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Art and Negative Emotions
Plenty of interesting philosophical questions arise when we start thinking about our emotional responses to art.
One of these is the problem of why we value works of art that stimulate negative emotions in us. For example, reading Anna Karenina is can make you feel quite depressed (though I won't give away the plot details). Similarly with Les Miserables, and plenty of far more recent works of literature - Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother features an excruciating scene where the main character cuts off a patch of his eczema, with scissors, because he's afraid it's cancer. And I'm sure you can think of plenty of non-literary examples, e.g. in film and motion pictures.
So we value plenty of artworks that stimulate negative emotions in us. Yet it seems that we don't value the works in spite of the negative emotions, but (at least partly) because of them. This is particularly puzzling when you realise that, in real life, we don't seek out or (typically) value witnessing events of suffering in pain, but in art we do seek out and value these experiences.
Given all this (perhaps you'll want to deny some of the above: if so, please say), how can we explain this discrepancy between our responses to suffering in art and suffering in real life? I'll briefly suggest a few routes you could take, and some of the problems that they have - and then I'll be interested to hear what you all think on the matter.
> Perhaps the puzzle is explained by the fact that, when we witness art, we aren't witnessing genuine occurrences of suffering (as we would be if we witnessed real-life suffering). It looks like there's a nugget of truth here, but surely this would only explain why we don't disvalue suffering in art - it doesn't seem to explain why we value it. Can we alter this position so that it explains the puzzle.
> Perhaps the answer has something to do with the formal factors of the art (e.g. plot, language, etc). Taking the literature example again, perhaps the suffering is so wonderfully and beautifully portrayed that we value the work as a result. Again, this looks plausible: but if it were the whole truth, surely we'd value a 'happy' work of art with excellent formal factors much more than a 'suffering' work of art with excellent formal factors. Is this the case? I don't think so. Perhaps a case can be made that certain species of formal factors can only be associated with the portrayal of suffering?
> Perhaps we value suffering in literature because of what it has to teach us about what it is like to suffer. This looks plausible, as well, but there are a number of problems to address for such a position. Firstly, there are those who think that art can't teach us anything. Even if a sufficient answer can be given to that problem, we have to ask how this explains why we don't value real-life suffering for what it can teach us. We'd also need to explain why we don't value immoral artistic portrayals of suffering.
Do you think that one of these routes can bear fruit in giving us an answer to the problem? If not, what route do you think we should take?
All the best, hope the new term is going well
Carl
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