How can we apply Hume’s passages on emotion to aesthetics? Part Two

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