The Paradox of Painful Art

AARON SMUTS

Introduction

Is there a fundamental difference between the kinds of emotional responses

we seek from art and those we seek from life? Many of the most popular
genres of narrative art are designed to elicit negative emotions: emotions
that are experienced as painful or involving some degree of pain, which
we generally avoid in our daily lives. Melodramas make us cry. Tragedies
bring forth pity and fear. Conspiratorial thrillers arouse feelings of hope-
lessness and dread, and devotional religious art can make the believer weep
in sorrow. Not only do audiences know what these artworks are supposed
to do, they seek them out in pursuit of prima facie painful reactions.
Traditionally, the question of why people seek out such experiences of
painful art has been presented as the paradox of tragedy, and recently Noël
Carroll has spun off a related problem known as the “paradox of horror.”
Both the paradox of tragedy and the paradox of horror arise as soon as we
ask the question, Why do people seek out or desire to see horror films or
watch tragedies? More specifically, we might ask, Why do people want to
be scared by a movie or feel pity for a character when they avoid situations
in real life that arouse the same emotions? An adequate solution to either
problem will most likely require genre-specific considerations. However,
the paradoxes of tragedy and horror are not simply questions about why
people desire to see works in these genres: a question is not by itself a para-
dox. As they are typically stated, the two paradoxes ask how it is possible
for audiences to feel pleasure while watching a horror movie or a tragedy.1
I have chosen not to present the problem as a matter of pleasure, since
doing so would beg a fundamental question—whether horror or tragedies

Aaron Smuts earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madi-

son. He primarily works in the philosophy of art, concentrating on the relationship
between art and morality. Aaron is interested in the philosophy of film and has writ-
ten several articles and book chapters on horror films. His recent articles have ap-
peared in journals such as Contemporary Aesthetics, Kinoeye, Film and Philosophy, and
Philosophy and Literature.

Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall 2007

©2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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actually do provide pleasurable experiences. Instead, I reframe the debate:

rather than asking about tragedy or horror in particular, I broaden the scope
to include all art whose primary purpose is to arouse negative emotions.
Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of such cases are works in nar-
rative genres that do not require happy endings. My concern is not to an-
swer the question of why people choose to see a horror movie rather than a
melodrama, but, instead, to ask why would they choose either. Perhaps an
answer cannot be given at this level of generality. My primary goal in this
article is to introduce the problem and to assess whether any of the exist-
ing accounts of the paradox of tragedy provide a solution to the paradox of
painful art.
If we do not assume that people derive pleasure from tragedy or that
pleasure must be the sole motive for art experiences, the paradox of tragedy
can be given a more general form, which I will call the “paradox of painful
art.” The paradox of painful art can be stated as follows:

1. People do not seek out situations that arouse painful emotions.

2. People have painful emotions in response to some art.
3. People seek out art that they know will arouse painful emotions.

In the process of looking for resolutions to this paradox, I examine theo-

ries designed to solve more particular problems, primarily those that try
to explain the appeal of a particular genre. I do this for two reasons. First,
if a theory cannot explain the appeal of a genre, then the theory cannot be
generalized and can be put aside. Second, by looking at the local theories
of painful art, we can gain an understanding of the plurality of factors that
may be at work. I attempt to establish a basic assumption that there is some-
thing similar going on in many different genres and forms of art that needs
to be accounted for. I hope that this will pave the way for localized theories
that explain the particular appeal of a single genre.
Any satisfactory account of the paradox of painful art will have to an-
swer three interrelated questions—the hedonic, difference, and motivational
questions.

1. The Hedonic Question: Do people seek out painful art in order to derive
more pleasure than pain from the experience?
2. The Difference Question: Why do people seek apparently painful expe-
riences more often in response to art than in real life?
3. The Motivational Question: Why do people desire painful art ­experiences
if they find them painful?

Most solutions to the paradox of tragedy assume that the answer to the
hedonic question is “yes.” From there, theorists attempt to account for the
source of this pleasure, a pleasure assumed to be had from representations
of events from which we do not derive pleasure in real life. I argue that this

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assumption is suspect: the motive for seeking out devotional religious art,
melodrama, tragedy, and some horror is not clearly to find pleasure.
The second question that a solution to the paradox of painful art must
address is whether there is a radical difference between the kinds of things
we seek representations of and the kinds of things we seek out in our dai-
ly lives. I argue that although there is a difference in proportion, the same
kinds of experiences are sought in life as in art. The motivational question
asks why people want to experience painful art, if it is indeed painful. I do
not attempt to provide a complete answer to this question, since it would
require accounting for the full swath of human motivation; instead, I offer
a partial answer in explanation of the proportional difference between the
kinds of experiences we seek in art and in life. After assessing the merits of
several leading solutions to the paradox, I sketch a general explanation that
can account for a wide array of the art experiences in question.

Painful Art

In “Poetry and the Classics,” the preface to his volume Poems, Matthew Ar-
nold explains his decision to omit the poem on Empedocles’s suicide from
the collection. He argues that there are situations in which

no poetical enjoyment can be derived. They are those in which the

suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of men-
tal distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance;
in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In
such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the descrip-
tion of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life,
they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is
painful also. To this class of situation, poetically faulty as it appears
to me, that of Empedocles, as I have endeavored to represent him,
belongs.2

Although one may agree with Arnold that painfulness is an aesthetic flaw,
one cannot deny that audiences appear to seek out painful art and that
many artists attempt to create artworks that are nothing short of painful. In
fact, the breadth of painful emotional experiences to which audiences will-
ingly submit themselves is staggering. For example, recently the religious
bio-film The Passion of the Christ (Mel Gibson, 2004), designed specifically
to disgust and outrage viewers, became a box-office success. This is not an
isolated case. A tremendous amount of religious-themed art in the Western
tradition seeks to provoke painful emotional reactions via the depictions
of the suffering of Christ and the martyrdom of saints.3 Documentaries of
injustice, war photography, and Holocaust memorials are principally de-
signed to revivify audience diligence against injustice by arousing anger,
fear, loathing, dread, disgust, and pity. Melodramas, or “weepies,” have

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become an extremely popular genre of fiction in the last century. An exem-

plary melodrama, Plenty (Fred Schepisi, 1985), ends with a flashback scene,
where on a good day in her youth the main character projects forward,
saying that “There will be days and days like this.” But after two hours of
watching the heroine go insane from boredom in a stultifying marriage, the
audience knows better. For viewers susceptible to having their heart-strings
pulled by a frequently visible hand, melodramas can elicit visceral sorrow.
Likewise, the horror genre primarily attempts to arouse a combination of
two aversive responses, fear and disgust, yet many people routinely attend
horror moves where such responses are almost guaranteed. Conspiratorial
fictions such as The Parallax View (Alan Pakula, 1974) often leave audiences
without clear explanations of the events other than that the world is a ma-
levolent and corrupt place, where almost anyone could become an expend-
able tool of powerful interests. Melancholy music can often arouse remorse
at past wrongs or missed opportunities and painfully felt nostalgia, where
listeners come to desire to return to previous times and suffer from the real-
ization that this desire can never be satisfied.
By focusing on tragedy, theorists have failed to grasp how pervasive
painful reactions are in our art experiences. I will argue that our willingness
to experience pain in response to fiction can illuminate crucial features of
our motivational structure.

Pleasure

There are two major types of answers to the question of why we desire
painful art. The first family of theories argues that the answer is pleasure.
The second type holds that the answer is something other than pleasure,
although just what the “other” is, is rarely specified. Among the pleasure
theorists there are two major lines of thought. The first denies that there
is significant pain, either because it is converted to pleasure4 or because it
never reaches a certain threshold because it is controlled5 in art experiences.
The second argues that the pain is compensated for by either a self-congrat-
ulatory meta-response,6 intellectual pleasure,7 or the dispelling of worries.8
Pleasure theorists take as their basic assumption that there is a funda-
mental dis-similarity between the kinds of events we are willing to encoun-
ter via representations and those that we welcome in our daily lives. This
group of theories is divided according to whether the responses had in reac-
tion to putatively painful art are actually painful; however, the theories in
this category are united in assuming that the reason people seek out painful
art is to feel pleasure. Although most pleasure theorists are committed to
a hedonic theory of motivation, they need not be; instead, they can sim-
ply take it as a useful methodological assumption that the simplest account
of why someone wants to experience an artwork would be to show that it
­affords pleasure. The major variants of pleasure theory can be divided into

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two groups: those that argue that there is no significant pain involved in
our experiences of putatively painful art, and those that argue that there is a
significant amount of pain but that pain is converted or compensated for.9

No Significant Pain
The first class of pleasure theories attempts to resolve the paradox of painful
art by denying that our experiences of such artworks are actually painful.10
If successful, this strategy completely dissolves the paradox and the related
problems. If artworks are not painful, then we have a clear explanation for
why people are eager to see representations of events that they would avoid
in their daily lives. If there is no pain involved, then the motivational ques-
tion—why it is that audiences are willing to endure painful reactions to art-
works—can be dismissed. As we shall see there are significant problems
facing this line of response. The chief difficulty is that it fails to account for
firsthand phenomenological reports of experiences of art as painful.
Better You than Me Theory.  Although the Stoics did not offer a solution
to the paradox of painful art, they briefly confronted a related issue that de-
serves some attention.11 They attempted to explain our curious fascination
with the suffering of others, which may have some applicability to our de-
sire to view representations of suffering characters. For instance, one of the
obvious drawbacks of living in a commuter city is the inevitable traffic jams
that result from rubbernecking—drivers slowing down to get a good look
at an accident, hoping to catch a glimpse of a gruesome scene. The Stoics
explained such a reaction as involving a feeling that is described as “better
you than me.” On this account, we are frequently fascinated by the suffering
of others because it makes us aware of our comparative good fortune.
I doubt that such “glad it’s not me” reactions fully describe these kinds of
responses to random accidents—responses that often might be better sum-
marized as “glad it’s you.” Nevertheless, in either form of this reaction, such
emotional detachment is rare in our encounters with art. Rather than feeling
lucky in response to fictions, we often have pity for characters and are out-
raged at their mistreatment. On the face of it, these responses involve pain,
and, therefore, the Stoic account fails to apply to painful art.
Conversion Theory.  There are two variants of the conversion theory. The
first position holds that painful emotions had in response to art are con-
verted into pleasure through some more prominent emotion. The second
variant holds that the entire experience feels pleasurable in retrospect, and,
as such, the pain felt is more or less forgotten. As we shall see, the second
position starts to veer off into the compensation theory. The first position is
more popular, but the mechanism behind the conversion of pain into plea-
sure is often claimed to be utterly mysterious.
In “Of Tragedy” David Hume attempts to resolve the paradox of trag-
edy by a conversion theory. He bases his argument on the assumption that

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a­ udiences do feel pleasure in response to tragedy. Hume argues that “the

same object of distress, which pleases in a tragedy, were it really set be-
fore us, would give the most unfeigned uneasiness.”12 Working with this
assumption, he attempts to account for the possibility of feeling pleasure
from what appear to be distressful emotions had in response to art. Hume’s
solution to the paradox is that the unpleasant emotions are “converted”
or “transformed” into pleasure by the eloquence of a narrative. He thinks
that the “predominant emotion,” beauty, alters the nature of the painful re-
sponses, such that the overall response becomes one of pleasure.
Hume fails to give a satisfying account of this process of conversion, and
his view has been rightly criticized for leaving the basis of his explanation
a mystery. At root, however, Hume’s explanation is not altogether implau-
sible. Any complex experience will be made up of disparate parts. In many
experiences, especially those had from well-crafted narrative structures,
there will be certain aspects that bring coherence and unification. Unifying
elements are often what come to typify an experience for us, giving us a
shorthand to reflect on overall more complicated phenomena. Feelings of
beauty derived from narrative eloquence are often the predominant, unify-
ing elements of art experiences, whereas such feelings are typically absent
from real life experiences. Hence, the experience of a tragedy may be over-
all one of pleasure for reasons not available to nonart experiences of tragic
events.
As we shall see, this explanation is very close to a compensation theory,
except that in the conversion account, the overall experience is treated as
a complex whole without clearly discernible parts. The absence of a clear
mechanism of conversion is not the primary weakness of Hume’s theory, as
most have supposed; rather, the theory does not mesh with how we describe
our own art experiences. The central problem with the conversion theory, as
I have presented it, is that it does not describe the way we typify our experi-
ences of painful art. Reviewers and ordinary viewers often describe works
as utterly depressing or heart-wrenching. The distinguishing, or unifying
element, is often not a beautifully crafted narrative but rather the overall
emotional affect, which is frequently painful. If the overall experience of
an artwork is best described as painful, then the conversion theory is not
applicable to that work. Since there seem to be plenty of heart wrenching,
depressing, disgusting, terrifying, and dread-inspiring artworks, the con-
version theory cannot serve as a general solution to the paradox of painful
art.
Control Theory.  Control theories attempt to answer the question of why
it is that we seek out negative emotions from fiction when we avoid them
in real life. John Morreall argues that fictional experiences are far less pain-
ful than those had in real life because in regards to fictions our powers of
control are far greater than in real life. Specifically, our control over ­fictions

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comes from our choosing whether or not to have these responses and our
ability to walk away if we cannot take it anymore.
Recent experiments on pain thresholds support this conjecture. When
subjects are able to say when the pressure on their finger should stop, they
can take far more pressure and pain than if the experimenter does not give
them the option. Subjects also report feeling greater amounts of pain when
they are unable to control the experiment. Likewise, we might argue that
our experiences of art are less painful since we can usually control whether
or not they happen or when they should stop. We can decide to leave a the-
ater or put down a book whenever it gets to be too much to handle, and we
are aware that we possess this power.
Robert Yanal criticizes control theories, arguing that according to the
control account, if a spectator is trapped in a theatre then the fiction should
seem more painful. However, this clearly is not the case.13 Perhaps such a
result would be absurd, but it does not damage the control theory. If the
subject is strapped to a chair with their eyelids pried open, like Alex in A
Clockwork Orange, he might feel more pain than a normal viewer, as the con-
trol theory predicts. Being trapped in a theatre does not mean spectators
are unable to stop watching a movie, except in bizarre circumstances that
would probably be extremely distressing.
Imagine taking a roller coaster ride at an amusement park. After the train
pulls into the docking station, it immediately begins again, without letting
anyone off. Over the loud speaker, you hear that something is wrong and
the operators cannot stop the ride, or, even worse, you discover that the ride
has been taken over by a gang of sadists who say that they will release the
passengers “as soon as we feel like it and not a moment sooner.” After hear-
ing such news, it is hard to image that the ride would remain very fun for
much longer.
In Man, Play, and Games Roger Callois14 argues, convincingly, that play
must be voluntary; that is, one must be able to step out of the game when-
ever one wishes, or the activity will cease to be playful. Similarly, an effec-
tive horror motif is the doll that comes to life or the ventriloquist dummy
that gains control of its puppeteer. Such examples are instances of games
that will not stop. In so far as experiencing a fiction is analogous to play, the
control theory suggests that the control we have over our fictional engage-
ments makes them less painful, or at least that if we lose control the nature
of the experience may become far more painful.
Although the control theorist offers a partial explanation for why we are
willing to experience emotional responses to art that we shun in real life, she
does not have a plausible answer for why we want to experience such emo-
tions at all. Our experiences of negative emotions in response to fictional
events may be less painful or more tolerable because we have some degree
of control over their occurrence, but this does not mean that they are not

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painful at all. Although the subjects in the finger pressing experiments have
a higher tolerance for pain when they are in control, they still feel pain.15
This problem is further amplified if we consider that our emotional re-
sponses to fictions are not completely controllable. Although we decide to
see a movie and can walk out of the theatre whenever we wish, we cannot
just decide to end our depression when we walk out of a melodrama, or to
not feel tense and nervous after watching a horror movie. If we feel any pain
at all, then the question of why we desire such experiences, why we seek
out painful art, is still open. The control theory can supplement a further
account, but it cannot answer the motivational question on its own.

Compensated Pain
Unlike conversion theories, compensation theories acknowledge that we do
experience pain in response to art. Most compensation theories offer par-
ticular accounts of why we choose to see a work in a particular genre when
we know that it will arouse negative emotions. All compensation theories
are of this structure: artworks in genre X provide compensatory pleasures Y
that outweigh any pain they cause. That is, compensatory explanations ar-
gue that the best answer to the question “Why do we see works of genre X?”
is that such works provide certain compensatory pleasures that audiences
expect to be greater than any feelings of pain.
The central problem for compensatory theories is that they must provide
a non-question-begging reason for us to think that the pleasures had from
works of a particular genre outweigh the pain. Noël Carroll, for instance,
offers a compensatory theory of our desire to experience horror fictions. He
argues that people seek out horror fictions for cognitive pleasures derived
from thinking about how one may confront a monster. Similarly, most com-
pensatory theories assume a hedonic theory of motivation and then try to
point out which pleasure must be doing the work.
The hedonic assumption is not altogether unwarranted. It is reasonable
to grant the compensation theorist the bootstrapping assumption that there
is probably more pleasure involved than pain so that they may engage in
a search for the pleasure involved. Then, if the compensatory theorist can
give us a convincing account of the kind of pleasure involved—pleasure
that is sufficient to offset the pain—the initial assumption is justified. To
justify the hedonic assumption, we need a largely convincing story of how
the pleasure could outweigh the pain. In comedy any negative emotions
we may feel are often offset by other pleasures.16 The situation is not so
clear when we look at melancholy music, melodrama, tragedy, or any of the
other types of painful art.
The extreme ambiguity that plagues any comparison of pleasures and
pains aggravates the problem for compensation theories. It is especially diffi-
cult to get a clear understanding of what it means for a pleasure to outweigh
a pain in these contexts. Consider the case of horror: How many ­intellectual

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exploratory units does it take to equal a unit of fear or disgust? The com-
pensatory theorist might argue that they are not committed to the notion
that viewers make such calculations consciously. An unconscious hedonic
calculation could take place based on our previous experiences with the
genre. Further, the compensatory theorist need not be committed to the idea
that we are always correct in our assessments; for the most part, however,
the past experiences would have to be more pleasurable than painful, else
audiences would gradually be turned off by the genre. Of course, meeting
the burden of proof for the compensation theorists requires showing that
audiences do report overall pleasurable experiences in genres and artworks
to which they return. In the case of painful art, I doubt that this burden can
be met. We will return to this problem when discussing general criticisms of
the hedonic solutions to the paradox.
Meta-response: Self-satisfaction.  Susan Feagin offers a compensatory so-
lution to the paradox of tragedy. She argues that people want to experience
tragedy because they take pleasure in the experience, or more exactly, they
take pleasure in the reactions they have to such fictions. The pleasure is in
the meta-response—the response we have to our direct responses to the fic-
tion. The particular meta-response that we find pleasurable is something of
a self-congratulatory feeling—we are glad that we are the kind of person
that can feel pity at the suffering of others. Feagin’s analysis should be con-
sidered a species of the family of compensatory theories because she holds
that the pleasure had from our meta-responses compensates for any pain
felt. Feagin’s compensatory theory fails to provide a solution to the paradox
of painful art since, at best, it is only applicable to an extremely limited set of
artworks.
Feagin’s analysis is designed to handle fictions that are akin to tragedy;
however, unsurprisingly, it does not cover horror cases such as the film
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997), where pity is not a major component of the
response. Cure is not sadistic, and it does arouse some pity, but this is not
the predominant emotions evoked; rather, horror and dread are more apt.
In addition, installation works such as Paul McCarthy’s Bossy Burger do not
arouse pity but rather pure visceral disgust. Nevertheless, since the suffer-
ing of others is found in most of the painful art forms we are discussing, if
Feagin is right then much of the problem will be solved.
However, Feagin’s analysis is far from an adequate explanation of the
appeal of pity-arousing fiction in particular. The meta-response she de-
scribes is extremely uncommon. Although they are the most effective tools
for arousing compassionate responses, vicious, malevolent, and indifferent
characters seldom prompt an awareness of one’s own kinder, gentler nature.
As such, I am hesitant to attribute the prideful meta-response to others, or
even myself, except in very rare cases where an artwork is able to highlight
the contrast between our pity and the callousness of others in the audience.

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For example, In the Company of Men (Neil LaBute, 1997) is designed in

such a way that the audience will be polarized from the beginning. In the
film the antagonist, Chad, devises a plot to devastate a lonely deaf woman
by inexplicably abandoning her after leading her on for a couple of months.
Throughout the film, Chad periodically tells sexist jokes and frequently
humiliates subordinates. Those who refuse to laugh at Chad’s sexist jokes
will sit in fear of the rest of the audience for the duration of the picture.
Seemingly, those laughing are in danger of gradually being sucked into a
sympathetic complicity with the evil Chad, whereas the rest of us may feel
glad that we are the kind of people that can feel pity for the butt of Chad’s
cruel practical joke. In the Company of Men is brilliant for setting callous au-
dience reactions in relief, thereby prompting such meta-responses as Feagin
discusses.17 However, the ingenuity of this film is that it figures out a way
to use humor to make the reactions of others salient. The film would not be
worth mentioning if it were not for the fact that the meta-responses it engen-
ders are uncommon. As such, atypical meta-responses cannot account for
why we generally want to see tragedies, much less other painful art.
Although it highlights prized examples of painful art, Feagin’s theory
seems to gain support from only a very limited pool of artworks and a small
number of communal viewing experiences. Otherwise it has no phenom-
enological support and cannot serve as a general explanation for even the
limited domain of tragedy. As such, the meta-response theory has a very
limited application to the paradox of painful art.

A-Hedonic Accounts

Recently there have been a few criticisms directed at the major solutions to
the paradox of tragedy because they assume a hedonic theory of motiva-
tion. In response to Carroll, Alex Neil18 argues that assuming pleasure as
the motivating factor behind audience desires to see horror films may be
correct, but a simple hedonism cannot account for the appeal of tragedy.
Similarly, Aaron Ridley19 argues that the paradox is a nonstarter since it
wrongly assumes that people derive pleasure from tragedy and that plea-
sure is all they are seeking. However, he fails to offer a theory of the appeal
of tragedy, focusing more on the philosophical relevance of tragedy via an
explication of Williams’s and Nussbaum’s writings on the genre.20
By presenting the breadth of painful genres of art, I tried to establish a ba-
sic problem for hedonic accounts. If many of our art experiences seem to be
mostly painful, then the burden of proof shifts to the hedonists to establish
their fundamental assumption that we seek such experiences for pleasure.
The hedonist may reply to this line of objection by arguing that what viewers
seek from art can diverge from what they actually get and that my examples
focus on the exception cases. If this were true, and viewers were only after
pleasure from art, then we would have to explain a tremendous amount of

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our art-going activity as involving a high degree of false optimism. Viewers

often know fairly well what to expect from a genre, and it is becoming rare
that someone will read a popular book, read a literary work, or a see movie
without knowing something about it. Almost every movie-goer has access
to reviews that reveal how we should expect to feel when we leave a movie.
In addition, people repeatedly return to the same artworks even after they
have what are best described as painful experiences. Not only do viewers
claim to have painful experiences, but many artists seek to induce painful
experiences. For instance, Bergman claims that he finds some of his own
movies terribly depressing, just as he intended. Religious artists for millen-
nia have been portraying martyrdom and the suffering of Christ to partially
encourage feelings of sadness. Most recently, Mel Gibson expressed that his
goal in The Passion of the Christ was to make the viewer feel pain—to vividly
portray Christ’s suffering in such a way as to sicken the viewer with sorrow
and resentment. As such, there is little reason to grant the pleasure theorist
the initial assumption that the reason we seek painful art must be to derive
pleasure.
None of the a-hedonic solutions to the paradox of painful art presents a
compelling explanation of the appeal of tragedy; rather, they merely suggest
that something other than pleasure must be involved. In evaluating these
solutions, I intend to assess the claim that pleasure theories cannot account
for the appeal of painful art. However, since the a-hedonic theories are criti-
cally underdeveloped, I will spend comparatively little time assessing their
merits before moving on to sketching what a possible solution might look
like.

Power
There are two variants of the power theory of painful art. First, one may
argue that the reason we seek out painful art is to be made aware of our ca-
pacity to endure such painful responses. This explanation may account for
the reasons some seek out graphic horror fictions—to see how much they
can take and brag about it to their friends. However, this adolescent, macho
explanation is rightfully dismissed by Carroll for being incomprehensive. It
cannot even account for the appeal of the particular genre of horror, since
often we see horror films to be scared ourselves, not to overcome fear.
Another power solution to the paradox is offered by Amy Price, who
defends a view she attributes to Nietzsche.21 She argues that we find joy in
knowing that the suffering endured is within the realm of human possibil-
ity. Recognizing that humans can endure great suffering and still embrace
life and go on gives us satisfaction. Such an explanation may account for
our feelings of reverence for fictional heroes, but it fails to account for why
we want to see fictions of a more fatalistic bent. As it stands, Price’s account
is not applicable beyond a particular form of tragedy. Perhaps more can be

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said in favor of power theories of painful art, but as it stands no adequate

solution has been advanced.

Pessimism
Although Schopenhauer offers an account of the value of painful art, like
most theorists who offer a-hedonic solutions to the paradox he does not di-
rectly address the question of why we desire to experience such works.22
In Schopenhauer’s writings on the value of art, he fails to consider the sig-
nificance of our desire to experience tragedies and other painful genres of
art to the basic motivational assumptions that ground his pessimism. The
principal way Schopenhauer argues for the inevitability of suffering, and
the conclusion that our situation is undesirable, is via the “Desire as Lack-
ing” argument. It goes something like this:

1. All lacking is painful.

2. Desiring is experienced as a lacking.
3. Since most of our desires cannot be permanently satiated, they will
keep coming back even if temporarily satisfied.
4. We typically have more desires than we can satisfy at once.
5. Hence, we will typically be desiring, that is, in pain, suffering.
6. Since suffering is undesirable, our situation is undesirable.

Worse still, Schopenhauer argues, even if we manage to quell some of our

pangs, most likely we will just be bored, since satisfactions are rarely as
sweet as we expect.
In his general theory of pessimism, Schopenhauer presents two general
avenues through which one may escape the pendulum of boredom and
suffering. The first escape is through ascetic denial, but this opportunity is
available to only a few disciplined ascetics. As such, it cannot be widely
recommended as a practical solution. The second route of escape is through
the distancing achieved by aesthetic experience.
Rather than answering the motivational question, Schopenhauer praises
tragedy for helping us to realize that the result of the life of desire is suffer-
ing, but this does not get us closer to an explanation of why we desire to see
tragedies. Perhaps one could construct a Schopenhauerean account of our
willing painful art experiences, but he has little to say about such desires.
The benefit of seeing tragedies might lie in a secondary, instrumental effect,
that is, encouraging a recognition that life is suffering and hence a renuncia-
tion of the life of desire. I doubt such an account can explain the ordinary
motivations of viewers, since I have never heard a single person report this
as a reason for wanting to experience a depressing artwork. Instead, the
desire to enhance melancholia, for instance, presents a fundamental prob-
lem for Schopenhauer’s theory of motivation. If we welcome suffering in
response to art—that is, if we will suffering itself—then suffering can serve

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 The Paradox of Painful Art   71

as a kind of satisfaction.23 This may either support his theory of the inevita-
bility of suffering or it may raise doubts about the undesirability of suffer-
ing that is fundamental to Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Either way, although
he provides a somewhat intellectualist account of the value of tragedy,
­Schopenhauer neglects to account for our desire for painful art; most other
a-hedonic theories suffer from the same flaw.

Rich Experience Theory

One of the first theories Hume dismisses in “Of Tragedy” is Dubos’s “Relief
from Boredom” explanation. As Hume summarizes, Dubos’s position is the
theory that “no matter what the passion is: Let it be disagreeable, afflict-
ing, melancholy, disordered; it is still better than that insipid languor, which
arises from perfect tranquility and repose.”24 Clearly, this view is untenable
since we seldom are willing to experience just anything to relieve ourselves
of boredom. Nevertheless, Hume provides little in the way of a refutation
of this view other than arguing that since we do feel pleasure from trag-
edies and we do not when confronted with similar events in our daily lives,
­Dubos has failed to account for the dissimilarity.
As presented by Hume, Dubos’s explanation is incomplete, but not for
the reasons Hume gives. Although Dubos does not explain the dissimilar-
ity between the kinds of events we seek representations of and the kind of
events we seek in real life, his account is significant in suggesting that we
do desire painful emotions. Rather than countering this suggestion, Hume
begs the question against Dubos, assuming that our response to tragedy
and other painful art is predominantly one of pleasure. Indeed, almost all
subsequent commentators have made the same mistake. Part of the prob-
lem is due to a mixing of moral and motivational questions. The paradox of
tragedy is driven by a need to provide a moral justification for the deriva-
tion of pleasure from the misfortune of the characters. This quest for moral
justification has overshadowed the motivational question, leading commen-
tators to assume that the pleasure we derive from tragedy must be the most
significant motivational factor since it is the most significant moral factor.
If we do not let the prominence of the role of pleasure in the moral ques-
tion blind us to the full range of our reactions to painful art, something simi-
lar to Dubos’s explanation becomes more attractive. If one briefly reflects
on the phenomenology of painful art experiences and notices how common
such experiences are, it becomes plausible that viewers desire painful emo-
tional responses. In 1998 Saturday Night Live featured a skit along the lines
of the following: A family sits down to dinner around a large table. A boy at
the end of the table takes a sip of milk from his glass and spits it out, saying
“Ugh! This is rotten.” The person to his left replies, “Let me try,” and has the
same response. This is repeated until everyone at the table has confirmed
firsthand how bad the sour milk tastes. The skit is funny not ­because it shows

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 72   Smuts

a particularly stupid family that would not take someone’s word about the
state of a glass of milk and thereby avoid a disgusting experience, but for
exposing our desire for firsthand, experiential knowledge of the world. If
Dubos is right—if people do desire painful emotional responses—we also
require answers to the motivational question and difference question.
Dubos’s “Relief from Boredom” explanation gives us an answer to the
motivational question—why we might seek out such experiences—but it
does not account for why we usually choose to have them in response to art.
I suspect that the answer to the first question—why we desire such experi-
ences at all—is more complicated than simply the relief from boredom, and
it may be easier to get at an explanation via the second question. I propose
that the reason we usually seek out these experiences from art rather than
real life is prudence and sometimes cowardice. Art provides a certain de-
gree of safety not present in situations that arouse extreme distress, disgust,
anger, fear, horror, misery, paranoia, and a host of other responses. Simply
put, most of these reactions cannot be had in real life without incurring sig-
nificant risks to ourselves and our loved ones, risks that we typically do not
take because they far outweigh the rewards.
A painful art experience is largely more desirable and easier to have than
the painful emotional life experience. Also, as the control theory suggests,
since we can usually control when such experiences take place and often
have the power to walk away when they get to be too much, the pain in-
volved usually does not pass a certain toleration threshold. The safety gar-
nered from our powers of control over art experiences also allows for some
reflection on the experiences themselves, which can provide certain cogni-
tive pleasures as we learn about our emotional capacities. Further, our abil-
ity to endure certain emotional extremes can provide enjoyment from feel-
ings of power that result from a certain kind of self-overcoming and from
the awareness of our own capacities. For many of us, our richest aesthetic
experiences come from encounters with painful art since one is seldom as
fully engaged intellectually, perceptually, and affectively as when experi-
encing painful emotional responses to art. Few, if any, pleasurable experi-
ences match the intensity of our reactions to painful art. Hence, it is not
hard to see why, as Alan Goldman suggests, “our involvement in such ex-
periences is its own reward.”25 All in all, the reasons why we desire painful
experiences are multifaceted and complex, but why we would rather have
them in response to art rather than real life is clear.
One might be tempted to classify the rich experience theory as a revi-
sionary explanation using Jerrold Levinson’s classificatory schema. He de-
scribes revisionary explanations as those in defense of a position that holds
the following: “neither negative emotions, nor the feelings they include,
are intrinsically unpleasant or undesirable, and thus there is nothing odd
about appreciating art that induces such emotions or feelings.”26 As should

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 The Paradox of Painful Art   73

be apparent at this point, this position is much too broadly defined. What
is crucial to note is that this category would contain two radically different
theories on my classificatory scheme since it is a far different thing to find
something “undesirable” than it is to find it “unpleasant.” Indeed, this is the
very issue that divides the hedonic and a-hedonic solutions to the paradox
of painful art. The rich experience theory argues that one may desire certain
kinds of experiences, including those of painful emotional responses, which
are unpleasant. That is, we can find experiences both unpleasant and per-
fectly desirable.
The only revisionary account Levinson offers as an example is that of
Kendall Walton, who is slightly uncomfortable with calling our reactions to
putatively painful art “pleasant.” Walton argues that

What is clearly disagreeable, what we regret, are the things we are

sorrowful about—the loss of opportunity, the death of a friend—not
the feeling or experience of sorrow. . . . there is nothing in the notion
of sorrow or grief to make it surprising that the opposite is sometimes
true, that we sometimes seek and enjoy the experience of real sorrow.
Much of Hume’s paradox evaporates without help from the fact that
it is only fictional that the appreciator feels real sorrow.27

Ignoring the problematic suggestion that we only fictionally feel sorrow,

Walton’s solution to the paradox has similarities to the “rich experience”
explanation, but the differences are acute. Most importantly, I am avoiding
the term “enjoy” since in common usage it is ambiguous as to whether it
means to find something pleasurable or to find desirable. For example, Mat-
thew Arnold uses it in the former sense when he argues that

it is not enough that the poet should add to the knowledge of men, it
is required of him also that he should add to their happiness. . . . a po-
etical work is not justified when it has been shown to be an accurate,
and therefore interesting representation; it has to be shown also that
it is a representation from which men can derive enjoyment.28

Arnold does not seem to have a more complicated notion of happiness as

“well-being” or enjoyment as desirable; instead, he explicitly contrasts the
enjoyable with the painful.
Although Walton is uncomfortable with using the term “pleasure,” ap-
pending its usage with parenthetical quotes—”pleasure (if that is the right
word)”—his additional comments suggest that he denies the painfulness
of painful emotions had in response to art. If this is the case, then the rich
experience theory is in stark disagreement with Walton’s account, since
my explanation holds that we do feel sorrow about such things as the loss
of opportunity for fictional characters. As in real life, we feel genuine pain
in response to the suffering of beloved characters due to fictional injus-
tice, fictional worlds inhospitable to love and liberty, and fictional brutal-

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 74   Smuts

ity; ­ nevertheless, we find these experiences desirable enough that we are

­willing to pay for art in order to have them.29

Conclusion

The rich experience theory does not answer any one specific question, such
as why people go to horror rather than comedy or melodrama films, but
it does show that the traditional framing of the paradox of tragedy begs
the question. The problem is not in explaining how we take pleasure in a
painful fiction since this assumes that the reason we desire such fictions
is because they are pleasurable, which is exactly what is at issue. Perhaps,
in many cases, we do desire painful fictions for other pleasures, but this
does not mean that there is anything that needs to be compensated for. We
should not assume that people only desire what brings pleasure. By refram-
ing the question, I introduced a new problem, that I call the “paradox of
painful art.”
Throughout this article I have argued that all of the various solutions to
the paradox of tragedy fail to provide a solution to the paradox of painful
art. Not only do all the hedonic and a-hedonic theories that I considered
fail to account for painful art in general, but we have some reason to think
that they all fail to answer the basic motivational question for even a single
genre.
My solution to the paradox is somewhat basic, but it combines the in-
sights of the critics of the hedonic account and the compelling aspects of the
control theory. I argue that the motive for seeking out painful art is complex,
but what we desire from such art is to have experiences on the cheap—not
life experience on the cheap, as one theory puts it, but experiences of strong
emotional reactions. Art safely provides us the opportunity to have rich
emotional experiences that are either impossible or far too risky to have in
our daily lives. We can feel fear without risking our lives, pity without see-
ing our loved ones suffer, thrills without risking going to jail, and a variety
of other experiences that usually come with unwelcome pitfalls. Outside of
art, it is almost impossible to have many of these kinds of experiences with-
out completely wrecking our lives—murdering our loved ones, destroying
our relationships, being sent to jail, or suffering fatal injuries.

NOTES

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for this journal for their excellent
comments and suggestions.
  1. The paradox of tragedy is often presented as a moral problem: How is it that we
appropriately take pleasure at the suffering of others in tragedies but not in real
life?

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 The Paradox of Painful Art   75

  2. Matthew Arnold, “Poetry and the Classics.” Published as “Preface” to Poems

(dated Fox How, Ambleside, October 1, 1853). It was reprinted in Irish Essays
(1882).
  3. Motives for seeking out painful religious art may be radically different from
most other genres. For example, one may see a duty to experience certain re-
ligious works or to frequent places of worship that display painful artworks
prominently.
  4. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1985).
  5. John Morreall, “Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fictions,” Philosophy and Litera-
ture 9, no. 1 (1985): 95-103. See also Marcia Eaton, “A Strange Kind of Sadness,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 41, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 51-63.
  6. Susan Feagin, “The Pleasures of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 20,
no. 1, (January 1983): 95-110; and “Monsters, Disgust and Fascination,” Philo-
sophical Studies 65 (1992): 75-84.
  7. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1990).
  8. To avoid a long digression on the Poetics I have chosen to omit any consider-
ation of theories of catharsis. Since the concept has two nearly opposite mean-
ings (purgation and purification), and the mechanism behind either is equally
ambiguous, it would be difficult to do the literature justice in this context. It
should not be too difficult to see where the various theories of catharsis fall in
my categorization of solutions to the paradox of painful art. For instance, pur-
gation theories are compensatory, since they generally hold that we have less
of some painful emotion after experiencing some other (allopathic) or the same
(homeopathic) painful emotion in response to art.
  9. Although we cover the same theories, my classificatory scheme differs signifi-
cantly from that offered by Jerrold Levinson in his excellent essay “Emotion in
Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain.” Levinson divides the theories into
five groups: compensatory, conversionary, organicist, revisionary, and defla-
tionary explanations. By focusing on the motivational question, I split the vari-
ous theories into two large groups: hedonic and a-hedonic. See Jerrold Levinson
“Emotion in Response to Art: A Survey of the Terrain,” in Emotion and the Arts,
ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20-
36.
10. Marcia Eaton, “Aesthetic Pleasure and Pain,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism 31, no. 4 (Summer 1973): 481-85.
11. Lucretius, The Hellenistic Philosophers, vol. 1, trans. A. Long and D. N. Sedley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 120.
12. David Hume, “Of Tragedy,” 218.
13. Robert Yanal, “The Paradox of Tragedy,” in The Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction
(Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 143-57.
14. Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2001). Caillois argues that play must be free (or voluntary), sep-
arate, uncertain, unproductive, governed by rules, and involve make-believe.
15. It is also important to note that although we often seek out painful art, there are
also things that many people do not want to see—images they find so distress-
ing they will look away. For many viewers, films such as Takashi Miike’s Audi-
tion (1999), where a sadistic woman saws the limbs off a semi-sedated man with
razor wire, are painful enough to be unwatchable.
16. The only negative emotion felt in response to comedy that would be difficult to
provide a convincing pleasure offset is embarrassment. There are two types of
embarrassment in comedy: embarrassment that serves as a comeuppance and
embarrassment that occurs for a liked character. The latter type of embarrass-
ment is one of the most effective devices for garnering audience sympathies and
is curiously almost solely found in the genre of teen comedy.

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 76   Smuts

17. For more on the use of humor in LaBute’s film, see my article “The Joke Is the
Thing: ‘In the Company of Men’ and the Ethics of Humor,” Film and Philosophy
11 (January 2007): 49-67.
18. Alex Neil, “On a Paradox of the Heart,” Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 53-65.
19. Aaron Ridley, “Tragedy,” The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
20. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Trag-
edy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and Bernard
Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
21. Amy Price, “Nietzsche and the Paradox of Tragedy,” British Journal of Aesthetics
(October 1998): 4.
22. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Well and Representation, vols 1 and 2, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (Dover: Dover Publications, 1969).
23. Teenage angst, which inevitably leads those afflicted to seek out the maudlin
and overwhelmingly depressing, may be a fatal counterexample to Schopenhau-
er’s assumption that pain is experienced as undesirable.
24. Paraphrased by Hume in “Of Tragedy,” 217.
25. Alan H. Goldman, Aesthetic Value (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 63.
Goldman explicitly avoids tying his notion of aesthetic experience to pleasure.
Following along the lines of Dewey, he adopts a view of aesthetic experience
that involves a thorough exercise of our various capacities. Dewey’s description
of aesthetic experiences as involving “doings and sufferings” is well equipped
to incorporate our experiences of painful art.
26. Levinson, “Survey of the Terrain,” 30.
27. Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 257-58.
28. Arnold, “Poetry and the Classics,” 5.
29. Walton, Mimesis, 256.

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