British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 54 | Number 2 | April 2014 | pp. 255–265 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayu019 © British Society of Aesthetics 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Notes on the Experience of Tragedy James R. Hamilton Gregory Currie ofers a statement of an interesting problem about tragedy: ‘(1) We want the iction be such that something, E, occurs in it; [yet] (2) we react in ways which make it tempting to say we want E not to occur.’ He argues for one way to make (2) more precise with regard to what it is we are tempted to say. I argue he should not so readily have accepted (1). More signiicantly, however, I argue both that Currie is right to hold we need an account of what the tragic response is before we can determine precisely what Hume’s puzzle really is and that any account of the desires involved in the experience of tragedy must hinge on when, in the course of a performance of a tragedy, we are considering a spectator’s responses. What is the ‘tragic response’? Whatever it is, it seems to be some sort of mental state or set of mental states in which one feels conlicted. The conlict seems to be a conlict between desires that pull in opposite directions. It has, moreover, given rise to a famous puzzle, namely, Hume’s puzzle about tragedy, which he expressed this way: 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 dis- agreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and afected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end. 1 Hume thought, the ‘unaccountable pleasure’ had an additional feature that only complicates it, namely, proportionality. For, as he put it, spectators ‘are pleased in proportion as they are alicted’. 2 It is this relationship, between our experience of disagreeable emotions and the pleasure we derive from them in the context of spectating tragedies, understood to be proportional to each other, that Hume sought to explain. To reiterate, his view at least roughly, is this: the objects that cause our experiences at a tragedy are di ferent: on the one hand, the ‘uneasy’ feelings we have ‘are generated in us by our sympathy with the characters represented in the work’; 3 and on the other ‘the pleasure we experience is initially and pri- marily a result of our attention to’ 4 the techniques by which the representation is presented. Moreover, the relationship between them is proportional. The solution to the puzzle that Hume went on to give was that the pleasure becomes the dominant afect in the experience of tragedy by a kind of ‘conversion’ of the negative feelings into the positive ones. 5 1 David Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’, in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty, 1987), 216. 2 Ibid., 217. 3 Alex Neill, ‘“An Unaccountable Pleasure”: Hume on Tragedy and the Passions’, Hume Studies 24 (1998), 337. 4 Ibid. 5 This formulation of the puzzle is due to Neill, ‘“An Unaccountable Pleasure”, 335–354. at Kansas State University Libraries on January 13, 2015 http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from