Negative Emotions and Creativity

Abstract

Certain works of art, particularly the narrative arts, feature episodes that are apt to provoke experiences that spectators find painful. A paradigm example would be the scene in King Lear in which Regan and Cornwall put out Gloucester’s eyes. If we combine this fact — that some art gives rise to painful experiences — with the hedonic theory of motivation we seem to have an inconsistency. This is the so-called ‘paradox of tragedy’: that people both are and are not motivated to pursue painful experiences. In a helpful recent article Aaron Smuts has done work disentangling various claims, and shown that the so-called paradox is not a paradox at all as there is no reason to believe the hedonic theory of motivation. Instead, he argues, we are left with two questions that do merit attention: the ‘motivational question’ and ‘the difference question’:

The motivational question asks: Why is it that people want to see putatively painful art? And, the difference question asks: Why are people more willing to experience painful affect in response to art than in their normal lives? (Smuts 2009: 43)