Dubos and Hume on the Paradox of Tragedy

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DUBOS AND HUME ON THE PARADOX OF TRAGEDY

DUBOS AND HUME ON THE PARADOX OF TRAGEDY

Abstract

I argue that it is a mistake to suppose that Hume and Dubos are grappling with one and the same “paradox of tragedy”—viz., the one just described. I offer a novel interpretation of Dubos paradox and his solution, defend Dubos against Hume’s criticism, and prepare the way for an appreciation of some ways in which their views are closer than they seem at first glance.

DUBOS AND HUME ON THE PARADOX OF TRAGEDY

1. Introduction

That there is something puzzling about the pleasure we take in good fictional tragedies is brought out nicely by three intuitively plausible claims we owe to Aristotle:

1. The characteristic pleasure (oikeia hêdonê) of tragedy comes “from pity and fear through imitation” (Poetics 1453b4-7).
2. Fear is “a pain or disturbance due to imagining some destructive or painful evil in the future” (Rhetoric 1382a21-3).
3. Pity is “a feeling of pain at an apparent evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon” (Rhetoric 1385b13-16).

It follows from (1-3) that, for Aristotle, the oikeia hêdonê of tragedy comes (i) from painful and disturbing feelings (ii) through imaginative engagement with imitations of, among other things, destructive or painful evil. If Aristotle is right, it seems that there are circumstances in which a feeling of pain is (in some sense) pleasing.

The explicit recognition of a “paradox” here, considered as a central problem in the philosophy of the arts, comes long after Aristotle. Hume notes in his 1757 treatment of the paradox, for example, that “the few critics who have had some tincture of philosophy, have remarked this singular phænomenon, and have endeavoured to account for it” (OT 217). One of the two such “critics” mentioned by Hume is the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, who announces a few paragraphs into the first part of his sprawling Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting that one of his aims is “to clear up this paradox” (CR 2).

But what is the paradox? Here is a typical way of setting up the problem in recent philosophy.[1] Start with two intuitively plausible generalizations:

T1. It is always unpleasant to feel pity and fear.

T2. Audiences enjoy feeling pity and fear in response to (good) tragic fictions.

Next, add the “apparent conceptual truth” (T3):

T3. “What is unpleasant cannot be enjoyed” (Yanal 1999, p. 144.)

The result (T1-3), of course, is a set from which a contradiction can be deduced. And since (T3) is an allegedly necessary or “conceptual” truth, presumably either one, the other, or both of the generalizations (T1-2) must be false. The philosophical challenge posed by “the paradox of tragedy,” then, is taken to be that of determining which of two apparently true generalizations is false and why.

Or is it? I shall argue that it is a mistake to suppose that Hume and Dubos are grappling with one and the same problem—viz., the one just described. In my view, the contrast between their “solutions” is not so knife-sharp as some commentators, including Hume, would like to think. Rather, their surface disagreement masks an underappreciated affinity between their views on tragedy and pleasure.

2. Hume’s Reading of the Hume-Dubos Dispute

Hume is widely read as denying (T2), though an interpretive dispute—one we needn’t concern ourselves with here—has arisen over just what grounds he sees for doing so. In any case, he seems to be attributing to Dubos the most obvious alternative strategy—viz., that of denying (T1):

L’Abbe Dubos, in his reflections on poetry and painting, asserts, that nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence . . . . To get rid of this painful situation, it seeks every amusement and pursuit . . . whatever will rouze the passions, and take its attention from itself. No matter what the passion is: Let it be disagreeable, afflicting, melancholy, disordered; it is still better than the insipid languor. (OT 217)

That is, Hume’s Dubos proposes that “disagreeable, afflicting, melancholy, [or] disordered” passions can, in fact, be pleasant—at least in the sense that they can be preferable to a certain “painful” and “insipid languor,” and hence that the resolution of the paradox is secured by means of the denial of (T1).

Hume acknowledges the widespread distaste for boredom to which Dubos appeals, but charges that “there is, however, a difficulty in applying to the present subject, in its full extent, this solution” (OT 218). The “difficulty” is that we find actual tragedies in no way pleasant, even though they make for “the most effectual cure to languor and indolence” (OT 218).

Perhaps as a result of this confident dismissal of Dubos’ solution, very few contemporary anglo-american philosophers have devoted even as many paragraphs to the discussion of Dubos’ proposal as did Hume—who, for the record, presents and dismisses Dubos’ view within the space of three paragraphs. If we’re to trust Hume—and, if I am right, many have done so—he and Dubos adopt opposing strategies for resolving one and the same paradox: Dubos accepts the claim that audiences enjoy feeling pity and fear in response to tragic fictions, and hence rejects the claim that pity and fear are always unpleasant. Hume, on the other hand, accepts the claim that feeling pity and fear is always unpleasant, and denies that what audiences enjoy is their feeling of pity and fear.

3. Hume’s Objection Rejected

The first clue that something is amiss in Hume’s response to Dubos is that the latter emphasizes precisely the point Hume seems to be raising as an objection: that we find actual tragedies in no way pleasant, even though they make for “the most effectual cure to languor and indolence” (OT 218). Dubos not only acknowledges that we do not take pleasure in actual tragedies, he judges that “the more our compassion would have been raised by such actions as are described by poetry and painting, had we really beheld them; the more in proportion the imitations attempted by those arts are capable of affecting us” (CR 2). That is, I take it: the more we would suffer, were we to witness the actual tragic events (depicted in a fictional tragedy), the more we are pleased by the fiction.

Further, if Dubos is arguing, as Hume suggests, that disagreeable passions can be pleasant insofar as they are preferable to (or release us from) a certain sort of painful boredom, it isn’t clear why Hume should expect him to thereby commit himself to the implausible doctrine that any experience, however painful, must seem pleasant in comparison to that boredom. But this is precisely the view Hume seems to think Dubos not only is committed to but even “asserts”: “L’Abbe Dubos, he says, “asserts, that nothing is in general so disagreeable to the mind as the languid, listless state of indolence” (OT 217, italics added).

In fact, Dubos asserts no such thing. What he does say is at least a bit more modest:

(1)“the inactivity of the mind” is “a situation . . . very disagreeable to man,”

(2)the degree of pleasure we experience in gratifying a want tracks the “greatness” of that “want,” and

(3)“one of the greatest wants of man is to have his mind incessantly occupied” (CR 5).

That is, “inactivity” is not the most disagreeable state of mind, though it is “very disagreeable” nonetheless.

Pulling the straw out of Hume’s Dubos does not, of course, show that Hume’s Dubos, sans straw, has a good solution to the paradox. For the idea that we take pleasure in feeling fear and pity in response to a tragic fiction only insofar as that painful imaginative engagement releases us from a more painful inactivity seems inadequate to the phenomenology of our experience of a well-written tragedy. Audiences who are starting to pity a tragic heroine when the curtain drops for an intermission do not turn to their neighbor and say, “it sure would be awful pitying her so, had I not been so terribly bored before the play started.”

Luckily for Dubos’ reputation, I think we can fairly conclude that Hume’s Dubos, minus the stuffing, is still not Dubos. So what is?

4. Two Surprising Regularities

One of the interesting differences between the problem that grows out of Aristotle’s poetics and the problems Hume and Dubos see is that the latter pair can be read as trying to explain lawlike regularities, fairly described by means of “in proportion to” statements:

P1. Audiences of tragedies “are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted” (OT 217)

P2. “[T]he more our compassion would have been raised by such actions as are described by poetry and painting, had we really beheld them; the more in proportion the imitations attempted by those arts are capable of affecting us” (CR 2)

Notice just how different (P1) and (P2) are. (P1) seems to be puzzling in the following way: our responses to tragedies involve both suffering and pleasure, and yet contrary to what we might intuitively expect, an increase in the intensity of the affliction generally increases (not decreases) the amount of pleasure in the response. (P2), on the other hand, seems puzzling in a different way: it finds an unexpected proportion not within a single type of experience (a response to fictional tragedy), but rather between two different types of experience (one of a real event, the other of a fictional event).

(P1) and (P2) are so different, I suggest, precisely because they belong to different problems. A brief look at how Dubos and Hume describe the paradoxes they take themselves to be resolving will bring this out.

5. Dubos’ Paradox

Just after noting the surprising regularity (P2), three paragraphs into his presentation of the paradox he hopes to resolve in his treatise, Dubos makes a remark that should surprise readers who take him to have in mind the paradox I described in my opening remarks:

It must be therefore a secret charm that draws our attention to the imitations made by those arts, whilst our nature feels an inward dread and repugnance at the sight of its own pleasure. (CR 2)

(Une charme secret nous attache donc sur les imitations que les peintres et les poètes en savent faire, dans le temps même que la nature tèmoigne par un frémissement intérieur qu’elle se soulève contre son proper plaisir. (Dubos 1993, p. 1))

There is no remark in Hume’s presentation of the paradox of tragedy about a “secret charm,” nor is there any talk of “repugnance at the sight of [one’s] own pleasure.” (Hume does say that “an action, represented in tragedy, may be too bloody and atrocious” (OT 224). But he explains that he means by this that no representation of such an action, no matter how much “energy of expression” a genius devotes to its creation, could ever win pleasure rather than “uneasiness” (OT 224).)

It seems to me uncharitable to suppose that Dubos is simply making an aside here. He ought to be clarifying the problem he proposes to solve, and so let’s suppose that’s what he’s doing. But what contribution could the remark in question make toward the clarification of his problem, if that problem is simply that of determining which of two empirical generalizations is true.

Here’s what I suggest: the passage just quoted presents the Scylla and Charybdis of Dubos’ problem, and the philosophical challenge posed by that problem is that of finding a way of explaining (P2) while avoiding both monsters. That this might seem impossible warrants, for Dubos, the use of the term “paradox.” Here, then, is the problem:

On one hand, Dubos wants to deny that artworks in general are morally dangerous, as they presumably would be if they held a “secret charm” by which they make the tragic, the violent, and the grotesque appear attractive to us. That Dubos would take up the task of countering the kind of critique of the arts associated with Plato (a critique against which he devotes an entire chapter (CR 35-42) of criticism) is unsurprising. After all, it is often recognized that the justification of the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the arts is one of the core projects of the eighteenth century.[2] Even the phrase “secret charm” seems to echo, say, Malebranche’s suspicion of the cook’s special “art of making us eat old shoes in their stews.”[3]

On the other hand, Dubos wants to deny that taking pleasure in artistic depictions of tragedy, violence, and the grotesque normally indicates a vicious soul. After all, a virtuous person, he thinks, “has no such motion in him as can lead him to commit the like excesses; having an horror by instinct, and, if I may be allowed the expression, a mechanic aversion to all such unnatural actions” (CR 95-6, italics added). That is, I take it, the virtuous cannot see anything appealing about a vicious act—there is simply nothing in their psychology that would permit them to take pleasure in the prospect of such an act.

In short, then, Dubos’ question is: what could explain our taking pleasure in depictions of what no virtuous person would take pleasure in, other than the presence of a moral flaw in the depictions (i.e., in the form of a corrupting function of art) or in ourselves (in the form of a disposition to take pleasure in what we should feel a “mechanic aversion” to)?

6. Dubos’ Solution

Without dwelling on the textual basis for my interpretation of Dubos’ solution to his paradox—this is, after all, a Hume conference and I would like to introduce this reading primarily as a means to clarifying the question of what’s at issue between Dubos and Hume—here is Dubos’ solution, as I understand it:

First of all, as noted above, he thinks that “one of the greatest wants of man is to have his mind incessantly occupied.” The proof of this is that “he frequently chooses to expose himself to the most painful exercises, rather than be troubled with it” (CR 5). This want explains the fact that persons have the “tastes and inclinations” they do: since they want their minds to be incessantly occupied, it is understandable that they have acquired tastes that “furnish them with frequent opportunities of amusing themselves agreeably with quick and pleasing sensations” (CR 20).

But since individuals are “not organized all alike,” they do not all have the same tastes. And satisfying some tastes and inclinations—such as those for wine or gambling—can yield disagreeable consequences along with immediate amusement (CR 21). Thus, it is a happy thing that we have also been provided with a taste for having “artificial” (or “superficial”) “emotions” (or “passions”)—viz., the emotions typically excited in us by representational artworks. Such works offer a way “to separate the dismal consequences of our [real] passions from the bewitching pleasure we receive in indulging them.” And they do so by “exciting” in us only “artificial passions, sufficient to occupy us while we are actually affected by them, and incapable of giving us afterwards any real pain or affliction” (CR 21).

Hence, Dubos’ view is not that we take pleasure in feelings of pity and fear at the theatre because they relieve our boredom; rather, his view is that we have (as a result of divine providence?) a taste for having artificial versions of real passions. And part of what distinguishes the artificial emotions is that they occupy our minds, thereby pleasing us by gratifying a basic want, and they do so without afflicting us or getting us into trouble. Finally, and most importantly given the account of Dubos’ problem above, since they are not real passions, they do not reflect poorly on the character of the person who has them, nor is their creation in us by artworks a sign that art is generally morally dangerous. Art is not dangerous, it is, instead, beneficial.[4]

7. Artificial Passions

This distinction between artificial and real passions might seem especially unclear. In fact, at least one of Dubos’ readers (Guyer 2004) supposes it most charitable to deny that Dubos means to be accepting an early antecedent of the view, associated most famously with Walton (1990), sometimes referred to as “emotional irrealism” (Gaut 2002).[5]

The author of perhaps the only book-length study of “Hume’s Aesthetic Theory” in it, however, acknowledges that Dubos is an emotional irrealist of sorts. As Townsend (2001) puts it,

The only difference between an artificial and a real passion . . . is the status of the object. In so far as imitation succeeds, the passions it provokes are closer to those that the real object would excite. The difference is one of force. The impression that an imitated object makes lacks the force of the object itself. The lack of force is not just a lack of strength in the way the passion is felt, however. It is a difference in consequences. The effect on the ‘sensitive soul’ by imitations is weaker, and thus it soon fades.[6]

What Townsend means here is not altogether clear, but I suspect he means to say: first, that the ontological status (real vs. imitation) of the object of an emotion determines whether that emotion is artificial or real; and second, that since imitations lack the superior causal power of real objects, artificial emotions are less persistent than real ones. That is, on Townsend’s view, Dubos would have us believe that whether we are having a real or an artificial emotion depends on whether we are experiencing a real-emotion-causing thing (say, a tragic event) or an artificial-emotion-causing thing (a depiction of a tragic event). And this sounds very much like saying that opium makes people sleep because it has a dormative property. If Townsend’s interpretation of the distinction is correct, Dubos’s distinction is not very informative.