Carrying on from my last post,
how can we apply Hume’s passages on emotion to aesthetics? In this post, I
shall examine Hume’s essay ‘Of Tragedy’1 as well as narrow my focus
to music. This means that the suppositions and judgements in question are
aesthetic judgements and our feelings about the music and how it is being
interpreted and conveyed relate to our individual aesthetic taste as well as a
more general standard of taste.
Hume’s essay ‘Of tragedy’ and
the concept of how the passions, including tragic emotion and the emotion of
beauty, impact on an audience
Hume agrees with L’Abbe Dubos
that passions in aesthetics are a good thing because:
“nothing is in general so
disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence, into
which the mind falls upon the removal of all passion and occupation.”2
Hume adds to this positive view
of the passions in aesthetics by adding that:
“The view, or, at least,
imagination of high passions, …. affects the spectator by sympathy, gives him
some touches of the same passions, and serves him for a momentary
entertainment.”3
So, applied to music, I
understand Hume as describing a process whereby, through sympathy (or perhaps
through empathy), we can engage in the passions expressed in a piece of music
by feeling what the musician is attempting to convey to us, so that we feel as
they do about the music. This process creates entertainment for the listener,
which is further enriched when the passions expressed by the musician are
transmitted with “eloquence”, “in a lively manner” and with a “force of
expression” aided by judgement4.
So I understand Hume as arguing
that it is not the amount of emotion expressed which matters but rather how
skilled someone is in judging how to put it across in an aesthetically pleasing
manner. In this way, Hume also avoids any potential excesses of emotion which,
although sometimes enhance dramatic effect, can sometimes detract from
aesthetic pleasure. Hume observes that excess emotions arise in the context of
tragedies and, to retain aesthetic pleasure as well as appealing to our moral
and aesthetic taste, these very negative and tragic emotions need to be
balanced out with “agreeable affection”, such as a story allowing virtue to win
out over vice, and by instilling it with “spirit, genius, or eloquence”5.
Nevertheless, this does not mean
that Hume thinks that everything must be beautiful in order to be aesthetically
pleasing or entertaining. Hume does see beauty as central but its role relates
to the function of the emotion of beauty rather than beauty in itself or
beautiful objects or sounds. Hume claims that the best entertainment makes use
of “the sentiments of beauty”, which, according to Hume, should be “the
predominant emotion” because it can transform even negative emotions, including
“indignation” into something “delightful”6. When Hume says
predominant, he does not quantify how much beauty would be considered too much
beauty, before it disrupts the aesthetic experience. However, given that he
uses the word predominant, beauty is presumably meant to be the prevailing
emotion because it uniquely has the positive, transformative effect of
impacting on all the other emotions, both positive and negative, within, for
instance, the music or a fictional story.
Furthermore, Hume thinks that
there is no need for perfection to achieve this because he observes in the art
world that “the last works of celebrated
artists, which they left imperfect, are always the most prized…”7
This leads Hume to state that:
“These instances (and many more
might be collected) are sufficient to afford us some insight into the analogy
of nature, and show us, that the pleasure, which poets, orators, and musicians
give us, by exciting grief, sorrow, indignation, compassion, is not so
extraordinary or paradoxical, as it may at first sight appear. The force of
imagination, the energy of expression, ….all these are naturally, of themselves
delightful to the mind… ”8
These claims form part of Hume’s
overall aim in this essay to attempt to provide an interesting way of how to
resolve the paradox of how the depiction of painful emotions in aesthetics,
whether through music or fictional stories, can give rise to aesthetic
pleasure.
1 Hume,
D., Of Tragedy, Essay XXII in Part 1
in ‘Essays Moral, Political and Literary’,
Ed. Miller, E.F. revised edition 1994, Liberty Fund Inc. Indianapolis p216-225
2 ibid
p217
3
ibid
4 ibid p219
5 ibid
p224-5
6 ibid
p220
7 ibid
p222
8 ibid
Comments
Post a Comment