Empathy: A Proposed Solution to the Paradox of Tragedy

I am sitting here listening to Punisher, an album by Phoebe Bridgers that chronicles both autobiographical and fictional stories of excruciating heartbreak, the gruesome death of a hero, a deeply painful childhood fueled by fatherly neglect, and the bleak realities of incurable mental illness. It’s absolutely devastating from start to finish and it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote an article arguing that Punisher is essentially a horror film in album form with its haunting imagery of ghosts and skeletons and aliens and hospitals and murder as well as its morbid descriptions of real life [1]. Even now, three years after its release, I can’t hear it without crying sometimes, and at the same time, I derive so much pleasure and enjoyment from the songs on this album that I don’t think I could live without it. But I’m not the only one who feels this way about Punisher or who deeply enjoys sad art and it does not strike me as absurd that I feel this way either. Tragic art is all around us and it is celebrated. But if Bridgers’ album is so gut wrenchingly tear-jerking, why and how is it possible that I enjoy it so much? This question raises the paradox of tragedy which is the puzzle of how it is possible that we seem to derive pleasure from tragic art.

One cannot deny that societally, we continue to produce and value all kinds of art that portray dark themes and sad stories. On the surface, it seems to be non-sensible or a contradiction to say that something which depicts tragedy and which we experience as tragic or even painful ought to somehow also bring us pleasure, but we cannot deny that this very thing happens all the time. The problem is not simply that some of us seem to enjoy tragic art because if this were the case, we might be able to write this phenomenon off as caused by the twisted taste of deranged psychopaths. The problem is that it seems to be the case that most of us find pleasure in the consumption of tragic art and this is not considered strange or abnormal in any way. This is so much so that we collectively revere tragedies and often to a greater degree than non-tragic art. We might think of the continued production and performance of Shakespearean tales where everyone dies and Sophoclean tragedies where the worst horrors take shape or the best picture Oscar of Schindler’s List and the extensive critical acclaim of Radiohead’s existentially dreadful Ok, Computer. So how are we to account for this? The resolution to this paradox will have to take the shape of an account of how it is possible to enjoy dark art and a description of what is happening when this enjoyment occurs.

Feagin, in her essay “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” presents a compelling argument for what accounts for our enjoyment of tragic art by describing how an unpleasant direct response to tragic content leads to a pleasurable meta-response. While this idea has its merits, I propose that Feagin’s characterization of both the direct and meta-response is flawed in that she misunderstands the nature of the feelings contained within them and therefore misrepresents the source and nature of our pleasure. While Feagin’s theory is deeply rooted in the connection between our emotional responses and morality, my theory for why we enjoy tragic art is entirely self-interested, having to do with self-soothing and not with sympathy. I will argue that while Feagin is correct that our enjoyment of tragic art requires both a direct response and a meta-response, and that the direct response must be unpleasant, the reason we enjoy tragic art has to do with a different source of unpleasantness and a different kind of meta-response, namely a selfish one wherein we do not feel relief in the knowledge that we are moral actors, but in the knowledge that our pain is not exclusive to us.

There are several preliminary matters when discussing the paradox of tragedy that Feagin addresses which are crucial to understanding both Feagin’s and my own arguments. The first is a question about how we can experience real emotional responses to art which we know to be fictional and therefore unreal in the first place. Feagin’s argument on the pleasure of tragedy presupposes an idea from Ralph Clark that when we consume art, we ask ourselves what it would be like if the events, actions, and characters were real. Insofar as we ask ourselves what it would be like to experience in reality what the art depicts in fiction, we entertain counterfactual conditionals in imagination as opposed to belief and this is what allows us to experience real emotion in response to art.

Another preliminary matter regards the premise on which the paradox of tragedy rests, namely the idea that we do and ought to derive pleasure from tragic art. Some people might argue that while we are able to experience real emotion in response to art, the proper response to a tragic artwork would not be pleasure and would instead be horror, sadness, fear, or any one of those emotions which reflect the unpleasantness of the tragic content in the art. On this account, to pursue tragic art is to pursue your own displeasure and to find any kind of enjoyment in the consumption of tragic art would constitute something like a moral perversion or having aberrant or unhealthy emotional experience. Feagin responds to this idea by pointing out that societally, we revere tragic artworks on the grounds that so many of us seem to enjoy them and we, as a society, often take works of tragedy to be among some of the best works of art in existence. If to enjoy tragedy constitutes perversion and abnormality, then why do so many of us experience this enjoyment?

One might respond to the paradox of tragedy by arguing that the question itself is mistaken: we do not find pleasure in tragedy, we instead find pain in it, so the question is not why we enjoy tragedy, but rather why we pursue things which we do not enjoy and which cause us pain. Feagin responds to this by arguing that there are different kinds of pleasure apart from the laughter and smiles we might immediately think of when we hear the word pleasure. We might reasonably accept that to experience a vibrant pleasure like laughter or joy in immediate response to tragic content is inappropriate and would be perverse, but Feagin argues that there are other kinds of pleasures which are more calm and satisfying than purely sensuous experiences of joy and that it is these more tranquil pleasures which we can account for in our experience of tragic art. Specifically, Feagin will describe the pleasure we feel in response to tragic works of art as a kind of profound gratification and I will argue that it is a profound comfort. Therefore, arguing that it is wrong to feel immediate smiling happiness in response to a profoundly sad subject matter is not the same as arguing that there are no pleasures whatsoever that result from consuming tragic art.

Feagin defines tragedy as broadly encompassing all works of art which have “unhappy endings" and "unpleasant subject matter" (Feagin, 96). While these descriptors might be overly simplistic, the definition of tragedy she is working with is helpful in that it distinguishes itself from a narrow Aristotelian use of the word tragedy and draws out the features of tragic art which give rise to the paradox. Therefore, this is the definition of tragedy I will be working with. Feagin’s proposed solution to the paradox of tragedy begins with the idea that there are two kinds of responses. The first kind of response is a direct response to the “qualities and content of the work” and the second kind of response is a meta-response which is a “response to the direct response” (Feagin, 97). Of course, to say that we respond directly to a work of art raises important metaphysical and ontological questions about what constitutes the artwork itself to begin with. However, for the purposes of this essay, I, like Feagin, will not attempt to resolve these metaphysical and ontological questions about what is art itself as Feagin’s argument hinges on the relationship between our meta-response and our direct response, and not on the question of which parts of our direct response can be properly attributed to the “work itself” (Feagin, 97). For our purposes, it is enough to say that we do experience direct responses to “unhappy endings" and "unpleasant subject matter” in art and it is the direct response to these aspects of the art whose meta-response we are interested in analyzing. This meta-response is essentially how we feel about the way we directly responded to the art.

One might object to this initial idea of responses and meta-responses by arguing that the same kinds of feelings and emotions can be involved in both direct responses and meta-responses. Furthermore, one might argue that there are many cases in which the line between the direct response and meta-response is impossible to discern, making the two responses essentially indistinguishable. For example, one might respond to something with anger, and then feel angry about having responded that way which only serves to compound the anger. In this case, it is incredibly unclear how to properly distinguish the response from the meta-response. Feagin, however, defends her starting point by making the simple claim that just because we cannot always tell the difference between the two, does not mean they are not different. Essentially, just because there is a penumbra where the line of division should be between two concepts, does not mean those two concepts do not exist. Therefore, moving forward, I will accept that we do experience both direct and meta-responses to tragic art and art in general and that the nature of and relationship between these responses is what accounts for our enjoyment of tragic art.

I will first address the direct response to tragic art. Feagin describes the direct response to tragic art as one fueled by sympathy and what one might expect from the consumption of unpleasant subject matter and unhappy endings. This direct response is emotional, rooted in pure feeling, and unpleasant. For example, if I watch a movie where an individual meets an unhappy end, my direct response will likely be to feel sad for the individual. I am sympathetic to their pain and this produces pain in me as well because, if we accept Ralph Clark’s idea of emotional responses to art, I am asking myself what it would be like for this person to really have existed and met this end. What if I had met this end? The aforementioned objector to the idea that tragic art can or ought to in any appropriate or healthy way lead to enjoyment or pleasure is in some sense right about this objection when we only think about the direct response. It is true that to immediately and directly respond to the tragic content with a feeling of pleasure simply does not make sense for someone who is not in some way deranged. This is so much the case that many people avoid tragic art because they do not want to feel any unpleasantness and do not want to be reminded of real tragic potentialities or the actuality of evil in the world.

However, if our discussion were to stop here, just with the direct response, we would find ourselves back in the paradox of tragedy: how can it be the case that societally we enjoy and revere tragic art all the time and also the case that an appropriate direct response to tragic content is an unpleasant one? This is why Feagin’s solution to the paradox of tragedy hinges on the meta-response to the direct response. While I agree with Feagin that the direct response to art ought to be unpleasant, her description of the direct response is where I begin to take issue with, and my own theory begins to diverge from, Feagin’s theory. Feagin describes the direct response as being rooted in sympathy, but I would argue that it is instead rooted in empathy. It is not that I imagine what it would be like for a person to experience such suffering and feel bad for them, it’s that witnessing their suffering reminds me of my own and evokes these unpleasant feelings by calling them to the surface. My direct response is therefore rooted in my ability to identify with the emotions portrayed in the artwork and not in the reminder of the existence of injustice in the world and consequent moral ability to feel sad about injustice. I’m not asking myself “what if this were real” or “what if this were me?” Instead, I recognize that in the emotional sense this is and has been me and in this sense is real.

For Feagin, what accounts for our eventual enjoyment of the art is the meta-response to the direct response wherein we are aware of our direct unpleasant reaction to tragic content and our meta-response is how we feel about the fact that we felt this unpleasantness in response to tragedy. To understand the meta-response, we must first understand that those who end up enjoying or deriving pleasure from the tragic art and so continue to pursue tragic art did not experience the unpleasantness of the direct response any less than those aforementioned people who avoid the tragic art because of this same unpleasantness. What accounts for the pleasure felt by those who enjoyed the tragic art is the pleasure in their meta-response. Feagin describes this pleasure in two slightly different ways. Firstly, she describes how when we feel unpleasantness in response to unhappy endings and unpleasant subject matter, we are reminded that we are good people. If the appropriate direct response to tragedy is a negative one, then experiencing this negative response makes us feel as though we “care for the welfare of human beings” and “deplore the immoral forces that defeat them” and we are so comforted by the fact that our moral compass appears to operate the way it ought to: we find relief in the confirmation that we feel the right things (Feagin, 98). This comfort is described by Feagin as a pleasurable feeling of satisfaction. There is a second way in which Feagin describes the meta-response which is that it makes us feel less alone. For Feagin, this comes from the idea that if our response to the tragedy is the expected negative one, we know that, by virtue of this response being commonplace, we aren’t alone in our feelings and emotional responses to things. Therefore, Feagin’s solution is not hindered by the obvious unpleasantness of proper direct responses, but accounts for and depends on this unpleasant direct response and in this way seems to escape the paradox by allowing for tragedy to be both painful in some sense but ultimately pleasurable.

While I agree with Feagin’s assertion that our meta-response has the function of making us feel less alone, I disagree with her account of why and how the meta-response does this. For Feagin, the direct response is rooted in sympathy and our meta-response involves the recognition that we were capable of such sympathy and “it gives us pleasure to find ourselves responding in such a manner” (Feagin, 103). However, I argue that since the direct response is instead rooted in empathy or our ability to identify with the emotions in the artwork, the meta-response does not involve any recognition of our good moral character and instead has to do with the recognition that the pain we know in our own lives was mirrored in the art and therefore cannot be unique to us. In some sense, Feagin’s theory involves the pleasure of knowing I am able to meet the artwork in its tragedy whereas my theory involves the pleasure of knowing the artwork was able to meet me in my pain. Knowing that we saw ourselves in the pain of another makes us feel less alone in the world. While Feagin agrees that the consumption of art makes us feel less alone, her idea about our meta-response involving a recognition of our morality and the feeling of less-loneliness are inseparable. For Feagin, our meta-response makes us feel less lonely because by recognizing that we care about others and that this care is in good moral character, we feel like a part of humanity because we had the correct response to the artwork, and this means most other people responded this way too. In realizing that we care about the outcomes of strangers, we remember we are a part of something larger than ourselves which we share called humanity and this is what accounts for less loneliness.

What is crucial is that Feagin’s claim about a loss of loneliness has not to do with us identifying with the emotions in the artwork, but has to do with us identifying with our direct emotional response. For Feagin, we feel united with others via a shared sense of morality, but in my account, we feel united with others via a shared sense of pain. Therefore, I would argue that our meta-response is the realization that our painful emotional direct response was evoked by our ability to identify with the suffering portrayed in the art which means we are not the only person in the world who is suffering, and this comfort is pleasurable. As humans, we want more than anything to be seen, heard, and understood and never more is this the case than in our suffering. I would argue that we care more about being seen than about whether or not we are good. Unlike Feagin’s, my account involves no recognition of moral character in the meta-response as the direct response is not rooted in moral feelings but in selfish ones.

Another puzzling feature of the paradox of tragedy is that not only do we often enjoy tragic art, but we also tend to consider tragedy to be better or more valuable art than comedy. Feagin’s theory for why this is the case is that our unpleasant direct responses to witnessing tragic art are the same feelings which allow us to be moral actors. We cannot feel sadness for the unfortunate soul depicted in the art unless we can sympathize with it and it is this same sympathy which leads to moral action in the real world. Therefore, our reverence of tragic art comes from our recognition that morality is important. I would add to Feagin’s idea that if she is right, perhaps it is the case that in the recognition our direct responses to tragic art are moral feelings, we might consider tragedy to be something which makes people better people in general. Our meta-response therefore is not only the reminder that we are moral people, it also involves the idea that experiencing and responding to tragic art is a way to practice our morality. Feagin herself asserts “some have thought that developing an appreciation of appropriate works of art is a good ingredient of moral education: if one can learn to respond morally in the imagined case, then it will be even easier to do so in reality” (Feagin, 102). We might therefore see the tragic work as something which can make not only us better, but humanity and the world better.

While this plausible explanation for why we revere tragedy over comedy is compelling, it requires a presupposition that morality is based feeling and it is these feelings which allow us to act morally or as Feagin puts it “on this analysis, the same feelings are at the base of both morality and aesthetic pleasure from tragedy” (Feagin, 101). While this may be true, it is a highly objectionable claim and Feagin does not argue for or defend this presupposition. However, Feagin’s claim might be saved by the idea that while we cannot categorically claim that tragic art makes us better people without an in-depth argument about the fundamental nature of morality (which I will not be making for the purposes of this paper), it can still be true that we think it does and that this explains our reverence of it over other genres like comedy.

Still, I disagree with her theory for why we often consider tragedy to be of greater value than other genres like comedy. Earlier in the essay I mentioned that as humans we want nothing more than we want to be seen and understood and that this is especially true in our pain. While we may be able to identify with positive emotions in comedic works of art and feel unity in that sense, we don’t need this kind of identification as much as we need identification with pain. The world is excruciatingly lonely when I feel I am the only one suffering and not nearly as lonely when I feel I am the only one smiling. My theory contains the idea that the consumption of tragic art, our painful direct response, and our comforting meta-response have the effect of improving our lived experience even after we leave the presence of the artwork by reducing our feelings of loneliness and isolation overall. Comedy might provide us relief from pain in the form of invoking laughter, but this laughter lasts as long as the art is in front of us and is not directly related to our pain. While we may chuckle at the memory of a joke in a funny movie, the escapist joy of comedy is contained to the direct experience of the artwork. Comedy, does not provide the same kind of profound relief from pain and improvement to our lives and therefore we consider it less valuable.

Feagin’s account of the connection between our aesthetic experiences of tragedy and the feelings of morality raises a prominent objection. If Feagin’s theory is true, how can it be the case that some moral people don’t experience emotional responses to art and how can it be the case that some immoral people do experience these unpleasant emotional responses to tragic art? Feagin argues that the immoral person may experience moral feelings when consuming art, but not when leaving the aesthetic experience because when they are actively consuming the tragic art, the unpleasant events are happening to other people, not to oneself. The immoral actor might be someone who is selfish, and when engaging with real things, they always put themselves first and this self-interest overcomes any concern for others. However, when engaging with tragic art, one is not in any way involved in the tragedy and therefore moral concern for others cannot be overcome by self-interest and thus the immoral actor, in response to a fictional and therefore detached scenario, is able to feel a genuine unpleasant aesthetic response composed of moral feelings. In other words, their sympathy is not hindered by self-interest.

Another explanation for why an immoral person might experience a genuine unpleasant direct response to tragedy is that the person identifies with a character in the story and therefore their response to the tragic experiences of that character remain inherently self-interested. Feagin comments that she would expect such a person to only respond to art which depicts tragedies happening to people who share key features with the immoral actor. For Feagin, we’d be able to pick up on trends regarding which tragic works they enjoy based on the kinds of characters depicted in the tragic art and how closely they align with the immoral actor’s lived experience. It is here where Feagin might object to my own theory by calling me one of these immoral actors who still manages to experience an unpleasant direct response to the artwork, but only because I identify with it. I agree with Feagin’s idea that such a person would show trends in the art they enjoy based on which art they can identify with most. I simply disagree with the idea that such a person is uncommon or abnormal.

I would argue that we will experience a more powerful or compelling direct response to art which we feel more identified in because it reminds us of our own pain. Still, I do not think such explicit identification is necessary for the kind of direct response I am describing. Even if I cannot identify as well with works of art that depict suffering people who do not explicitly resemble me or my life, I can still identify with the fact that they are suffering and with the structural similarities of their problems with mine. For example, I have never been killed by my king husband after being falsely accused of cheating on him like Othello’s Desdemona. However, I have experienced painful punishments as the result of false accusations from jealous and conniving wrongdoers. In this sense, I am extremely able to identify with the pain and tragedy of the situation and feel relief in the knowledge that this kind of tragic experience is a human one and I am not alone in feeling this kind of pain. Even if I had never been falsely accused and consequently punished by malicious people, I could still identify with the pain of feeling powerless, unfairly treated, confused, mistrusted, or scared.

Still, I would argue that it is easier to identify with the pain felt by characters or situations that more closely resemble oneself, but that this resemblance doesn’t always have to be explicit and might sometimes take the shape of a purely emotional resemblance. For example, I might enjoy the album Ok, Computer more than I enjoy the album Blue because I am more pained by the deep existential dread described by the former than I am the young heartbreak described by later despite the fact that I have more explicitly in common with the female American Joni Mitchell as a first person protagonist than I do the male British Thom Yorke as a first person protagonist. Nevertheless, it can also be true that I prefer Punisher to Ok, Computer because I am more able to explicitly relate to Phoebe Bridgers as a gen z young adult woman than to Thom York. Feagin herself admits that identifying with a character in a tragic story can bring someone pleasure but describes this pleasure as self-interested. I would argue that she is correct about this but that all pleasure from tragedy is inherently self-interested and is not a phenomenon unique to an immoral actor.

Feagin accounts for the case of the moral actor who fails to experience these aesthetic feelings by arguing that this person simply lacks the imagination required to properly experience aesthetic emotion. If we are to continue using Ralph Clark’s idea that our ability to feel real emotions in response to fictional art is rooted in our ability to entertain counter-factuals in the imagination as opposed to belief, then those who lack a certain amount of or ability for imagination, will not be able to feel these real emotions. It is reasonable to argue that there are people who are good moral actors and feel deep sympathy when witnessing real tragic cases, but lack a certain level of imagination and therefore do not experience the deeply unpleasant direct response from tragic artwork that we might expect. Feagin even argues that because we have to overcome the artistic medium and employ our imagination, it is harder to experience real emotion in response to art as opposed to in response to real life. However, I would argue that the moral actor could fail to have a powerful unpleasant direct response to tragic art simply because she struggles to identify or empathize with the artwork.

It is here where my problem with sympathy arises. Someone might be fully capable of recognizing the sadness in a work of art and that the subject matter depicts things which are morally wrong and even feel bad for the characters in the artwork, but be totally unable to identify with it and therefore experience no powerfully unpleasant direct response, no pleasurable meta-response, and no real enjoyment of the artwork. Perhaps the moral actor has had a really good life and struggles then to see themselves in stories with sad endings and unpleasant subject matter and furthermore does not feel a need for any relief from intense feelings of loneliness and thus does not experience this as a great pleasure. Therefore, I would argue that the question of how moral and immoral people alike can both like and dislike tragic art is resolved by the fact that the feelings involved in the direct and indirect response have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with our own self-interested lived emotional experience.

My theory would suggest that the sadder a person is, the more enjoyment they will get out of tragedy and the more they will pursue it. I would argue that not only is this the case, but that the reason we collectively revere tragedy is that most of us humans do or have experienced a tremendous amount of pain in our lives. When we take up counter-factuals in the imagination, these fictional or artistic depictions are made real by the fact that we see ourselves in them and they remind us of tangible pain within ourselves and this is why we feel such emotion in the first place. So it is possible that a lack of imagination plays into a lesser ability to experience the unpleasant direct response and that both imagination and identification with the artwork are required for this response, but I would argue that even in those individuals who lack a strong imagination who cannot suspend their disbelief, a tragedy can still remind them of something real even if they are fully aware of the fact that what the tragedy portrays is not real. It becomes real by being familiar and we do not need imagination to remember our own life. Because I am not sympathizing with an imagined situation and instead empathizing via the memories and emotions that the artwork reminds me of, a capacity for imagination becomes less important.

There is one final important related discussion at play. Why do we feel pleasurable meta responses to our direct responses to fictional tragedy but not to direct responses to real life tragedy? Feagin argues that because nobody actually gets hurt in works of fiction, a pleasurable meta-response is appropriate. By virtue of the fact that tragic art evokes real sympathy without real suffering, Feagin describes this sympathy as an “unequivocal good,” in a way that sympathy in response to real world tragedies could never be because it “feeds on human misery” (Feagin, 102). Furthermore, Feagin points out that aesthetic experiences have endings or “closure” whereas real life does not (Feagin, 102). She asserts that direct responses to art can only be felt in the presence of the art and this allows us to isolate the feelings of the direct response and leave us only with the pleasurable meta-response the moment the aesthetic experience is done and every moment thereafter. In real life, however, the direct response has no firm end and therefore the unpleasantness of the direct response remains and continues to make us feel bad because the unpleasant direct response does not require a specific set of experiential conditions to be actively present in order to exist like it would in the case of art. The “closure” of the art lets the unpleasantness end and only pleasure of our feeling that we have been sympathetic remains whereas in real life, the unpleasantness persists and any pleasure we might get from the meta-response to our sympathy is overshadowed and deemed inappropriate by the fact that our sympathy had to come from real suffering in the world (Feagin, 102).

I would disagree with Feagin on the premise of this question. I would argue that we do feel pleasurable meta-responses to real life tragedy, just that these meta-responses are usually weakened by the reasons Feagin gives. As much as I hate to admit it, when I am able to empathize with someone in real life, I sometimes do find comfort in the fact that I am not alone in my pain. I would argue that in real life, I might have a response to this response wherein I am horrified by the fact that I felt this comfort and the pleasure of the meta-response is thus overcome. However, I agree with Feagin that in most cases, the persistence of real-life scenarios and the fact that they are based in real suffering accounts for why we do not feel pleasure when witnessing real life tragedies.

It is worth taking a moment to address the proposed resolutions to the paradox thinkers which Feagin addresses. Feagin begins her essay “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” by bringing up the argument Hume makes in his essay “Of Tragedy,” that imagination and artistic components like imitation and expression are things which the mind finds naturally pleasurable. Hume describes how these naturally pleasurable things are contained within the tragic artwork due to its being art and can dominate the unpleasant feelings caused by the artwork’s being tragic. When these pleasurable artistic components are dominant, they convert the unpleasant feelings caused by the tragedy of the art into pleasant ones and this accounts for why we enjoy tragic art. While Hume’s argument is somewhat compelling in that it seems to at least provide a start to resolving the paradox of tragedy, Feagin aptly points out that Hume does not explain when and how the pleasurable artistic components are dominant to the unpleasantness. Because Hume discusses a play which is so tragic that the natural pleasure of expression is unable to dominate the unpleasantness of the horror of the artwork, it is clear that in Hume’s system, it is not always the case that the pleasurable components dominate and that when they do dominate, it is not on simple account of the artwork’s being fictional or being understood as fictional. However, without an explanation as to what allows for the dominance of the pleasurable artistic components over the unpleasant feelings of tragedy and in which cases we ought to find this dominance and why, Hume has failed to fully resolve the paradox.

Furthermore, Feagin highlights how Hume’s theory is not arguing that the pleasure of imagination proportionally outweighs the unpleasantness of the work’s being tragic, but that he is instead arguing that the pleasure of imagination converts this unpleasantness into pleasure. While this is an interesting proposal, Hume does not provide an explanation as to how this conversion works so we are still left without an understanding of how the unpleasantness of tragedy becomes pleasure. Feagin argues that even if we are to accept every part of Hume’s theory as true, there are gaping explanatory holes in his theory which make it an incomplete answer and a non-solution to the paradox of tragedy. While I agree with Feagin that Hume’s account is incomplete,

I would argue that some of the important ideas contained within his account ought not to be completely discarded and remain consistent with both mine and Feagin’s theories. Hume’s theory draws out an important point about the paradox of tragedy which is that we experience both unpleasantness and pleasure and therefore must account for both in a resolution to the paradox: “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” (Hume, 216). Hume’s emphasis on conversion suggests that the pleasure is somehow caused by or comes from the unpleasantness and this idea is consistent with both mine and Feagin’s theories as in both cases the pleasure we feel is a response to the unpleasantness we feel. Perhaps Hume himself, in his unclear concept of conversion was trying to describe something like a meta-response. Regardless, an analysis of Hume’s theory highlights the important idea that the pain of the consumption of tragedy is crucial to the pleasure.

Another theory that attempts to resolve the paradox of tragedy is the idea that tragedy allows us to outwardly express our pent-up negative feelings, and this purifies our emotional mind which results in feelings of being refreshed, cleansed, renewed, or released from our pain. These feelings that result from this release are pleasurable and this accounts for our ultimate enjoyment of the artwork. This idea is most often associated with the word katharsis and the writing of Aristotle in the Poetics, but Aristotle’s use of this word and its exact meaning are highly debated, and I do not intend to make any interpretive claims about Aristotle’s writings on tragedy or the concept of katharsis in general for the purposes of this paper. I mean to only address the broad idea that outward expression accounts for the pleasure of tragedy, as Feagin does. We might think of this as something like crying or screaming. Feagin points out that there are many cases in which we consume and consequently enjoy tragic art without having outwardly expressed our unpleasant emotions and this theory cannot account for these cases. Furthermore, even when there is an outward expression of emotion, it can also be true that this outward expression causes us to feel embarrassed or ashamed and therefore make us feel worse and not any kind of pleasure.

These objections powerfully suggest that emotional release in the form of outward expression cannot be the reason we enjoy tragic art. While I agree with Feagin that emotional release cannot account for every case in which we find pleasure in tragedy, I would argue that the theory of outward expression and Feagin’s theories are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that emotional expression in response to an unpleasant direct response can lead to feelings of renewal and refreshment and unburden the soul, but that we might, at the same time find pleasure in the fact that we reacted so strongly to the art and in this sense derive pleasure from both expression and a Feagin-style meta-response. Furthermore, I would argue that there may be cases where there is no expression and the pleasure comes only from a satisfying meta-response, but there are also cases where release from expression functions as a separate mechanism which accounts for pleasure and adds to the satisfying or comforting meta-response.

While I do agree that both theories can account for the enjoyment of tragedy, Feagin is right in asserting that we need some other theory than one contingent upon emotional expression if we want to account for all pleasurable tragic art experiences and fully resolve the paradox of tragedy. I would argue that what we need is a theory in addition to the theory of outward expression to resolve the paradox. Similarly to how Feagin’s theory is consistent with outward expression, my own theory is as well and perhaps even more so. Outward expression might very well provide this release, but I would argue that this will necessarily be accompanied by and contribute to the meta-response of less loneliness as the outward expression caused by the tragic aesthetic experience both allowed us to release something that was plaguing the soul and reminded us that we are not the only ones plagued.

So why do we find pleasure in tragic art? What resolves the paradox of tragedy? Feagin and I agree that this pleasure is constituted by a meta-response to an unpleasant and even painful direct response. Furthermore, we agree that the ultimate result of this meta-response is a feeling of connection and less aloneness. However, while Feagin’s concept of the direct response is that it is caused by sympathy, mine is that it is instead caused by empathy. For Feagin, in our meta-response, we are pleased with our ability to experience moral feelings in that we have sympathized, and this accounts for our enjoyment of the tragic art. My theory argues that we instead empathize with the tragic art by identifying with the pain portrayed and this identification evokes reminders of and a resurfacing of the pain we do or have felt in our lives and therefore our meta-response is pleasurable in that it makes us feel seen, understood, and not-alone in our suffering. For Feagin, this less-aloneness comes from a recognition of ourselves as a part of humanity in our ability to sympathize. Furthermore, Feagin argues that our collective general preference for tragic art can be accounted for by “the fact that our pleasures in it derive from feelings which are essential to the existence and maintenance of human society.” I instead argue that the pleasures of tragedy do not derive from important moral feelings that enable sympathy and instead from our own self-interested need for our pain to be seen and we therefore do not revere tragedy because it can make us and society better, but because we feel that we need a relief from pain more than anything another genre might offer us emotionally.

Feagin attempts to account for how moral and immoral people alike can both respond or not respond to tragic art while I argue that our pleasure in tragic art has nothing to do with morality. My theory begs the question about how happy people can experience the kind of pleasure I describe to which I respond that we have all suffered and therefore can all find some kind of identification in tragic art but that the more we can identify with the pain in the art, the more we will derive pleasure from it and I maintain that most of us have suffered a great deal. While Feagin argues that we do not experience meta-responses to real life tragedy because the unpleasantness of tragedy is contained in the time we are actually experiencing the art and our pleasurable meta-response in the case of art does not bear the burden of being caused by actual suffering, I instead argue that we do experience such meta-responses in real life, but that they are less powerful than in the consumption of art for the reasons Feagin describes. I further agree with her that such meta-responses in real life are generally deemed inappropriate but that this is not the case in the consumption of tragic art.

Lastly, I attempt to draw out important ideas contained within Hume’s theory, namely the necessity of the pain for the consequent pleasure, and, unlike Feagin, allow for a theory of outward expression to fit within my own by arguing that such expression can cause pleasure through release and add to the meta-response, but that a meta-response will always occur regardless and account for a more profound and longlisting comfort. So, I like Punisher because I’m sad and it’s sad and when I hear it, I feel sad because I identify with the sadness, betrayal, despair, and loss represented by the art, but this then makes me feel less alone in this pain. I’m lonely, but tragedy makes me less lonely in an entirely self-interested way. We all suffer, but we survive the pain through connection in the knowledge that others are suffering too and in the same ways. We need tragedy as it turns out to paradoxically be one of the most existentially comforting and healing genres of art. As long as we suffer in our isolating individuality as humans, we will continue to seek out art which reminds us that our pain is seen and we are not alone. Tragedy is the aesthetic language that communicates ineffable pain which we can all understand and share and use to cope. Maybe that’s not so tragic after all.

Works Cited

Hume, David. ”Of Tragedy‟, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1987), p. 216.

Feagin, Susan. “The Pleasures of Tragedy‟, American Philosophical Quarterly vol. 20 (1983), pp. 95- 104

[1] https://firebirdmagazine.com/reviews/punisher