The Resolution and Dissolution of the Paradox of Negative Emotions in the Aesthetics of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Twelve centuries after Saint Augustine, thinkers of the eighteenth century pondered with some bewilderment what contemporary aesthetics calls ‘the paradox of negative emotion in art’.¹ L’Abbé Dubos noted that, ‘at the theatre, man finds more pleasure weeping than he does laughing’, in that ‘the art of poetry and the art of painting are never more appreciated than when they succeed in evoking in us a sense of profound grief’.² He wondered about the nature of this apparently ‘secret charm that draws us to artistic depictions of devastating events, while at the same time an internal tremor tells us that we are contradicting our own understanding of pleasure’.³ Hume also underlines the strangeness of this pleasure that seems to contradict our human nature: ‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle.’⁴