, onewould not derive certain characteristic pleasures from tragic dramasif they did not provoke their characteristic kinds of negativeemotionsqua negative emotions. It is the experience ofnegative emotions, not something that happens to cause or be caused bytheir elicitation, that matters for our pleasure. As he notes,audiences are “pleased in proportion as they areafflicted” (1757 [1987: 217]). Although we will refer to thisconundrum asthe paradox of tragedy, the condition itdescribes is instantiated in many different modes of artisticexperience beyond the theater.

Thus, on the one hand, we often pursue and take pleasure in works ofart in ways that are ostensibly explained by their elicitation ofdisagreeable feelings: fear of a movie’s monster, disgust overthe simulated viscera in a painting, shock in playing a video game,cringing embarrassment for a television comedy’s heedlesscharacters, alienation through punk rock, grief in listening to athrenody, disorientation entering into an installation, trauma inwitnessing certain modes of performance art, and even boredom oracedia that, for example, are intentionally elicited in AndyWarhol’s eight-hour continuous footage of the Empire StateBuilding filmed from a static point of view (Gilmore 2020:157–158). On the other hand, such engagements do not conform totheprima facie plausible assumption that we tend not topursue experiences for the distress, pain, annoyance, or otheraversive feelings they engender, and that when we must undergo suchexperiences we do not positively value or take pleasure in thosedisagreeable dimensions. Indeed, it might be proposed to be ananalytic truth that we don’t take pleasure in something invirtue of what makes it displeasing to us.

Before we consider alternative construals of the paradox, it isimportant to register that at least in Hume’s version the painsand pleasures of these kinds of artistic experiences aren’teasily accommodated in apro tanto fashion. It seems right tosay that in an ordinary case such as playing in the snow, we takepleasure in the experienceinsofar as it is diverting, anopportunity to be with friends, etc. and we feel discomfort in theexperienceinsofar as our fingers begin to freeze and weshiver. No paradox would arise in our experience of tragic drama fromits eliciting painful and pleasurable emotions that, analogously, aredirected at respectively different objects (Ridley 2003). Somedescriptions of the phenomenon thus eliminate its paradoxical air byidentifying the distinct objects of pain and pleasure that have beenunwittingly treated as one. By contrast, in Hume’s version ofthe puzzle, we do not disvalue tragedy insofar as it causes us painand value it insofar as it gives us pleasure. Rather, the pain ordistress a tragedy elicits seems itself positively valued(“unaccountably” so [1757: first line]). Further, thatpain and pleasure seem to directly covary: at least within arestricted range, an increase in the former brings an increase in thelatter.

Of course, mere covariance of pain and pleasure in some experiencedoesn’t always pose a conundrum. Suppose that as it gets colder,the quality of the snow in which children play improves. There, thepleasure of throwing snowballs and the pain of frozen digits bear adirect relationship, but only because they share a common condition orcause. Here, if the pain could be diminished without a loss inpleasure, that would be something participants desire. By contrast,Hume’s enigma is that we seem to want to suffer: we undergo somesort of positive emotion that is explained by our distress, not justby the circumstances by which the distress is caused. It is thatdynamic that would make it odd to agree with the “Positive OperaCompany”, in an April Fools Day parody aired on National PublicRadio, that audiences are better off when tragic operas such asDon Giovanni andLa Bohème are rewritten toprovide happy endings (broadcast 1 April 2006). Or, in a genuineexample, it would be a dubious claim that audiences have reason toprefer Nahum Tate’s 1681 version ofKing Lear overShakespeare’s insofar as the revision eliminates the destructionof Lear and Cordelia that makes the original so distressing.

As we will see, the cases we wish to understand are highly variable:they, and the responses they elicit, may not fall into any naturalclass (Neill 1999: 124). Furthermore, one may wish to abjurereferences topain and other constitutively embodiedresponses in contexts in which the distress is primarily constitutedby psychological not somatic states (for a common concept of pain, seeRaja et al. 2020). And to say that wesuffer from a voluntarydiversion such as attending the theater or streaming a film on tv cansound rather grandiose, at least when compared to real sufferingpeople undergo in relation to non-imagined states of affairs. Allowingfor those cavils, we can offer at least a preliminary attempt at ageneral characterization of the paradox, by saying that an experiencehas a negative affectivevalence in part or whole if it isone in which we feel pain or some other disagreeable emotion orfeeling. And an experience has a positive affective valence if it isone in part or whole in which we feel pleasure or some agreeableemotion or feeling. The paradox can thus be stated as the conjunctionof three individually plausible but jointly inconsistentpropositions.

For some instance or form of artA:

1. Properly appreciatingA involves forming a mental statewith a negative valence (Appreciation Condition)
2. We do not take pleasure in forming a mental state with a negativevalence (Coordination Condition)
3. We take pleasure in properly appreciatingA (ResponseCondition)

Although conditions 1–3 capture the structure of the puzzle, weshould note that in the gloss on the paradox earlier, it was naturalto refer to different kinds of attitudes being implicated beyond thatof taking pleasure, viz,desiring andvaluing. Thisreflects that there may be different formulations of the paradoxemploying reference to different attitudes—affective, conative,evaluative—which are taken to be central and in need ofexplanation.

Thus, the Appreciation Condition may be that a proper appreciation ofA elicits

• a displeasing experience; or,
• a negative appraisal of the experience; or,
• a desire that the experience not occur.

And the Response Condition may be that a proper appreciation ofA furnishes

• a pleasurable experience; or,
• a positive appraisal of the experience; or
• a desire that the experience occur.

Different formulations of the paradox may mix and match thosedifferent kinds of attitudes (e.g., pairing the unpleasantness of theexperience with the desire that it occur). Yet, not all suchconjunctions necessarily evince a puzzling conflict. In other words,not all such pairings lend themselves to a plausible statement of theCoordination Condition. For example, as those with substanceaddictions would avow,to desire does not entailtopositively appraise, and so a worrying over whether there is aconsistency between those attitudes of those differentkinds,when expressed about any particular thing, can sometimes beotiose.

Even when we restrict the operative attitude to one kind (whetheremotions, desires, or appraisals) two such attitudes toward the sameobject can coherently disagree, as we saw above, in virtue of beingpro tanto, or directed at the object from a differentperspective. Taking pleasure in one’s child leaving for collegeisn’t inconsistent with feeling sadness over her departure fromhome. Mixed emotions and incompatible desires are a common feature ofaffective experience (Greenspan 1980; Larsen & McGraw 2014). Note,however, it would be too quick to assume any pairing of attitudes thatbelong to different kinds is thereby rationally benign; for that wouldprejudge the question of whether a given attitude-kind imposesrational or psychological constraints on another. Some philosophersargue, for example, that a desire forx presentsxas valuable or “good” (e.g., Stampe 1987). Somepsychological theories of the emotions construe at least some of themas expressions of desires (Green 1992; Gordon 1987). And, finally,emotions themselves have characteristic somatic, cognitive,expressive, behavioral, and phenomenological dimensions that can makeparticular emotional pairings psychologically and physically difficultto sustain (Cowen & Keltner 2017).

Furthermore, the statements of the paradox carry an implicitassumption that negative and positive valences exist on a singlecontinuum, such that the morepositively valenced anexperience is, the lessnegatively valenced it must be. Butthere are empirical reasons to suspect that this relation does nothold, at least in the case of the valence of pleasure. Rather, somework in the psychology of affective experience suggests that the twomeasures are orthogonal to one another (Norris et al. 2010). If thisis so, it would render the co-presence of the two responses lesscurious. But it would then raise the question of why, if Hume isright, the two independent responses seem to covary (assuming there isno common cause)—“The more they are touched and affected,the more are they delighted with the spectacle” (1757 [1987:216]).

Finally, a distinction elided in the above pairings is that betweenconstruing the paradox in descriptive and normative terms.Descriptively, the problem rests on the assumption that as anempirical matter we usuallydo not take pleasure in pain, butwith tragic art forms we do. Normatively, the problem rests on theassumption that weought not to take pleasure in pain, butwith some of the arts, a successful appreciation means we should. Aswe will see, the descriptive construal is threatened by the widevariety of contexts in which indeed we do seem to take pleasure inpain. Meanwhile, the normative construal is threatened by thedifficulty in providing a convincing interpretation of that“ought”. Is pursuing painful experiences or garneringpleasure from pain practically irrational; a failure of fit or aptnessof our emotions for their objects (i.e., where the formal object ofpleasure isn’t something that causes pain); defective withrespect to the evolved function of pain (as a signal of current orimmanent injury and elicitor of avoidance behavior); a misconstrual ofthe objective value of the relevant artistic experiences; or perhapsin some other way unmerited or dysfunctional? Augustine calls thatpleasure in grief that we experience while watching tragic drama a“wretched madness” (Confessions Book 3, chapterII) but why it is irrational or “mad” to have thatexperience is not explained.

In what follows, we will focus on the paradox of tragedy construedsolely in descriptive terms, and, for economy’s sake, confineour attention to solutions that see the paradox in Hume’s terms,as, at leastprima facie, involving a puzzling mixture ofpainful and pleasurable emotions. For a version of the paradoxconstrued solely in terms of desires, see Currie (2010). The followingdraws partly from the typology of solutions outlined in Levinson(2014b: xii).

2. Compensatory Solutions

One major approach to the paradox introduces reasons for why, despitewhat appears to be our usual disposition to avoid pain and distress,we may be rationally motivated to pursue experiences of art thatelicit disagreeable feelings. Suchcompensatory approachesthus acknowledge the negative valence and undesirability of thefeelings we have while experiencing tragedies (and relevantly similarart forms), but contend that we choose to undergo those feelings forthe sake of realizing some sufficiently valuable good. Here, thedisagreeable dimension of an artistic experience is not positivelyestimated qua disagreeable dimension, but only for its contribution tosome specifiable benefit. Compensatory solutions might initially seemto dissolve even theappearance of a paradox, as it is hardlysurprising to note that pain is sometimes the price we pay forpleasure. Yet, we don’t speak of, e.g., the “paradox ofdentistry”. How is tragedy, and other painful art, different?Compensatory solutions tend to answer through highlighting ways inwhich the benefits of such art forms are in principle not realizableindependently of our undergoing their characteristic modes of causingdistress.

2.1 Hedonic Compensation

One such benefit that could render the experience of disagreeabledimensions of an art form worthwhile is aesthetic pleasure. Thus acommon approach, motivated by Hume’s essay, is that we suffer inresponse to thecontent of the tragic representation but feelpleasure in response to itsformal features (Yanal 1991: 76;Eaton 1989). The thought behind suchhedonic compensatorytheories is that I feel pain in imaginatively representing thecontents of a play, but pleasure in such things as the play’splot, language, scenery, costuming, and the actors’performances. That pleasure is provided in a sufficient quantity ordegree to justify undergoing that pain. This solution thus treats theproper appreciation of a work of art as comprised of two distinctaffective experiences, each with its own object: the representedcontent, and the medium or mode of representation. Our experience ofthat content—e.g., through imagining that the represented stateof affairs is real—is posited to cause us pain. At the sametime, our experience of the work’s medium or mode ofrepresentation—e.g., through seeing its beauty or evaluating itsplot—is said to give us pleasure. Thus, noting the pleasureelicited by a painter’s achievement of verisimilitude, Aristotleremarks that “objects which in themselves we view with pain, wedelight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity”(Poetics IV). Although intuitively compelling, the problem with thisapproach is that it is exceedingly difficult to speak of ourexperience of form or content as separable from the other in a waythat is consistent with artistic appreciation.

Let us take a literary fiction as an illustration. In principle we canrefer solely to aspects of its content—what is fictionally truein the work, or how it represents the world as being. And, inprinciple, we can refer solely to aspects of its form—callingattention to its tone, verbal style, names of characters, plotstructure, and so on. However, even a minimal experience of thework’s content will be inflected by the work’s form. Thisis so because the contents of a literary fiction are in partconstituted byhow they are represented. Thus, for example,Peter Lamarque (2007: 121; 2014) notes that the features ofshallowness and ostentation that Dickens invokes in the name of theVeneerings inOur Mutual Friend, are intrinsic qualities ofthose characters themselves. Here, one’s experience of thework’s content (the fictional characters) is inflected by thework’s form (their names and the tone in which they aredescribed). Of course, the text of, specifically, a tragic dramaexists prior to the play being performed. However, even there we canspeak of the represented content of the performance as inflected byits form, as we compare, e.g., one actor’s Hamlet to another, orthe staging of the play in traditional dress versus contemporaryclothes. The mistake is to assume that form and content refer to twodistinctexperiences of the object of our appreciation. Butthere is only one experience of the work of art: the experience of thecontent-given-form.

A proponent of the view in question might then respond that whatcauses our pleasure is not merely the form of tragedy but itscontent-as-represented. We don’t take pleasure in the merecontent: e.g., that Lear holds the murdered Cordelia, we take pleasurein the particular way in which the play (actors, staging, etc.)represents that event. But if such content-given-form is supposed toexplain our pleasure, then what explains our distress? It cannot bethe content itself, because we have no access to content, except as itis inflected by a given form. Similar problems beset attempts to treatthe different objects of our pain and pleasure as, respectively, thesad content of tragedy and itsartistry, for any fulldescription of the artistry of a work would require reference to whatthat content is—what events and states of affairs arerepresented by the work. At best, one could say that certain formalfeatures of a tragedy offer pleasure in themselves, independent oftheir role in being constituents of the manner by which thetragedy’s content is represented. Aspects of lighting, costume,stage sets, music, movement, voice, etc., might be pleasurable inthemselves, perhaps thereby compensating for displeasure caused by aplot. Yet, this approach leaves open the following question: why doaudiences often prefer to attend tragic dramas over alternativetheatrical productions with none of the tragedy’sdistress-inducing contents? Comedies are not always chosen overtragedies even if they offer the same formal rewards. We’llreturn to that question below, after considering some other versionsof and objections to the compensatory pleasures account.

Note, it is an independent question whether the distinction betweenform and content as the respective targets of our feelings mightexplain the puzzle of why people seem to take pleasure in thenon-fictional contents of a representation of awful events,for there the events are not constituted by how they are represented.Sometimes the distress caused by thinking of the events under onedescription can be counterposed against the pleasure caused bythinking of them under another description, where different framingsimpose different patterns of saliencies on the shared content. Onemight take pleasure in a historical account of a medieval method oftorture that highlights its bizarre and outlandish brutality but bediscomfited by an account that makes vivid the excruciating sufferingof its victim. By contrast, tragic dramas typically don’tlicense alternative points of view from which, respectively, theircontents elicit pleasure and distress.

Some critics of compensatory theories centered on pleasure dispute thephenomenology such theories impute to the experience of painful art.Specifically, they dispute the very claim that people feel pleasure inexperiencing such works. Rather, they note, people often describetheir engagements with tragic dramas and the like as, “on thewhole, painful, distressing, gut-wrenching, and emotionallydevastating, not as on balance pleasurable” (Smuts 2014: 124;see also Andrade & Cohen 2007).

In response, a defender of a hedonic compensatory view might proposethat such reports should not be taken at face value. For a naturalresponse to believing or perceiving a tragic event has occurred wouldbe to feel sympathy for its victim; for their suffering to linger onin one’s mind; to recall the event with sadness. But suchreactions do not typically accompany merely imagining that such anevent occurred. If our putative expressions of pity for a fictionalcharacter don’t have the behavioral profile of feeling pity foractual people, perhaps we don’t suffer for them the way we thinkwe do.

2.2 Hedonic Meta-Response

Thehedonic meta-response theory offers a different critiqueof hedonic compensatory theories: that their defect is not in theirappeal to pleasureper se, but where they locate it in ourengagements with distressing works. The claim here is that wedon’t feel pleasure in the first-order experience of a tragic ordistressing work, but rather feel that pleasure as part of asecond-order to that first-order response. Here, pain is necessary forpleasure because the pleasure is given in a meta-response to the pain.Thus, Rafael De Clercq (2014), for example, notes the pleasure we maytakein recognizing that a work is such as to evoke, or hasevoked, a negatively-valenced emotion, even if we don’t takepleasure in experiencing that emotion. For empirical studiessupporting that relation between first-order experience of aversiveexperience, and pleasure in one’s meta-cognitive response to theexperience, see Rozin and others (2013).

Why might audiences feel pleasure as part of such a meta-response? Oneproposal is that the experience makes salient one’s humanity;that one shares with all others a susceptibility to feelings ofsadness, loneliness, fear, and the like (Levinson 1982; Feagin 1983).Another is that we may take pleasure in recognizing the work’sachievement in having elicited those emotions in us. A third is thatour pleasure comes from having an opportunity to explore the nature ofour suffering, without the motivation to alleviate it given that itisn’t a genuine indication of the bad things that typicallyaccompany suffering in real life

it becomes possible for us to savor the feeling for its specialcharacter, since we are for once spared the additional distress thataccompanies its occurrence in the context of life. (Levinson 1982:325)

A fourth proposal, advanced by Susan Feagin is that our pleasurablemeta-response consists in recognizing our virtue. Specifically, wehave a first-order painful response arising from our sympathy with orpity for the victims of a tragic drama, and second-order response, inwhich we take pleasure in recognizing how we felt in that first-orderresponse. Feagin writes,

We find ourselves to be the kind of people who respond negatively tovillainy, treachery, and injustice. This discovery, or reminder, issomething which, quite justly, yields satisfaction. (1983: 98)

One worry about such accounts of pleasure that locate it in aself-reflexive meta-response is that they seem to call into questionthe genuineness of our concern for others that is part of thefirst-order response. Because of its self-reflexivity, the pleasure wetake in having that concern seems to stem not frombeing thekind of person who, e.g., feels pity and sympathy toward others, butfromthinking of oneself as virtuous in that way. Indeed,choosing to attend a tragic drama for the sake of that pleasure castsdoubt on the sincerity of one’s pity or sympathy for tragiccharacters—for pity and sympathy are not emotions one chooses toexperiencefor the sake of some personal end. In hisLettre à d’Alembert, Rousseau proposes that, farfrom nurturing in us a genuine capacity for sympathy outside aestheticcontexts, the best tragedies only function to

reduce all the duties of man to some passing and sterile emotions thathave no consequences, [except] to make us applaud … ourhumanity in pitying the ills that we could have cured. (1758 [1960:25])

An alternative objection is that there are likely many people who lackmoral goodness but who respond with pity and sympathy to the fates oftragic characters. Perhaps their experience shows that we would bewrong to infer from our feeling pleasure in recognizing our pity forcharacters in a drama, to how we would feel for those in comparablestates of affairs in real life. In other words, while ourmeta-response to our feelings for fictions might give us pleasure, wewould be unjustified in characterizing that meta-response as arecognition of a genuine capacity for pity. Augustine disputes asimilar claim that our pleasure in tragedy derives from the feeling ofcompassion we have for its protagonists. Such mercy would imply adesire that the sorrows of characters be eliminated, yet, as he notes,spectators desire that they be continued—taking pleasure inone’s own sadness, one “sheds tears of joy”(Confessions Book 6).

Another challenge, which we’ll look at more closely below in thediscussion of thedistancing approach, arises from a generalrelation that theorists of fiction have proposed between theabsorption one experiences in engaging with a fiction and the degreeto which one experiences self-awareness or self-conscious attention toone’s experience. The proposal is that the relation is indirect:the more one is self-conscious, the less one is absorbed, or“transported” into a fiction, and the less one experiencestypical effects of fictions such as emotional engagement. The problemthis raises for the meta-response theory is that a meta-responsecalls for such self-consciousness—hence for adiminution in the absorption that is typically a precondition offiction-directed emotions. So the solution would seem to propose thatthe very experience that gives us pleasure results in a weakening ofthat pleasure’s causal condition.

Some plausible responses would be that our meta-response andabsorption are not constant but alternate, i.e., we flip back andforth from attention to the contents of the story as if they were realto our own response to the story in which it is explicitlyacknowledged as fictional. An alternative suggestion is thatabsorption dominates the experience of the work but the pleasure inmeta-response to that experience takes hold once our engagement withthe story has concluded (e.g., when the play ends). The plausibilityof these solutions can be addressed in part by how well theycharacterize the phenomenology of our experience of works such astragedies. The verdict here is unclear.

In any case, it shouldn’t be disputed that sometimes we feelpleasure in virtue of a second order response to a first orderresponse. One might laugh over the excessive fear one felt during aroller coaster ride, or one’s nervousness before a big date.Analogous relations can hold as one reflects on one’s weepingduring a sad film, as one finds it curious how susceptible one is tohaving emotions triggered by what one knows to be fictional, or howautomatic tendencies to feel and behave certain ways expose the faultsin one’s dignified image of oneself as having top-down cognitivecontrol over such reactions.

Other candidates for the hedonic return in enduring tragedy’scharacteristic forms of distress include the pleasure of relief, oncethe unfolding of the story that sustains the distress has reached anend, and the pleasure of one’s sense of one’s comparativewellbeing in not being subject to the misfortunes of an aversivefiction’s protagonists (Lear 1988). Lucretius identifies thegeneral dynamic:

’tis sweet
To mark what evils we ourselves be spared;
’Tis sweet, again, to view the mighty strife
Of armies battled yonder o’er the plains,
Ourselves no sharers in the peril. (De rerum natura Book II,5– 9).

See Dadlez (2004: 222) for the potentially broad scope of Hume’sreference to pleasure, where it is associated with a wide variety ofdistinct kinds of passions, including relief and hope.

2.3 Non-Hedonic Compensation

Approaches that reject the exclusively hedonistic flavor ofcompensatory theories note that some of the goods afforded by aversiveworks of art can be sufficiently compensatory without beingpleasurable. More precisely, such theories allow that tragedy cancause us to feel pleasure, but that is through offering us a distinctkind of good, the possession of which is itself valuable, and not justas asource of pleasure or satisfaction. Such theorists denythe assumption of theresponse condition. Thus, Aaron Ridleyremarks,

There is … no reason at all to imagine that the value andimportance of tragic drama must ultimately derive from its capacity toplease. And that, surely, is just as well, since successful tragicdrama—think of Lear, think of Oedipus—is simply not allthat pleasing. (2003: 413; see also Budd 1995)

2.3.1 Heightened Experience

One candidate for a value distinct from pleasure is mere affectivestimulation. The thought here is that is we sometimes valueexperiences that provoke us to strong feelings, extreme affectivestates that may be valuable just because they are unusual in ordinaryhumdrum life (which of course does not presume that any affectivestate that is unusual is for that reason valuable).

Hume (1757) considers L’Abbe Dubos’s argument for thatproposal that it is the mere desire for heightened experience, whetherpositive or negative, that motivates us to be audiences for tragicdrama:

No matter what the passion is: Let it be disagreeable, afflicting,melancholy, disordered; it is still better than that insipid languor,which arises from perfect tranquility and repose. (1757 [1987:217])

His objection, however, is that, as we saw earlier, our positiveaffect in engaging with a tragic drama is a result of exposure to itsevents-as-represented, not to the events themselves:

It is certain, that the same object of distress, which pleases in atragedy, were it really set before us, would give the most unfeigneduneasiness; though it be then the most effectual cure to languor andindolence. (1757 [1987: 218])

A related proposal is that what we take pleasure in is not the extremestate of fear, sadness, disgust, and so on, but an aspect of thosestates that is not intrinsically unpleasant (Morreal 1985). Thus somekinds of fear involve a feeling of excitement, and we may takepleasure in that aspect of, e.g., riding a rollercoaster, withoutbeing said to take pleasure in all aspects of the fear that event maycause, such as a feeling of tightness in one’s chest.

Smuts (2007) argues for what he calls therich experiencetheory which holds that audiences desire such works in part for theintrinsic value of the experiences they offer. These are experiencesone cannot typically undergo in ordinary life without paying seriouspsychic or physical costs. By “rich experience” Smutsmeans experiences that are “cognitively, sensorily, andaffectively engaging” (2014: 132). Here, the painful experienceis not, alone, valuable, so much as it is partlyconstitutiveof experiences that are valuable.

2.3.2 Cognitive Value

Other goods relate to the cognitive benefits, broadly understood, ofthe experience of tragic drama. Thus, it has been proposed (mostfamously in association with the obscure notion of“catharsis”) that tragedies offer spectators anopportunity to clarify their emotions. On interpretations ofAristotle’s notion of catharsis, see Nehamas (1994); on theambiguity of the concept, see K. Bennett (1981) and Lear (1988). Theproper understanding and existence of catharsis is controversial(Shelley 2003). But a plausible construction of the idea is that wecome to learn about some of our emotions when their expression iselicited by highly affecting works of art, in the case of tragediesspecifically by the “release” of the negative emotions offear and pity that comes with the narrative resolution of the plot.There, the expression of our emotions does not leave them unchanged;rather, they are exposed, fine-tuned, and given a salient form whenarising in conformity to a work of tragedy’s prescriptions forhow to feel. For the view that emotions can be brought intoperspicuity through their expression, see Collingwood (1938:109–11) and Gilmore (2011). Another cognitive benefit is anintrinsically valuable enlightenment about the nature of suffering.Flint Schier (1989) thus discusses how an artistic representation mayallow us a more objective understanding of such things as distress andpain, and more broadly, the nature of our and other’s humanpredicament, than would our witnessing actual distress. For example,in the case of an actual event, our concern for our own safety mightobscure our understanding of the depth and character of the sufferingof others. Schier argues that we desire such knowledge because it isintrinsically valuable, and thus take pleasure in acquiring it (seealso Shelley 2003). Relatedly, Kames proposes that tragedy helps toenhances our sympathy and (thereby) strengthens our virtues (1751:Essay i, 49–50). Hutcheson, by contrast, notes the satisfactionwe take in morally approving the virtuous dispositions of charactersin a tragedy in response to the struggles they face (1725: ii, 6.7,240–241).

A third non-hedonic value is an opportunity afforded by tragic worksof art to contemplate and better come to understand our ownvulnerability to loss. Referring to the last point in his discussionof Shakespeare’s tragedies, Samuel Johnson writes that

the reflection that strikes the heart is not, that the evils before usare real evils, but that they are evils to which we ourselves may beexposed. (1765: 77–78)

Other cognitive approaches suggest that the benefits offered bypainful emotions pertain to understanding the work of art itself.Thus, Goodman (1968 [1976: 248–52]), treats both negative andpositive emotions as potential modes of sensitivity to awork—helping discern properties of it that a colderdispassionate appraisal would miss. Maybe there is a point conveyed bya work to which we remain uncomprehending unless sufficiently attunedto it via the focus on it engendered by being in a particularemotional state.

Relatedly, Korsmeyer (2011) endorses what she identifies as a“conversionary account” (seeSection 5 below). In her view, the disgust and fear we feel for somerepresentations are not transformed into different, pleasurableemotions, but rather serve (are “put to use”) in theattainment of aesthetically or otherwise valuable responses to thatrepresentation (2011: 132). For example, disgust and fear elicited bya representation can heightenattentive absorption (2011:132) in that thing. And “death”, she writes, “isrealized differently in the experience of disgust” (2011: 134),suggesting that there is epistemic value peculiar to an experiencethat is realized through its elicitation of disfavored feelings.Rather than demonstrating a conversion of negative feelings, thisaccount is better characterized as identifying a compensation thatthey lead to, viz, the achievement of such things as attentiveabsorption for which we undergo fear and disgust; or the realizationof an overall pleasurable whole, of which the negative emotions areparts. See a related proposal in Todd (2014) that our awareness of afictionqua fiction shapes the negative emotions that itscontents elicit, and those negative emotions in turn strengthen andfocus our attention to those contents.

A final candidate for a quasi-cognitive good is the satisfaction ofcuriosity or achievement of understanding. The thought here is theunderstanding gained in satisfying our curiosity is itself valuable(cognitively so) and is pleasing to obtain. Indeed, just as thepleasure of slaking one’s thirst helps motivate the search forlife-sustaining hydration, the pleasure of achieving understanding ispart of what helps motivate our efforts to realize and garner itsintrinsic value. Aristotle notes in thePoetics that“we enjoy looking at the most exact portrayals of things whoseactual sight is painful to us” (Poetics IV; he refersto pictures of corpses as an example) and explains this pleasure asarising from the knowledge acquired in viewing such representations.See the more contemporary account by Carroll on the role of disgust inhorror films (1990: 184–5) where our pleasure is not in thedisgust itself but in the disclosure of the unknown—themonster—of which disgust is a predictable concomitant.

One concern with the cognitive account is whether the putativecognitive benefits are sufficiently strong to compensate for thedispleasures of tragedy. If we learn something largely propositionalfrom tragic or other disturbing works of art, it isn’t clear whywe tend to see them again and again. If learning such and suchexplains why we endure the pain a tragedy causes, this wronglysuggests that seeing the tragedy a second time somehow deprives it ofits compensatory value—since we already know what it teaches.Perhaps a response is that we learn something more completely ordifferently with subsequent viewings. Although this criticism is drawnfrom generally applicable anti-cognitive approaches to the arts, ittakes on a special plausibility in the case of tragic drama which,unlike, e.g., novels, we often see in several iterations.

Another objection addresses an ambiguity faced by cognitive accountsover whether the compensation tragedy offers is the value ofunderstanding, or merely the value ofhaving the feeling ofgaining understanding. If, as some of the cognitive compensatoryapproaches note, it isn’t for the sake of the cognitive benefit,but for the sake of the pleasures associated with those cognitivebenefits, that we submit ourselves to the unpleasant emotions oftragedy, how important is it that those cognitive benefits begenuine?

Jonathan Lear (1988) identifies, for example, one of the goods oftragedy as being theconsolation it offers in explaining thatwhen bad things happen to good people, those occurrences areintelligible and explicable: they do not “occur in a world whichis in itself ultimately chaotic and meaningless” (1988: 325).Yet, as Aristotle observes, what is important in a well-formed tragedyis that eventsappear plausible or credible, not that theyactually are (Poetics XXIV). Theappearance ofexplaining this consoling fact takes precedence over actuallyimparting knowledge of how the world works, at least inAristotle’s estimation of what best generates artistic value.Perhaps what matters is not that we learn from tragedy, but that wehave the satisfying feeling of having learned. If that is true of thesupposed cognitive values found in tragedy then at least some versionsof the cognitive theory collapse into the hedonistic theory. We valuethe feeling of learning something occasioned by the experience offictions; that we actually learn something is not necessary for thatfeeling to arise. A natural counter to this reduction of cognitive tohedonistic accounts would be to note that while one may take as muchpleasure in merely seeming to learn as in actually learning from awork of art, it is the pleasure of the latter experience that explainsthe possibility of the pleasure of the former. Just as we findpleasant the sweetness of artificial sweeteners only because we aredisposed to find pleasant the taste of actual sugar, so any cases ofdelight we take in seeming to learn must be understood against abroader background in which we take pleasure because we actuallylearn.

2.3.3 Meaning and Function

A last kind of compensatory approach points to the ways in whichcertain experiences aremeaningful to us in part in virtue ofthe pain or distress they involve, without any implication that suchpain or distress is otherwise intrinsically or instrumentally valuable(Bloom 2021).

Why should the pain an experience causes accrue to its meaningfulness?Multiple explanations suggest themselves. From an evolutionaryperspective, that a given achievement involves suffering may reveal itas a “costly signal” of the virtues or desires of theachiever. The distress an activity causes may serve to distinguishthose who really value or need it (and thus are willing to endure itsassociated pain) from those for whom the activity is relativelyunimportant, and thus something they’d pursue only at a lowcost. For a discussion of how deliberate self-harm might serve as a“costly-signal” see Hagen, Watson, and Hammerstein (2008).For discussion, see Bloom (2021: 64). These explanations tend to focuson how the willingness to undergo pain redounds to the authenticity ofan emotion or sincerity of an expressed desire for the experience inwhich the pain is elicited.

Related explanations posit certain functions, of which one istypically unaware, in the pursuit of negative emotions through art.Mar and Oatley (2008), for example, describes fiction as having thefunction of social simulation. It is perhaps true that horror fictionappears to rely on the same mental architecture as actual experiencesin producing its effects on our emotions and body. And perhapsaversive fiction causes or enables an ability to learn from and dealwith genuine threats, losses, and other setbacks to our interests viasimulation, but that doesn’t explain why we take pleasure in itor pursue it. We would need to posit another explanatory factor herethat says that we desire (unconsciously?) to do things that furtherour capacities, e.g., of responding to things that make us suffer.“Function” here is used only in an evolutionarysense—i.e., in the sense in which the psychological dispositionto have such experiences (pleasure from pain or fear) was acquired inpart because it helped to produce beings like us. Alternative accountsfavor an explanation that appealed to exaptation. The appeal toevolution speaks only to the question of how our cognitive andemotional makeup makes such experiences possible, not why now, in thepresent day, we ought to desire these experiences.

An important point about most compensatory approaches is that,although drawing on Hume’s introduction of the problem, theyconstrue the paradox in ways that depart from the Scottishphilosopher’s terms. Hume posits an internal relation betweenthe disagreeable and agreeable responses engendered by tragedy. Thepreceding compensatory approaches, by contrast, treat the negativeaspects of a work of art as merely a necessary cost to be entered intoan overall accounting of the net value of experiencing a work of art.In that approach, the negative dimension of a work is not valued assuch; instead, it is valued only insofar as it plays a role inproducing the positive dimensions. If one could do away with thesadness a tragedy causes us to feel while preserving the enlightenmentthe play affords, the value of the experience would be the same orincreased. Some solutions that appeal to the pleasures of tragedyexemplify this. Delight in spectacle does not require the spectaclebeing produced through rebarbative events.

The exceptions are compensatory approaches (what Levinson [2014b: xii]calls “organicist”) in which the connection between thenegative and positive dimensions of the experience is tighter and thelatter is directly dependent on the former (presumably only withincertain ranges). Earlier, we saw an objection to solutions to theparadox that say that, in apro tanto manner, we takepleasure in the formal or aesthetic dimensions of a tragedy and feelpain about its content. The objection was that this implies that if wecould experience the formal aspects of tragedy in a work that causedus no pain, we would prefer that to the tragedy. While this is ofcourse sometimes the case, it is implausible to posit it as a generalrule. We do often choose tragedies over comedies, without assuming thelatter is deficient in its formal values. A rejoinder here is theproposal that the pain that tragic drama causes possesses a particularcharacter, making the experience ofthat pain a preconditionfor realizing tragedy’s particular compensatory good. That good,in other words, cannot be furnished by a work without tragedy’sdistressing dimension. In one such proposal, for example, it is onlyin and through the suffering elicited by tragedy that we contemplateour vulnerability to loss. In another proposal certain aesthetic orexperiential values can be realized only in our encounterswith such works (Budd 1995). The suffering we experience in watching atragedy might, for example, have cognitive value both in the familiarsense in that it allows us to learn about the suffering of others, orto enhance our capacity for empathy, and the more interesting sense inwhich certain insights may be available to us only through oursuffering. Sadness might, for example impose an otherwise inaccessiblepattern of saliency on what we see and on our relation to it.

Of course, tragedy’s characteristic benefits may be multiple andthe theories cited above are not always mutually-exclusive incharacterizing the good that comes with the bad. However, a moreelaborate mapping of the logical space of such solutions would ask towhat extent a given theory excludes another, either by making thelatter explanation otiose, or denying the description of the phenomenathe latter assumes to be true.

3. Contextual Solutions

Some explanations don’t so much identify the reasons for whichwe desire to experience disagreeable art, as identify the conditionsunder which we are able to have those experiences. Two such conditionsaredistance andcontrol.

3.1 Distance

It’s often claimed of the artistic medium in which tragicstories are told that it allows us to experience their content in asafely “distanced” form, one that prevents us fromsuffering as we would if we were witness to an analogous state ofaffairs outside of that artistic context. As Edmund Burke (1757) notesin his remarks on the sublime,

When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving anydelight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and withcertain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as weevery day experience. (part 1 section VII)

In his essay on the Laocoon (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing suggeststhat beauty can have such a distancing effect when he argues thatbecause artists understood it would have been too painful foraudiences to confront a fully realistic representation of thesuffering involved in the story, they represented that story in abeautiful form.

Accounts of such distancing identify a condition, perhaps a necessaryone, under which an experience of tragic drama can be pleasurable, butnot why it is pleasurable. Answers to that latter question may appealto a wide variety of considerations explaining why we enjoy a givenart form, many of them listed inSection 2.1.

That there is a metaphorical distance between audiences and what theyare prompted to imagine by a fictional representation makes intuitivesense. One can’t intervene in a play’s state of affairs tochange its outcome; one can’t be physically harmed by the eventsthat a novel prompts us to visualize. And, even highly vividfiction-directed imaginings don’t typically cause us to believethat what we mentally represent is genuinely before us. In one kind ofaccount, emotions that are too raw, too overwhelming, or too powerfulto endure when experienced unmediated, are better contained whenexperienced via the psychological and practical “remove”audiences have toward fictional representations. See the discussion inRobinson (2005) on “Formal Devices as Coping Mechanisms”and the idea of a “protective frame” furnished byknowledge of a situation’s fictionality in Apter (1992). Withoutsuch distancing, powerful emotions can get in the way of theexperience of pleasure that audiences can take in features of theartistic representation. Likewise, such powerful emotions can preventus from achieving the various forms of insight and understanding forwhich we value and pursue the experience of such works. In arepresentative example of this approach, Menninghaus and hiscollaborators (2017) draw on substantial empirical literature inpsychology to argue that only via the activation of certaindistancing processes, such as one’s being made aware ofa film’s fictional status, can there arise certainembracing processes via which audiences experience pleasuresderiving from such things as “an interplay between positive andnegative emotions”; one’s attention to a piece’sartistry; and the social dimensions of one’s sharing with othersthe experience of the work. Distancing processes

keep negative emotions at some psychological distance, therebysafeguarding the hedonic expectations of art reception against beinginevitably compromised by the experience of negative emotions. (2017:3)

In other words, distancing prevents the negative emotions from gettingin the way of the positive emotions that would otherwise emerge inone’s experience of a work.

Yet, despite its familiarity, there are conceptual problems withemploying the idea of distancing in a solution to the paradox oftragedy. These problems emerge when we try to unpack what is literallyasserted when one says tragedies distance audiences from the horriblestates of affairs they represent. Let us suppose that what is meant bydistancing is a kind of moderation or subduing of an otherwise extremeemotional response. To say we are distanced by a factor such asfictionality is to say that we feel an emotion with less intensitythan we otherwise would if such fictionality were not present. We arethen able to avail ourselves of those pleasures and other benefits oftragedy whose emergence would be frustrated by emotions that are moreextreme. One objection to such an account calls into question the verypremise that audiences for tragic drama and the likearedistanced in that emotion-subduing way that the explanation proposes.For,prima facie, audiences of tragic fictions do experiencepowerfully painful emotions, Having such affective experiences doesnot impede their pleasure, but, if Hume is right, enhances it. Aninverse of that objection is that, as Hume notes, under certainconditions we can take pleasure in non-fictional representations ofawful things, even though confronting them directly would cause usdistress. There is no assumption of fictionality in Cicero’soratory of terrible events, yet in his eloquence, Hume writes,

the uneasiness of the melancholy passions is not only overpowered andeffaced by something stronger of an opposite kind; but the wholeimpulse of those passions is converted into pleasure, and swells thedelight which the eloquence raises in us. (1757 [1987: 220])

A more significant problem may be found in the claim that we can speakof thesame emotion, whether it is experienced unmediated orin a manner that involves putative distancing. For to adopt adistanced attitude toward someone for whom one feels anguished pity isnot to continue to feel anguished pity, just “at adistance”. It is to feel something else altogether, or not tofeel at all. The distancing approach does not explain how we canendure feeling an emotion of thesame kind and quality towarda fictional state of affairs but not toward an analogous real state ofaffairs. It elides, instead, two categorically differentemotions—one that is weak, short-lived, potentiallydis-passionate, and one that is overwhelming or otherwise so powerfulas to block any pleasures that the occasion might allow. Claiming thatthe affective or phenomenological character of the emotion we feel fora fiction is different from that which we feel for like affairs inreal life can suggest a solution to the paradox. Specifically, itwould be to reject theappreciation condition—the claimthat properly appreciating an artwork of the relevant kind causes oneto feel serious distress. However, that solution comes at theconsiderable cost of denying the presence of the aversive feelings weexperience in watching painful art that makes the appreciationcondition plausible in the first place.

An alternative objection to the distancing approach is that itimproperly locates the source of the putative ameliorative effect thatfictionality has on our emotions. For, as noted earlier, manynon-fictional representations can elicit pleasure through, or alongwith, causing distress. Even as their contents cause feelings ofdistress, pity, and disgust, we sometimes enjoy reading of such thingsas historical narratives of violent battles, tabloid reports ofgruesome deaths, and seeing beautiful or otherwise compellingphotographs of abject and suffering individuals, natural disasters,cities in ruins, and other subjects we would not take pleasure inseeing face-to-face. Perhaps the distancing model must dispense withthe distinction between fictions and nonfictions, and help itselfinstead to a different distinction, such as that betweenrepresentational and confrontational contexts (Matravers 2014). Here,fictionality, as such, is not what explains our capacity to takepleasure in painful experiences, rather being fictional is only one ofmany ways in which a state of affairs can be something into which wecannot intervene and cannot be practically affected by.

Finally, the distancing approach attributes a mental state toaudiences that is at odds with the mental state briefly referred to inSection 2.2 that at leastprima facie appears to be a precondition of afiction causing intense feelings: imaginative immersion. Sometimescalledabsorption orfictional transportation,imaginative immersion describes an engagement with the contents of afictional representation typified by several dimensions:interalia, selective and sustained attention; a fluency in access toand processing of information supplied by one’s attention;cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses that are experienced asendogenously elicited by the contents of the representation, ratherthan by the representational vehicle itself; and, a diminishedself-consciousness or meta-reflective attention to those responses(Gerrig 1993; Green & Brock 2002; Mazzocco et al. 2010).

Plausibly, a fictional story can cause us to feel aversive emotionsonly when we are absorbed in its content (as opposed to, say, immersedin the second order experience of performing a literary analysis). Butif this is true, it is hard to see how the distancing approach canclaim both that we can experience such aversive emotions and be awareof ourselves as removed from the state of affairs represented by thefiction. The absorption condition says that only by audiences beingimaginatively immersed in the state of affairs a tragedy representscan it have its characteristic effects, while the distancing conditionsays we experience the pain and pleasure of tragedy only whenunderstanding ourselves as being at a good remove from that state ofaffairs. Hence, the distancing and immersion approaches representcompeting pictures of our mental states during artisticengagements.

Although different explanations of the paradox of tragedy may offerdistinct, yet complementary, causes for the phenomenon, we can see howthe distancing approach stands as a direct competitor to compensatorysolutions. Compensatory approaches like those inSection 2 take the strength of the negatively valenced emotion aroused by adisturbing work of art to require some positively-valenced emotion, orother valuable property for the whole experience of the work of art tobe sought after and valued. But if distancingeliminates orreduces the awfulness of some fiction state of affairs, no suchor less such compensation is required to understand why the fiction asa whole is desirable. To the extent that distancing has the effect itsproponents say, the compensatory solutions become otiose.

3.2 Control

The second kind of condition under which it is proposed that tragediescan be pleasurable iscontrol. Because I know that I can stopor modify my experience of painful art, the pain is less severe, oracquires a different valence than it has in ordinary contexts.Specifically, under such a condition one source of the badness of painis eliminated: one’s not knowing that it can be controlled.Control in this sense is broader than and can include the dimension ofdistancing described earlier: specifically, according to the controltheory, if one believes one cannot distance oneself from thephenomenon then one cannot take pleasure in it.

Theorists who propose that a control condition operates in ourexperience of tragic drama stress the greater degree of power we haveover the pain caused by works of art than over the pain caused byordinary experience (see Eaton 1982; Morreall 1985). Specifically, wecan enjoy tragic and other sorts of aversive works of art when we areaware we can direct our thoughts and actionsvis-à-visthe work in question. Theorists argue that such control limits orchanges the character of the putative painfulness of some works ofart, such that the pain at issue doesn’t generate the paradoxthat a desire for, or valuing of, ordinary pain would. One way suchcontrol is manifested is in our awareness, when experiencing negativeaffectvis-à-vis art, that the story belongs to agenre in which it is typical for all things to work out in the end.One may also simply infer a happy ending from what one knows about awork, as one’s sadness over the life-threatening illness of atelevision character is made tolerable by one’s knowledge that aseries wouldn’t kill them off so soon. Feelings of anxiety orfear are therefore accommodated through modes of affective regulationthat rely on our familiarity with the artform in question.

Solutions to the paradox based on control face two major objections.One is that already lodged against distance theories: the controltheorist argues that the typical negative valence of a given emotionis ameliorated or eliminated when our experience of it is one overwhich we have some power. The problem here is assuming that thusseparated from its displeasing or aversive dimension via a sense ofcontrol, the negative emotion is the same emotion it would otherwisebe. Theories of emotions that hold that the valence of an emotion isan intrinsic quality of it would disagree. For them, a solution to theparadox based on the control condition doesn’t explain how wecan take pleasure in a displeasing emotion, it just implicitly deniesthat we experience the displeasing emotion in question. The secondobjection is that the control condition seems false to experience: onecan feel fully in control over whether or not one attends to ahorrifying, disgusting, or tragic state of affairs in a fictional filmwithout that sense of control making attending to those elements anyless displeasing (Gaut 1993: 338). Attending to a fictionalrepresentation of such events might be less distressing than actuallywitnessing such events. However, it is not clear that whether controlis given or withheld over attending to the fictional representation ofawful circumstances makes a difference in the aversive feelings itcauses.

4. Conversionary Accounts

Some explanations of the paradox suggest that in our experience ofpainful art, the content is rendered in such a way so as to“convert” its distressing elements, as a kind of rawmaterial, into a pleasurable form. Hume’s account lends itselfto this interpretation (Yanal 1991). It is not only, he writes, thatthe “melancholy passions” are overcome by “somethingstronger of the opposite kind” but that those passions are“converted into pleasure” (1757 [1987: 220]). Here, Humestresses that the negative emotions aroused by the distressing eventsmust be of a sufficiently high intensity for the accompanying orconsequent pleasure furnished by the conversion of those passions tobe as substantial as it is. So, for example, Cicero’s eloquenceapplied to ordinary events would not result in a pleasure with asgreat a magnitude as when it’s applied to awful ones.

One explanation of the phenomenon Hume describes appeals to adifference between an initial painful or distressing experience of astimulus and the experience of that stimulus in light of one’sawareness that it poses no threat of injury or harm to one’swell-being. In this connection, Paul Rozin coined the term“benign masochism” to refer to the enjoyment of“initially negative experiences that the body (brain) falselyinterprets as threatening”. This realization that the pain posesno real danger, Rozin and his colleagues write, “leads topleasure derived from ‘mind over body.’” (2013: 439).^[1] Even assuming that the psychological description is correct, thephenomenon described may not exemplify a “conversion” ofan emotion, but rather a replacement of one emotion with another, thelatter constituted by a different cognitive base, e.g., from a beliefor perception to an imagining. On cognitive bases of emotions, seeDeonna and Teroni (2008 [2012]) and Gilmore (2020: 45). Of course,distinguishing here between conversion and replacement may beconstrued as only a verbal dispute.

An alternative possibility for capturing the conversionary proposalwould be to appeal to the familiar idea that the form, manner, ormedium of a representation shapes our responses to its contents. Touse Hume’s example, death and destruction, the representation ofwhich would normally provoke horror and pity, give us pleasure whenrepresented in Cicero’s eloquent description. And the greaterthe pity and horror those events would produce absent that eloquence,the greater the pleasure they can elicit when conveyed via arepresentation possessed of an eloquent form. That different modes ofrepresenting an event may elicit, respectively, different kinds anddegrees of emotional responses is uncontroversial. But thatexplanation of varied responses to different framings of the sameevent doesn’t tell us how distressing emotions are“converted” into pleasurable ones. One reason is that, aswe saw earlier in compensatory theories that appeal toformas compensation forcontent, our responses to distressingworks of art are always to the content-as-represented, that is, thecontent in a given form, manner, style, etc. There are not, as itwere, two stages in our exposure to such events: one in which we feeldistress over what is described “independent” of theirhaving been represented for us and a second in which that distress ischanged into pleasure. There is just our response to thoseevents-as-represented.

It is a truism of artistic production that a given event that wouldprovoke pain or distress if it actually occurred can be rendered in afictional form that will provoke other kinds of emotions, such aslaughter, or no emotion at all. Picaresque novels often subject theirprotagonists to various forms of violent injury that would indeed bepainful, if real, to behold, but are a source of humor when confinedto a fiction. The animated seriesSouthpark kills off thelittle boy Kenny in one episode after another, but to only comediceffect; and it should go without saying, the history of art ispopulated by paintings and sculptures of murder, rape, and torturerendered in stylized and beautiful forms that evoke wonder anddelight, not the revulsion that the representation of actual suchevents would cause. However, such cases illustrate not the conversionof emotions, but merely their elicitation. Furthermore, when weconfine our attention to fictional objects, there doesn’t evenexist a contrasting case of the events framed in a different way. For,as noted inSection 2.1, there is no sense in which we have access to the contents of afiction independent of their representation. The contents of a fictionareconstituted by how they are represented. Those events maybe distressing or pleasurable to behold, but it is not the case thatthe style, manner, form, etc. of how they are represented somehowtransforms what they are “prior” to thatrepresentation.

Even if we had a plausible description of how our emotions elicited bytragedy are converted from distress to pleasure, conversionaryaccounts face the challenge of showing that the relevant emotions aretransformed into forms in which they relinquish their negativevalence, while remainingthe same emotion. As we saw in theobjection to distancing solutions to the paradox, it is highlycontroversial to assert that when a given emotion is shorn of itsusual valence, it remains an instance of the same emotion-kind. Thereare many theories of emotions and no consensus over which has the bestintensional, extensional, and explanatory account. However, it seemshighly intuitive that if a given emotion kind hasanyessential features, how the emotion feels (its phenomenology) is oneof them. If, as conversionary accounts suggest, aesthetic contexts caneffect a transformation in a given emotion to one with a valence notat all resembling that which it has in its usual manifestations, wemay have a case not of the conversion of a given emotion, but areplacement of one kind of emotion with another. When we turn toRevisionary Solutions inSection 6 we’ll see a solution to the paradox that explicitly tries tomeet that challenge by rejecting the intuition that the valence weassociate with a given instance of an emotion is one of its essentialfeatures.

5. A Broader Approach to the Phenomenon

When the experience at issue is construed without restriction tofictions, many kinds of engagements outside of the artistic spherefall within its scope. We often find satisfaction in nonfictions,e.g., in historical narratives, even as they generate pity or anger.Many people are titillated by disturbing pictures or reports in thenews. Enjoying Reality TV depends on its participants genuinelybehaving in ways that viewers find deplorable. Others find violentsports repellent but enthralling. A long-distance runner might findsatisfaction in exercising to the point of exhaustion, and not justfor the training stimulus it offers. And, for a thrill, one might eattoo-spicy chili peppers, risk one’s physical well-being, orimagine inordinately nauseating or frightful circumstances. See Bloom(2021) for a compendium of such contexts in which people seem to takepleasure in undergoing experiences that areprima facieunpleasant

When construed in a descriptive fashion, the puzzle arising from ourengagement with tragic works of art assumes that they call for aresponse thatcontrasts with that which we tend to exhibit ina class of normal cases. However, the wider the range is of relevantlysimilar experiences such as those surveyed above, the more dubious isthe premise that initially gives rise to the puzzle: viz., our findingvalue in some experiences in virtue of the negative feelings theyevoke is sounlike our other sorts of attitudes and behaviorthat it requires some distinctive explanation. However, if it is truethat we have that response in many contexts outside of our engagementwith tragedy, then its paradoxical air is difficult to sustain. Wemight still want to know what gives us pleasure in tragedy but therewould be no specialparadox of tragedy calling for a solution(Gilmore 2020: 159–60). Indeed, we may contrast those sorts ofsocially acceptable pursuits in which one takes satisfaction inone’s distress with other sorts thatdo call for aspecial explanation, such as some practices of deliberateself-harm.

Resisting this denial that there is a paradox calls for somedemonstration that the experience of pleasure through pain in art issufficiently unlike that found in ordinary non-artistic contexts todemand its own explanation. Two such approaches can be found inRevisionary solutions.

6. Revisionary Solutions

Revisionary approaches to the paradox of tragedy attack the premisethat seems most immune to being falsified, theappreciationcondition. Applied to the cases at hand, that condition holdsthat properly appreciating tragic drama (or other relevantly similarworks of art) involves forming a mental state with a negativevalence. In other words, to respond appropriately to a tragicdrama is, to undergo sadness, distress, anger, or some other emotionor feeling that is in itself unpleasant, undesirable, ordisvalued.

Revisionary approaches reject that characterization of the state weare in as audiences for such painful art. They allow that a properappreciation of the works in question elicits negative emotions, butdeny that those negative emotions must carry their characteristicallyunpleasant feeling or phenomenology. Such theories argue that thetypical valence of negative emotions is not present in the contexts inwhich we take pleasure in painful art, but the negative emotionsremain.

Describing such a theory, De Clercq (2014) notes

According to one type of solution to the paradox, no emotion is initself agreeable or disagreeable to experience. So-called negativeemotions may be typically disagreeable, but they need not have anegative “hedonic charge” (Morreall 1985; Walton 1990;Gaut 1993; Neill 1992). (De Clercq 2014: 112)

If it is not a disagreeable feeling, what then explains theattribution of a “negative” aspect to those emotionselicited by tragic drama? Revisionist theories say the negative aspectbelongs not to the phenomenology of undergoing the emotion, but to theevaluation of the situation that the emotion is about.

Walton thus remarks

Hume’s characterization of sorrow as a passion that is “initself disagreeable” is very much open to question. What isclearly disagreeable are the things we are sorrowful about—theloss of an opportunity, the death of a friend—not the feeling orexperience of sorrow itself. (1990: 258).

Thus, the sorrow one feels for a fictional character need not be initself a disagreeable or negatively-valenced experience; it isundesirable by virtue of the undesirable situation that it registersan evaluation of (Neill 1992: 62). This approach treats the negativityof a negative emotion as, at least sometimes, a relational property ofthe event or state of affairs the emotion is a response to. Onlysecondarily, and only sometimes, does the disvalue of the state ofaffairs prompt an unpleasantness in the phenomenology of undergoingthe emotion elicited by awareness of that state of affairs.

This distinction between the negativity of an emotion’scharacteristic phenomenology and the negativity of the event or stateof affairs the emotion is about may make sense only within anexcessively cognitive characterization of emotions. Yes, our sorrowpresents its object—the death of a friend—asdisagreeable, as counting against one’s wellbeing, as a loss ofvalue, etc. But it is at leastprima facie true that sorrowitself is undesirable beyond its instantiation merely being anindication of an undesirable state of affairs. That is because thenegative valence of such emotions is the means by which they express,qua emotions, the undesirability of their objects. This ishow emotions contrast with beliefs—which lack a characteristicphenomenology—as distinct ways of representing the values ofthings. Consider how badbeing anxious feels, when anxiety isessentially about something that has not yet happened and hence hasnot yet instantiated the harm or loss of value of what, if the eventcomes about, may be an additional factor counting against one’swellbeing. The badness of the feeling of being anxious is a feature ofthe emotion because of the emotion’s function in putting us onguard against immanent harm. This is just as the badness of thefeeling caused by disgust is a feature of the emotion in its capacityas a warning signal, or reminder, of the danger of being exposed toharmful substances.

Of course, different theories of emotions will differ in the extent towhich they see the standard phenomenology of an emotion as anessential feature of it. If a theory, for example, includes within thescope of experiences of fear, those in which the typicalunpleasantness of feeling fear is absent, then revisionist approachesare on firm ground in claiming that such negative emotions need nothave a negative hedonic charge. But theprima facie challengeto such revisionism is to question why its opponents should admit intothe extension of an emotion conceptany putative cases ofsuch responses shorn of their typical feelings.

If the revisionist view here was presented in the strongest terms,where theonly negativity of a negative emotion belongs tothe state of affairs the emotion is about, this would entail theimplausible conclusion that there is no point in engaging in thecommon practice of trying to manage one’s sadness or distressabout some sad or distressing state of affairs. Unless one’sgoal is to convince oneself that the situation wasmisinterpreted as sad or distressing, trying to manageone’s feelings about it would be inconsistent with recognizingits truth. However, a significant challenge threatens even a moremoderate version of the revisionist proposal—one that allowsthat the feeling of merely undergoing a negative emotion can be amongthe sources of its negativity. The challenge is to explain why thenegative emotions elicited by tragic dramas are exceptions to emotionsof their kind in not causing unpleasantness or distress, or in causingjust pleasure. The revisionist theory cannot help itself to thevarious proposals that the context of fictions—e.g., ourdistance from the represented events—ameliorates the pain ofwitnessing distressing events. For then the revisionist theorycollapses into one of those theories and its denial that thedispleasing emotions we feel for tragedy possess a negative valencebecomes unmotivated.

An alternative revisionary approach suggests that the emotions we feelin fictional contexts ought not to be assimilated to emotions we feelin real life contexts because the former are a particular kind ofemotion associated with pretense and imagining:“quasi-emotions” in the nomenclature that Walton employsin his theory of fiction (1978 and 1990). The thought here is thatimagining or pretending to have an experience ofx does notrequire imagining or pretending to experience all of the propertiesconstitutive ofx. Imagining that I’m flying does notrequire me to imagine experiencing the feeling of flying (even thoughit might involve visually imagining my flying or imagining believingthat I’m flying). So imagining feeling sad over the death ofCordelia need not require my response to exhibit all the properties itwould if I were really sad, such as sadness’s valence andcharacteristic motivational dimensions. The solution here is to denythat our experience of such art is genuinely painful, a cause ofsuffering, a source of sadness, disgust, fear, and so on, in whole orpart. Instead, what appear to be such negatively-valenced emotions arein fact only imagined or pretend affective responses. These responsesshare certain characteristics with those of emotions we feel innon-fictional contexts, just not their unpleasantness. If this istrue, then there is no conflict between thecoordinationcondition that says we don’t take pleasure in painfulexperiences and theresponse condition that affirms that wetake pleasure in the experience of aversive art. For our experience ofsuch art on this understanding does not involve pain, but involvesrather an affective state that only resembles pain while not being aninstance of the kind of emotion that we may feel for genuinely tragicstates of affairs that we know to be actual.

Whether the emotions we feel for the contents of fictions arecontinuous with those we have for what is represented by our beliefsand other truth-apt attitudes is a substantial question addressed indiscussions of the so-called paradox of fictions. Reasons to doubtthat such emotions felt for the objects of imaginings are of the samekind as “real world” emotions, include: asymmetries intheir phenomenology, differences in their functional roles, thecognitive or evaluative content of each affective state, and thedirect-objects of each state (Gilmore 2013; Stecker 2011).

Whatever the resolution is of that debate, it should be noticed that,even if such emotions are identified as only“quasi”—as within a pretense or imagining, notoutside and directed in—this does not entail that they aresomehow less painful or disagreeable.

For it is plausibly the case that in order to experientiallyimagine feeling sad over the death of a fictional character,one has to experience the most central, or even constitutive, aspectof sadness—its negative valence. Without that, why say one is(experientially) imagining feeling sad, rather than merely imaginingthat one occupies the perceptual and other dimensions that accompanyfeeling sad, without feeling sad? Also, it might be suggested that,aside from the negative evaluations they represent of their targets,what fiction-directed sadness and ordinary sadness have in common suchthat we treat them as intimately related is that theyfeelbad. In other words, any plausible interpretation of the role ofquasi-emotions in our engagements with fictions must allow thepossibility that they carry with them similar bodily, affective, andother phenomenological dimensions as their counterpart ordinaryemotions. They may, as in one interpretation, lack the dimension ofbelief, or commitment to a proposition, about their object being real,and lack any motivation or reason for action (as one can’tintervene in a fictional world) but their being identified asquasi-emotions of particular type may depend upon their having asimilar phenomenology to the real-world-directed prototypes. So evenallowing that it is a quasi-emotion that we experience when we engagewith aversive art forms (quasi-disgust, quasi-horror, quasi-sadness)we still need to explain how our pleasure in undergoing such feelingsis consistent with our tendency (perthe coordinationcondition) not to take pleasure in, and to avoid where possible,experiences with negative valences (Friend 2007). Whether the emotionswe have for tragic dramas are real or pretend, they carry feelings ofpain and distress; why we choose to engage in an activity that causesthose feelings—perhaps even for the realization of thosefeelings—remains a puzzle.

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