schopenhauer and tragedy

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British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 1 | January 2012 | pp. 17–32 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayr051© British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.

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The Problem with the Problem ofTragedy: Schopenhauer’s Solution

RevisitedSandra Shapshay

If one holds that an engagement with tragedy is to some extent pleasurable, then one ought to

recognize two distinct problems of tragedy. First, given the grim subject matter, what is the source of

the pleasure in engaging with works of this genre? Second, is there some sort of affective irrationality

involved in the experience? In this paper I reconsider Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy and offer a

fuller reconstruction of his complex solution to these problems than has hitherto been given by

commentators. Next, I draw out Schopenhauer’s distinctive contribution to thinking about these problems, in contrast to contemporary, more univocal solutions. Finally, I argue that the strength of

Schopenhauer’s complex solution lies in its recognition that our serious engagement with tragedy is

a cognitively rich oscillation between feelings of humility and pride.

When even the best of us hear Homer or some other tragedian imitating one of theheroes sorrowing and making a long lamenting speech or singing and beating his

breast, you know that we enjoy it, give ourselves up to following it, sympathize withthe hero, take his sufferings seriously, and praise as a good poet the one who affects usmost in this way. (Republic 605c–d1)

Assuming that we agree with Plato’s assertion (via Socrates) that many of us do enjoy tragicart, there are two basic problems of tragedy. First, given the grim nature of the subjectmatter and the seemingly unpleasant emotions experienced in engaging tragedy, what isthe source of the pleasure in experiencing works of this genre? Call this the ‘source prob-lem’ of tragedy. Second, there seems to be a kind of affective irrationality in taking pleasurein tragedy. For instance, one might take oneself as having decisive moral reasons not to takepleasure in witnessing scenes of cruelty—say, if one believed that taking such pleasurewould be callously voyeuristic, or an instance of vicious Schadenfreude —and yet one mightpersist in finding this experience pleasurable. Or one might take oneself to have decisivecognitive reasons not to pity fictional characters, and nonetheless one might pity them, andmight derive pleasure from that pity. Prima facie, in these cases, one would be involved inaffective irrationality by taking pleasure in tragedy. Call this the ‘rationality problem’ oftragedy. I take these to be distinct problems because, as Colin Radford has pointed out withrespect to the paradox of fiction, an aesthetic experience’s irrationality is in principle no

1 Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. of the Republic by G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis:

Hackett, 1997).



18 | SANDRA SHAPSHAY

barrier to its being enjoyable. It may just be irrational to feel emotions for fictional charac-ters, and yet people may enjoy the experience nonetheless.2 Applied to the case of tragedy,it may just be irrational to take pleasure in scenes of great and undeserved suffering, andyet people may enjoy the experience nonetheless.3

In general, aestheticians have attempted to solve the rationality problem—to show that

the appearance of irrationality is illusory—by offering a solution to the source problem.A canonical example of this strategy is evidenced in Hume’s formulation of the problemof tragedy: ordinarily human beings avoid pain and seek pleasure; an integral part of anexperience with tragic drama, however, is the experience of painful emotions, and so inengaging with tragic drama, we appear to be seeking out precisely those kinds of painfulexperiences we generally seek to avoid. This behaviour seems prima facie irrational and theappearance of irrationality is heightened by the fact that the tremendous value attributedto tragedy as an art form seems not ancillary to, but rather to derive precisely from thesuffering it evokes as well as from the serious and terrible events depicted.4 As I shall treata bit further below, Hume’s strategy is to solve this irrationality problem by offering an

account of the source of tragic pleasure.Philosophers tend to favour univocal solutions to puzzles, and this predilection is amply

attested to in the major solutions aestheticians have offered to the rationality problemof tragedy.5 They take the basic form: it is indeed rational for people to enjoy painfulemotions in tragic drama because X, where ‘X’ is supplied by the one of the following:

1. Pain is converted to pleasure. Hume’s solution in Of Tragedy (in the broadest terms) isthat the painful passion experienced in engaging with tragedy is ‘converted’ into apleasurable one, making it rational after all that we should seek out such experiences.6 On such conversion views, it is rational to seek out tragic drama because the painful

2 Colin Radford, ‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society , 49

(1975), 67–93.

3 A further reason to take these as distinct problems is that it is quite possible to offer a plausible solution to the source

problem without it resolving the rationality problem. For example, the source of the pleasure in tragedy may be

identified as deriving from voyeuristic delight in dramatic life-and-death scenes, and yet if those who take such delight

believe they have decisive moral reasons not to do so, then the rationality problem persists despite the location of the

source of the pleasure. The reverse is also true, as I will detail below with respect to Alex Neill’s treatment of

Schopenhauer’s treatment of tragedy. That is, it is quite possible to offer a plausible solution to the rationality problem

of tragedy without resolving, but rather, dissolving the source problem.

4 Several aestheticians have made this point forcefully. For example, Christopher Williams writes: ‘It would be an

astounding coincidence—too astounding, we should surmise—if tragic satisfaction and the subject matter of tragedywere only contingently related to each other.’ C. Williams ‘Is Tragedy Paradoxical?’, BJA, 31 (1998), 47–62, at 48.

Similarly, Alex Neill holds that ‘[a]ny plausible account of the paradox of tragedy must involve a recognition that the

pleasure and the “pain” that tragedy gives rise to are in some way internally related; that the tragic pleasure lies at

least partly in the pain.’ A. Neill ‘Yanal and Others on Hume on Tragedy’, JAAC , 50 (1992), 151–154, at 153.

5 A notable exception in this regard is Aristotle, whose solution to the problems of tragedy is complex, combining both

the pleasure in learning significant truths and in emotional catharsis.

6 I cannot do justice here to the critical controversy over Hume’s account of this ‘conversion’. For the state of this

debate see Amyas Merivale, ‘Mixed Feelings, Mixed Metaphors: Hume on Tragic Pleasure’, BJA, 51 (2011), 259–269.



THE PROBLEM WITH THE PROBLEM OF TRAGEDY: SCHOPENHAUER’S SOLUTION REVISITED | 19

passions of fear and pity are converted into pleasure, due either to the fictionalnature of the events depicted (even when based on historical events or are verisimilar)or to the artistry of the language and plot structure of the tragedy.

Other major solutions offered save the rationality of emotional engagement with

tragedy by holding that: 2. People enjoy intense emotional states. Berys Gaut, for instance, has offered an account

of the source of tragic pleasure, arguing that at least some people on some occa-sions enjoy intense emotional states such as fear and disgust and that there is nothingparadoxical about this.7 While such ‘negative emotions’ are typically experienced asunpleasant and while there is a conceptual connection between the emotions of fearand disgust and an unpleasant affect, Gaut holds that what is intrinsically ‘negative’to these emotional states are the evaluative judgements rather than the affectivestates. Since his general view of negative emotions covers those typically associatedwith tragedy, he offers a way to dissolve both the paradox of horror as well as the

rationality problem of engagement with tragedy. Some philosophers add a conditionon enjoyment of intense negative emotions that subjects must be in control of thesituation (thus, subjects enjoy rock-climbing but only with ropes; and many enjoywatching victims being chased by a serial killer, but only while sitting safely in themultiplex theatre).8

3. The pain is amply compensated for by pleasure from another source. Hedonic-compensatory views hold that while there is indeed much pain experienced in engagement with tra-gic drama, the pain is offset by pleasure from another source, for example by learningprofound truths about the human condition, by the pleasure of purging excessemotions (catharsis) even if the experience of those emotions in engaging the tragedyis itself painful (Aristotle), or by the pleasure in having one’s curiosity satisfied (anapproach taken by Carroll with respect to the pardox of horror).9

4. People take pleasure in reflecting on their tragic responses. A variety of the above hedonic-compensatory approach is the second-order view. For instance, on Susan Feagin’ssolution, we enjoy tragic drama because while we are indeed pained as we suffer alongwith the characters in tragic drama, we derive pleasure in reflecting on ourselves ascapable of having such compassionate moral responses.10 Another variant of a second-order response view is arguably held by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil : people enjoy making themselves suffer; thus, the suffering involved in the experience of painful

7 Berys Gaut, ‘The Paradox of Horror’, BJA, 33 (1993), 333–345.

8 John Morreall, ‘Enjoying Negative Emotions in Fictions’, Philosophy and Literature, 9 (1985), 95–102.

9 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Hear t (New York: Routledge, 1990), ch. 4. Carroll’s view is

like Hume’s in so far as he holds that the tragic plot engenders curiosity in the audience, in ‘how certain forces,

once put in motion, will work themselves out’. Thus, even if the emotions we experience in engagement with

tragedy are painful, the pain is converted or balanced in so far as we derive pleasure from ‘having our interest in the

outcome of such questions satisfied’.

10 Susan L. Feagin, ‘The Pleasures of Tragedy’, American Philosophical Quarterly , 20 (1983), 95–104.




emotions and the learning of terrible truths is rendered, overall, pleasurable by reflec-tion on that fact that one voluntarily undertakes this suffering.11

All of these attempts accept the claim that people actually derive pleasure from tragedies,and offer univocal explanations of how pleasure can be taken either in the tragic drama itself

(conversion and enjoyment of intense emotion views), or despite the pain of the experience(compensation and second-order views), thus rendering the experience of tragic pleasureultimately rational.

Breaking with this approach, another solution has been proposed by Alex Neill, followingup on a suggestion by Flint Schier.12 Neill questions whether any significant pleasure isderived from the experience of tragedy at all:

[S]urely our response to the depiction of suffering and distress in tragic art does notalways involve pleasure. Is witnessing Gloucester’s blinding, or Lear’s disintegration,really pleasant? . . . [I]sn’t there something more than a little odd about the commonphilosophical insistence on characterizing the essential character of our experience of

tragedy in terms of pleasure?13

According to Neill, the reason why people value tragedy is not for the pleasure they gain, but rather for the knowledge they acquire, that is, profound truths about the human con-dition that the genre is especially apt to convey: that terrible misfortunes befall people, andthat they suffer out of proportion to their desert; that human lives are vitiated largely bysocial factors, by chance, by fate, or by human evil. Unlike the hedonic-compensation viewsketched above, on Neill’s view, the knowledge acquired from tragic drama is not itself asource of pleasure which offsets the painfulness of the experience. We value tragic drama

because it is cognitively rich, not because it is enjoyable. Thus, Neill resolves the rationalityproblem but dismisses the source problem as a pseudo-problem.

Neill credits Schopenhauer with the development of this alternative, non-hedonic-compensatory position on the experience of tragedy, what I shall refer to as the ‘value ofknowledge’ view. Indeed, Schopenhauer did stress the high cognitive value of tragic drama.However, as I will seek to show, this interpretation of Schopenhauer is only partially cor-rect: in addition to offering a cognitivist account of the value of tragedy, Schopenhauer’sview is also hedonic-compensatory because, as I will elaborate, he characterizes a rarifiedpleasure in an experience of tragedy, a pleasure which he categorizes as the highest degreeof the dynamically sublime.14 My aim here is to do two things: first, to offer a more complete

11 This view derives from section 229 of Beyond Good and Evil. For full discussion of Nietzsche’s post-Birth of Tragedy solution, see Amy Price, ‘Nietzsche and the Paradox of Tragedy’, BJA, 38 (1998), 384–393.

12 Flint Schier, ‘The Claims of Tragedy: An Essay in Moral Psychology and Aesthetic Theory’, Philosophical Papers, 18

(1989), 7–26.

13 Alex Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and Value,’ in José Luis Bermúdez and Sebastian Gardner (eds), Art and

Morality (New York: Routledge, 2003), 208. See also his ‘Hume’s “Singular Phaenomenon”’, BJA, 39 (1999),

112–125.

14 He writes, ‘[o]ur pleasure [unser Gefallen] in the tragedy belongs not to the feeling of the beautiful, but to that of the

sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling’ (WWR II: 433).




reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s solution to the problems of tragedy, and second, to showthat it has distinct advantages for contemporary thinking about the experience of tragedy.Despite what T. J. Diffey has aptly called its ‘metaphysical extravagances’, I shall argue thatSchopenhauer’s multifaceted solution to the problems of tragedy has real advantages overthe competitors adumbrated above in capturing what aficionados have long attested to in

the phenomenology of tragic drama.15

Tragedy and Knowledge

Schopenhauer indeed stressed the cognitive significance of tragic drama. Like other formsof literature (the epic, the drama, the novel), he held that tragedy concerns itself with the‘Idea of humanity’ and aims to clarify all of the facets of human life through the portrayalof ‘highly individualized characters’ in ‘significant and extraordinary actions’ (WWR I,§51, 279).16 The only feature really essential to tragedy, on Schopenhauer’s view, is the‘portrayal of a great misfortune’ (WWR I, §51, 281), which comes about in three main

ways: First, through the extraordinary evil of some character (Schopenhauer numbersRichard III, Iago, Shylock, and Creon among such evil agents17); second, through ‘blindfate’ which Schopenhauer glosses as ‘chance and error’ (WWR I, §51, 281); and third, bymeans of ‘ordinary characters in everyday circumstances’ whose relationships and situa-tions with respect to each other ‘forces them knowingly and clear-sightedly to cause eachother the greatest harm without the injustice falling on one side or the other’ (WWR I, §51,281–282). Among tragedies of this sort Schopenhauer lists Goethe’s Clavigo and Faust,Schiller’s Wallenstein, and aspects of Hamlet, namely in the eponymous character’s relation-ships with Laertes and Ophelia. Schopenhauer sees this last form as superior to the others

because it is the most realistic form of tragedy, and moreover it has the most powerfuleffect on ordinary people, bringing the tragic side of life to consciousness for anyone whopartakes in parental, romantic, friendly, collegial, or other relationships that often bringsituational suffering to those who bear little (if any) fault.

For reasons involving the structure of human desire and its necessary frustration,reasons supported by empirical observation but ultimately grounded in his metaphysics,Schopenhauer viewed these tragic entanglements as the rule rather than the exception:

[T]he unspeakable pain, the misery of humanity, the triumph of wickedness, the scornfuldomination of chance, and the hopeless fall of the righteous and the innocent are

brought before us here [in tragedy]: for here we find a significant intimation as to thenature of the world and existence. (WWR, I, §51, 280)

15 T. J. Diffey, ‘Schopenhauer’s Account of Aesthetic Experience’, BJA, 30 (1990), 132–142.

16 References to vol. I of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, pertain to the newer Cambridge edition

translation by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: CUP, 2010). References to

vol. II of this work pertain to the older E. F. J. Payne translation of The World as Will and Representation (New York:

Dover, 1966). I have also supplied section and chapter numbers for WWR I and WWR II, respectively.

17 I disagree with Schopenhauer’s placing of Shylock and Creon in this category, but the particularities of his taxonomy

go beyond the scope of this paper.




Recently, Michael Tanner18 and Neill19 have wondered why Schopenhauer does not recog-nize a paradox, let alone a significant philosophical problem, in the idea of tragic pleasure.Indeed, in Volume I of WWR, the philosopher does not acknowledge this problem per se. Assketched above, Neill sees a virtue in this apparent lacuna20 and argues that the problem oftragedy is generated by the underlying assumption of a ‘hedonic theory of motivation’ and

a ‘hedonic theory of value’. If one assumes a hedonic theory of motivation and value, thenit does seem paradoxical that persons who typically seek out pleasure and value artworksfor the pleasure they provide would seek out and value an engagement with painful emo-tions and terrible scenes in tragedy. But, as Neill argues, Schopenhauer assumes no hedonictheory of motivation or value. Although there is always some degree of pleasurable tran-quillity in any truly aesthetic experience on Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, on Neill’sinterpretation this type of pleasure is neither distinctive nor the source of tragedy’s highvalue. Rather, on this view, the distinctive value of an engagement with tragedy derivesfrom its ‘cognitive payoff’.21 This line of thought effectively dissolves the source problemoutlined above by disputing the claim that people take significant pleasure in tragedy at all.

Neill still recognizes a prima facie rationality problem with engagement with tragedy,namely why would people want to learn the terrible lessons tragedy purveys? But thisproblem is no longer bound up with a puzzle about the pleasurability of the experience.

Although Neill is undoubtedly correct in seeing the high value of tragedy forSchopenhauer as deriving in good measure from its ‘cognitive payoff’, his interpretation ofSchopenhauer’s full view of tragedy is flawed in two respects. First, though it may appearthat Schopenhauer does not take tragic pleasure as its own problem in Volume I of WWR,he recognized and offered an explanation to the problem of the sublime in that volume, whichhe proceeds inexplicitly to adopt as an account of tragic pleasure. Since Schopenhauer viewstragic pleasure as the highest degree of the feeling of the sublime, an answer to the problemof the sublime obviates the need to offer a separate solution to that of tragedy.

The second flaw in Neill’s interpretation is that Schopenhauer does indeed address theproblem of tragedy directly in Volume II of WWR. It bears quoting him at length here as thisis where he most explicitly acknowledges the problem and offers an explanation:

The horrors on the stage hold up to him [the spectator] the bitterness and worthless-ness of life, and so the vanity of all its efforts and endeavors. The effect of this impres-sion must be that he becomes aware, although only in an obscure feeling, that it is

better to tear his heart away from life, to turn his willing away from it, not to love theworld and life. Thus in the depth of his being the consciousness is then stirred that for a

different kind of willing there must be a different kind of existence also. For if this were not so, if

this rising above all the aims and good things of life, this turning away from life and itstemptations, and the turning already to be found here, to an existence of another kind,although wholly inconceivable to us, were not the tendency of tragedy, then how would

18 Michael Tanner, Schopenhauer (New York: Routledge, 1999), 40.

19 Alex Neill, ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and Value’, in Bermúdez and Gardner (eds), Art and Morality , 204–217,

at 209.

20 As I will show in what follows, Schopenhauer does in fact address the problem of tragedy directly.

21 Neill,‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and Value’, 216.




it be possible generally for the presentation of the terrible side of life, brought before our eyes in

the most glaring light, to be capable of affecting us so beneficially, and of affording us an

exalted pleasure? (WWR, II, ch. 37, 435; emphasis added)

This passage requires some interpretation in order to bring Schopenhauer’s proposed

solution to the problems of the source and rationality of tragic pleasure fully to light. First,there is the question of how exactly Schopenhauer understands the spectator as taking an‘exalted pleasure’ in the presentation of the ‘terrible side of life’? And, second, what is itprecisely that we are supposed to ‘become aware’ of from an engagement with tragedy?

Tragic Pleasure as Sublime

On the first question, because Schopenhauer sees the aesthetic pleasure experienced intragedy as the highest degree of the dynamically sublime, we must turn to Schopenhauer’stheory of the sublime for an understanding of his view of the ‘exalted pleasure’ experi-enced in engagement with tragedy. Schopenhauer distinguishes the feeling of the beautifulfrom the sublime in two main ways. First, in the feeling of the beautiful, the objects, as itwere, invite one to aesthetic ‘contemplative intuition’—for they ‘meet that state halfway’(WWR, I, §39, 225). That is to say, these objects lie in the middle of a spectrum betweenattraction or hostility to a person’s ‘will’ or, one might put it in more contemporary terms,to a person’s bodily ‘desire’ or ‘inclination’. At either pole, the non-instrumental contem-

plation of the object (the sine qua non of aesthetic experience for Schopenhauer) is moredifficult to achieve because a person may be moved either to flee from the hostile object orto use the agreeable object to gratify one’s bodily needs. Objects or phenomena experi-enced as sublime lie at the antipathetic end of the spectrum: they bear a ‘hostile relation tothe human will in general (as it presents itself in its objecthood, the human body)’ (WWR,

I, §39, 225). Following the general lines of the Kantian distinction, Schopenhauer seesthat in the dynamical sublime, a person is confronted with forces which threaten bodily harmto the individual; and in the mathematical sublime, extreme magnitudes threaten psycho-logically to reduce the individual’s own existence to complete insignificance. Sublimepleasure, on Schopenhauer’s view, results when a person is able to acknowledge the threatposed to the individual by the object, but nonetheless to disregard it and instead contem-plate that object for what it essentially is (WWR, I, §39, 226).22

The second main difference between the beautiful and the sublime on his account lies ina qualitative difference in the pleasure experienced due to the presence or absence ofself-consciousness in these types of experiences. In achieving the contemplative state via

22 See Alex Neill’s more recent treatment of Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy for a detailed analysis of the distinct

moments of sublime experience, in ‘Schopenhauer on Tragedy and the Sublime’, The Blackwell Companion to

Schopenhauer ( Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming). In this essay, Neill highlights the precariousness of sublime

experience due to the fact that the subject must recollect that the ideas being contemplated are of a threatening sort

to remain in sublime rather than beautiful experience, but also without succumbing to an anti-aesthetic personal

anxiety. My interpretation of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime adopts this analysis but differs from Neill’s in

the role I see for a felt recognition of moral freedom in the theory.




psychological struggle, sublime pleasure is described as a feeling of ‘elevation’ rather than‘tranquillity’ as it is in the beautiful.23 The elevation (Erhebung) is due to the fact that forSchopenhauer the subject of sublime experience is conscious of having attained liberation

by struggle and of maintaining that liberation from his own individual body and particularstrivings. Thus he describes the sublime as a ‘state of elevation’ where one is conscious that

one is ‘peacefully contemplating those very objects that are terrible to the will’ (WWR, I, §39,226). By contrast, the experience of the beautiful is described as an absorption of consciousnessin the object, and a complete loss of self-consciousness (WWR, I, §39, 225; §34, 200–201). Inorder to explicate the nature of this self-conscious pleasure of elevation on Schopenhauer’stheory, however, we need first to address the cognitive dimension of sublime experience.24

The Sublime and Knowledge

On the question of what exactly it is we are supposed to ‘become aware’ of from thesublime experience of tragedy, Schopenhauer’s theory offers two sorts of cognitive

content. First, and explicit on his view, we perceive the Platonic ideas: the essentialfeatures of the phenomenal world, and in the case of tragedy, the idea of humanity in itsvarious manifestations. The second sort of cognitive content, however, is not fully expli-cated in his writings; it enters the picture only in high degrees of the mathematically anddynamically sublime, and is gained by the element of self-consciousness in this aestheticexperience. Schopenhauer holds that in such experiences we gain an immediate but only feltunderstanding of what he calls ‘the twofold character of his [the subject’s] consciousness’[die Duplicität seines Bewußtseyns] (WWR, I, §39, 229).

This twofold character consists at once in (i) the feebleness of the human individual qua natural being (who is ‘helpless against the might of nature, dependent, abandoned tochance, a vanishing nothing in the face of enormous powers’ (WWR, I, §39, 229)) as well as(ii) the powerfulness of the subject qua supersensible being, that is, as the ‘eternal, tranquilsubject of cognition’, who ‘calmly apprehends the Ideas, free from and foreign to all needand all willing’, and who ‘as the condition of all objects carries and supports just this entireworld’ (WWR, I, §39, 229). I have argued elsewhere that there are profound Kantian

23 Here I depart from Christopher Janaway’s view that tranquillity is the sole kind of aesthetic pleasure on

Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory though it may had through different avenues, that is, in either the experience of the

beautiful or the sublime. Janaway holds that the pleasure of ‘tranquil, will-less contemplation’ is the ‘truly unifyingnotion in Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory’ and accordingly, Janaway understands ‘the key to the satisfaction we take

in tragedy [as] . . . the will-lessness of sublime resignation in the face of the Idea’. Pace Janaway, I hold that in

addition to the ‘tranquillity’ in all aesthetic experiences, there is in the sublime an additional, phenomenologically

distinct pleasure of ‘exaltation’ experienced in especially high degrees of sublime experience such as that with tragic

drama. For Janaway’s position see ‘Knowledge and Tranquility: Schopenhauer on the Value of Art’, in Dale Jacquette

(ed.), Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), 39–61, at 58.

24 For a fuller reconstruction of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime in contrast to his theory of the beautiful,

see my ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’, Kantian Review , forthcoming.




echoes in Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime, and believe that this Kantian inheritancecomes out quite clearly with respect to his account of the subject’s sense of power awokenin sublime experience.25

The subject’s sense of ‘powerfulness’ takes two distinct forms in the Schopenhaueriansublime. The first sense consists in a felt recognition of negative freedom, that is, the

subject’s sense of having the power to resist the demands of the will to life . In other words, this isthe sense that one has the ability not to be determined by the pressing demands of bodilyexistence. In Kantian terms, this negative freedom—the ability to resist the pull ofinclination—is accompanied by positive freedom (autonomy), that is, the ability to act inaccordance with and from the moral law, but Schopenhauer often and vehemently repudi-ates the categorical imperative. Nonetheless, his theory of the sublime retains the view thatin sublime experience a subject gains a felt recognition of his ability actively to resist for atime the demands of egoistic striving. This is recognized precisely in his ability to contem-plate threatening objects aesthetically.

The second sense of powerfulness consists in the subject’s sense of her existence as transcending

the phenomenal world. This sense, which Schopenhauer writes is only made clear by philosophy(that is, transcendental idealism) (WWR I, §39, 230), is that in addition to being part of nature,one is also part of the ‘in itself’ of the world of representation. The feeling that one is partof the ‘in itself’ of the phenomenal world is common to Kant and Schopenhauer’s theoriesof the sublime, but is explicated in different ways. For Kant, both the mathematical anddynamical sublime afford a felt recognition of one’s supersensible rational nature (CPJ ,138; 5:255; CPJ , 145; 5:261; CPJ , 144–145; 5:261; CPJ , 145; 5:261–262),26 which has

both a cognitive and moral vocation. For Schopenhauer, the mathematical sublime affordsa felt recognition of one’s status as transcendental subject—as the epistemologicalsupporter of the world of representation. In addition, the experience also affords a senseof being ‘one with the world’, that is, of being one with the world as it is ‘in itself’ whichSchopenhauer identifies as ‘will’ or ‘striving’ (one might think of it along the lines ofenergy).

In an example of a high degree of the mathematically sublime, for example, Schopenhauerevokes this felt understanding of the second sense of the subject’s powerfulness:

When we lose ourselves in the contemplation of the infinite extent of the world inspace and time, reflecting on the millennia past and the millennia to come, —orindeed when the night sky actually brings countless worlds before our eyes, so that we

become forcibly aware of the immensity of the world, —then we feel ourselvesreduced to nothing, feel ourselves as individuals, as living bodies, as transient appearances

of the will, like drops in the ocean, fading away, melting away into nothing. But at the

25 Here I take issue with Vandenabeele, who holds that the predominant influence on Schopenhauer’s theory of the

sublime is Burke. See B. Vandenabeele ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Aesthetically Sublime’, Journal of Aesthetic

Education, 31 (2003), 90–106. By contrast, I believe that Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime has a very marked

Kantian inheritance. Again, see my ‘Schopenhauer’s Transformation of the Kantian Sublime’ for a fuller argument

for this claim.

26 These references are to the Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews edition of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment

(Cambridge: CUP, 2000) followed by the Akademie volume and page number.




same time, rising up against such a spectre of our own nothingness, against such a slan-derous impossibility, is our immediate consciousness that all these worlds really existonly in our representation, only as modifications of the eternal subject of pure cogni-tion, which is what we find ourselves to be as soon as we forget our individuality, andwhich is the necessary, the conditioning bearer and support of all worlds and all times.

The magnitude of the world, which we used to find unsettling, is now settled securelywithin ourselves: our dependence on it is nullified by its dependence on us.—Yet wedo not reflect on all this straight away; instead it appears only as the felt consciousnessthat we are, in some sense (that only philosophy makes clear), one with the world, andthus not brought down, but rather elevated, [nicht niedergedrückt, sondern gehoben wird ]

by its immensity. (WWR, I, §39, 230)

The distinct moments of mathematically sublime experience as well as the second sense ofpowerfulness felt by the subject as transcending the phenomenal world come out quiteclearly in this passage: first, the subject loses herself in contemplation of vast phenomena.Thus far, Schopenhauer describes only the experience proper to the beautiful. But then,the ideas the subject perceives—the immensity of the universe and the infinitesimal small-ness of human beings within it—disturb her in so far as they awaken a feeling of her owninsignificance, threatening to overturn will-less aesthetic contemplation. Yet, in so far asthe consciousness arises in the subject that all these worlds and times are supported by ouractivity of representation, herein lies the transition to the sublime. If the subject forgets herindividual frailty and instead begins to feel her power qua epistemological subject, then shecan make a conscious transition to the sublime. In so far as she does, then she experiences apleasurable feeling of elevation in her recognition of her transcendence of the phenomenalworld, both as transcendental subject and as part of the ‘in itself’ of the world of represen-tation. She comes to feel that qua subject, she is the epistemological condition of all theseobjects which seem to reduce her to ‘nothingness’; further, she feels that she is ‘one withthe world, and thus not brought down, but rather elevated, by its immensity’. As anappearance and as part of the ‘in itself’ of the world the subject is both humbled andexalted by the immensity of the natural world.

Transcendental idealism permeates this account of the phenomenology of sublimeexperience, and, needless to say, not everyone will subscribe to the metaphysical part ofthe story. But the basic contours of Schopenhauer’s account of particularly high degrees ofmathematical sublime experience may be translated into plausible, non-extravagantlymetaphysical terms. Encounters with vast or powerful phenomena in nature (the GrandCanyon, the Alps, a wide expanse of ocean, a towering cascade, or the starry night sky to

take some classic examples) do instil in many of us a sense of our physical smallness, cosmicinsignificance, and/or our cognitive and existential feebleness. Take an aesthetic encounterwith the night sky. One might take in the perceptual features of the dark sky, the vastnessof the vault, and the luminosity of its numerous points of light, and one might reflect onone’s scientific knowledge of the universe, about the make-up of the stars and the length oftime it takes for light to travel to Earth. In such an experience, one might feel bothhumbled and exalted by engagement with this natural spectacle: Humbled by the overwhelmingscope and duration of the sky relative to oneself; and yet elevated by the recognition that




humans have been able to fathom so much about the universe and are capable of reflectingon it in various ways (cognitively, formalist-aesthetically, existentially, and so on). This com-mon-enough phenomenology of the sublime is available to the religious and non-religiousalike. In it there seems to be an oscillation between feelings of humbled awe and prideful exalt-ation. The term ‘sublime’ is commonly used as an honorific, to describe our most striking and

important aesthetic experiences. How is this exquisitely painful pleasure to be explained?Schopenhauer’s theory aims to capture the pleasurableness of this experience by

locating a recognition of the subject’s own power within and as part of the universe,despite the apparent feebleness and insignificance of human beings revealed in such experi-ences. Even without the transcendental idealism, and without adverting to any invocationof the divine, one might come to the analogous thought, faced with vast or powerfulphenomena in nature, about one’s status as both a very humble being in nature as well as arather special kind of being: one who contemplates nature aesthetically (rather than merelyin an instrumental fashion), and who raises scientific and existential questions about his orher place in the universe. Thus, I believe the phenomenological account that Schopenhauer

offers of the sublime can be shorn of its more controversial metaphysical trappings, andwhen seen in this light offers a promising, phenomenologically compelling basis for an ac-count of tragic pleasure.

As mentioned above, Schopenhauer explicitly utilizes his theory of the sublime in hissolution to the problem of the source of tragic pleasure:

Our pleasure [unser Gefallen] in the tragedy belongs not to the feeling of the beautiful, but to that of the sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling. For, just as at

the sight of the sublime in nature we turn away from the interest of the will, in order to behave in

a purely perceptive way , so in the tragic catastrophe we turn away from the will-to-liveitself. (WWR, II, ch. 37, 433; emphasis added)27

27 In personal communication, some commentators have objected to my view by insisting that Schopenhauer holds the

pleasure we take in the experience of tragedy is merely ‘analogous’ to, rather than identical with, that of the

dynamically sublime. Indeed, in the continuation of the above-cited passage, Schopenhauer writes that the pleasure

we take in tragedy is ‘analogous to that of the dynamically sublime’ in so far as the effect of tragedy ‘raises us above

the will and its interest, and puts us in such a mood that we find pleasure in the sight of what directly opposes the

will’ (WWR, II, ch. 37, 433). But I think it wrong to conclude from this passage that Schopenhauer does not identify

the pleasure in tragedy with that of the dynamically sublime, for there are many places in which he does actually

identify the pleasure in tragedy precisely with that of the dynamically sublime: ‘[O]ur pleasure in the tragedy belongs

not to the feeling of the beautiful, but to that of the sublime; it is, in fact, the highest degree of this feeling.’ Also, in

the Nachlass Schopenhauer writes about the requirements for sublime experience, ‘It is not true that we must be

safe and secure, for even at the moment of actual danger and destruction our consciousness can ascend to thesublime [kann unser Bewußtseyn zum Erhabnen emporsteigen]. This is presented by the tragedy which moreover belongs

to the dynamically sublime [welches übrigens auch zum Dynamischerhabnen gehört], a feeling which is stimulated in the

spectator, although he is safe and secure.’ Der handschriftliche Nachlaß , ed. Arthur Hübscher, 5 vols (Frankfurt a.

M: Kramer, 1966–75), vol. II, 289; Manuscript Remains, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 4 vols (New York, Berg, 1988), II, 321.

In these passages it is clear that Schopenhauer actually identifies the pleasure in tragedy with the feeling of the

dynamically sublime, and does not merely claim that these feelings are analogous. Thus, I would explain his use of

‘analogous’ above as a way of expressing that the experience of tragedy involves the pleasure in the dynamical rather

than in the mathematical sublime.




For Schopenhauer, a consciousness of our negative freedom—our freedom to resist thepressing inclinations of the will, objectified in our bodies—may be brought on by experi-ences with dynamically sublime nature or they may be brought by recognition of the‘tragic catastrophe’. If the spectator is able to contemplate as sublime ‘the powers thatdestroy life and happiness and that can at any moment make their way towards us as well’

(WWR, I, §51, 282) she confronts the tragic aspects of the human condition in a way thatis also exalting in so far as she recognizes that she does indeed have negative freedom,that is the power to turn her attention (at least for some length of time) away from thewill to life.

Rather than taking pleasure in one’s identification with the will qua thing in itself(as in the mathematical sublime), for Schopenhauer tragic pleasure is dynamically sublimeand comes with an awareness of being raised ‘above the will and its interest’. 28 Hereis the hedonic-compensatory component of Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy. Heoffers his considered account of how we can take pleasure in tragedy through the subject’sawareness of the first kind of power felt in high degrees of sublime experience, namely

the power to will differently from ordinary egoism. In dynamically sublime experiencewe gain an intuitive sense of our moral power, but, Schopenhauer insists, this is not to

be understood in a Kantian sense as a consciousness of our moral autonomy even in anenvironment hostile to duty. Rather, the subject’s moral power consists in an ability tomake the ethical choice, which he describes in transcendental idealist terms as the ‘onlyevent in-itself’—to affirm or deny the will to life (WWR, I, §35, 184). In the passage Iquoted earlier in which Schopenhauer confronts the problem of tragedy directly, it isour power to will differently from ordinary egoism that amounts to being a moral agent.And it is the ‘stirring’ of the consciousness of one’s capacity to will differently fromthat of a self-interested agent, and thus to detach ourselves from tragic entanglements,that Schopenhauer invokes as the solution to the problem of tragedy, as he arguescounterfactually:

For if this were not so . . . then how would it be possible generally for the presentationof the terrible side of life . . . to be capable of affecting us so beneficially, and of affordingus an exalted pleasure?’

Thus, in a manner similar to Kant, it is the sense of a subject’s moral power, a power toresist nature in the dynamically sublime that is responsible for the pleasure a subject takesin an experience of tragedy. For Schopenhauer, this moral power is the ability no longerto be a slave of the will to life, but to make a choice of how to relate to one’s egoisticwilling which motivates the subject in ordinary life. The choice is either to affirm the

will—tantamount to being a willing participant in the ‘drama of life’ with all of its suffer-ing and striving—or to deny it, and thus to dampen one’s own egoistic striving in variousways and degrees (for example, with universal compassion and activism on the part of

28 This is arguably exactly the route that Nietzsche takes in the Birth of Tragedy ; interestingly, this was a path available to

but not taken by Schopenhauer, largely on moral grounds.




those who suffer, à la Mother Theresa, or with a response of detachment and resignation,in the way of an ascetic monk).29

Schopenhauer’s account holds that we find tragedy so important in large part because itpresents us with an accurate picture of our situation through vivid perceptual means. Inaddition, it awakens a sense in us that we have the power to choose how to respond to the

tragic aspects of our lives by ‘willing differently’. In order to be in a position to make thisethical choice of how to conduct oneself in the world, a subject must first gain anunderstanding of the way the world really is. Schopenhauer believes that there is an inbornoptimism in people, borne out in the history of Western philosophy which has generallyheld the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. In order to understand the full spec-trum of life, human beings do not especially need comedy, which is merely ‘an invitationto the continued affirmation of the will [which] declares that life on the whole is quitegood, and in particular is generally amusing’ (WWR, II, ch. 37, 437–438). Rather, peopleneed tragedy, for the

peculiar effect of the tragedy rests ultimately on the fact that it shakes that inborn

error [i.e. their optimism], since it furnishes a vivid illustration of the frustration ofhuman effort and of the vanity of this whole existence in a great and striking example,and thereby reveals life’s deepest meaning. (WWR, II, ch. 49, 635)

In addition to the important knowledge tragedy imparts of the world, the genre alsoaffords us insight into an ethical power in ourselves—the insight which is the source of thesublime pleasure of tragedy.30

Schopenhauer’s Solution to the Problems of Tragedy

Schopenhauer offers a complex solution to the problem of tragedy. I believe its complexityis a virtue. On the one hand, he endorses a non-hedonic-compensatory or ‘value of

29 Whether or not people are truly free to choose denial or affirmation of the will is a troublesome issue in

Schopenhauer’s thought. On the one hand, he holds that an individual’s empirical character is fixed and so we cannot

change what it is we will in particular circumstances; rather, he holds that we may only come to realize what our

true character is—that is, we may gain acquired character—in the course of life. However, Schopenhauer’s ultimate

position is in a sense compatibilist, for he holds that while our actions seem necessitated by our empirical character,

each of us has an intelligible character which transcends the phenomenal world, and which renders moral freedom

possible on the ultimate metaphysical level. See Arthur Schopenhauer, Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will , ed. Günter

Zöller, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) or in a more recent translation by Christopher Janaway, The TwoFundamental Problems of Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 21–112.

30 In his magisterial essay on tragedy and morality, Sebastian Gardner does recognize a moral element in the

experience of tragedy in Schopenhauer’s thought, but he does not connect this element with Schopenhauer’s

account of the sublime. Thus, it is puzzling on Gardner’s view why Schopenhauer speaks of a demand for a ‘different

form of existence’ as being awoken in an experience of tragedy. By focusing on Schopenhauer’s account of tragedy

as dynamically sublime, I believe Schopenhauer’s talk of tragedy as awakening this demand makes considerably

better sense. S. Gardner, ‘Tragedy, Morality and Metaphysics’ in Bermúdez and Gardner (eds), Art and Morality

(New York: Routledge, 2003), 218–259, at 254.




knowledge’ view by stressing that much of the value of tragedy derives from the know-ledge we gain rather than from the pleasurableness of the experience. We gain knowledgeabout the human condition in general, as well as ethical knowledge about our power assubjects within the world, that is, our ability to rise above what nature gives us; to will dif-ferently from ordinary egoism. This focus on the cognitive value of tragedy accounts well

for Neill’s insight that it is indeed strange for aestheticians to stress the enjoyment of theexperience. Indeed, people do value tragedies largely for what they will learn, not becauseit is a thoroughly pleasant experience. The high cognitive significance of tragedy has been acommon view among the most celebrated writers and critics of tragic drama for centuries.For instance, the nineteenth-/twentieth-century playwright, Maurice Maeterlinck writesof the revelatory power of tragic drama which is at its best when about ‘the situation ofman in the universe’:

The poet adds to ordinary life something that is the secret of poets, and all of a suddenit [ordinary life] is revealed in its astonishing grandeur, its subordination to unknownpowers, its unending affinities, and its awesome misery.31

More recently, in Arthur Miller’s defence of Death of a Salesman as a modern tragedy, theplaywright stresses his intention for writing something of significant cognitive value:‘Above all, in the structural sense, I aimed to make a play with the veritable counten-ance of life . . . I set out not to ‘write a tragedy’ in this play, but to show the truth as Isaw it.’32

On the other hand, many critics and philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have recog-nized that there also seems to be a unique kind of pleasure taken in the experience of tragicdrama. Schopenhauer captures this special kind of painful-yet-pleasurable experience byutilizing his theory of the sublime, which ties tragic pleasure to a certain kind of pridein our sense of moral power as subjects to behold terrible truths about the world and torespond to these in a non-egoistic manner.

Further, Schopenhauer captures a sense in which many of us find tragedy to be anethically important genre, ethical in the broad sense of treating how we ought to live. Asopposed to, say, romantic comedies, many of us feel that we ought morally speaking toengage with tragedy. Some of the most renowned writers and critics of tragic drama havearticulated this ethical importance in various ways. Again, Arthur Miller writes: ‘I believefor myself, that the lasting appeal of tragedy is due to our need to face the fact of death inorder to strengthen ourselves for life.’33 And George Bernard Shaw attests to the ethical

31 Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’, in George Brandt (ed.), Modern Theories of Drama (Clarendon

Press: Oxford, 1989), 118.

32 Arthur Miller, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller , ed. Robert A. Martin and Steve Centola (New York: Da Capo Press,

1996), 143–144.

33 Ibid ., 146.




importance of some tragedies while commenting upon one of his favorite French tragicdramatists:

You do not go away from a Brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or theproblem solved for you by the dramatist. Still less do you go away in ‘that happy, easy,

ironically indulgent frame of mind that is the true test of comedy,’ as Mr Walkley putit in the Times of the 1st of October 1909. You come away with a very disquietingsense that you are involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it for yourself andeverybody else if civilization is to be tolerable to your sense of honour.34

In summary, Schopenhauer’s complex solution to the source problem is that the pleasureof engaging with tragedy is the highest degree of the feeling of the dynamically sublime.The source of the pleasure in such a sublime experience derives from a feeling of exaltedpride in one’s power to detach oneself from personal fear, to behold a terrible truth aboutthe world as a knower rather than as an anxious sufferer, and to respond to this truth

by willing in a manner different from ordinary egoism. Schopenhauer’s solution to the

rationality problem is two pronged: he stresses the value of knowledge and the value of thisethically infused sublime pleasure. His solution does account for three commonly heldphenomenological elements of tragedy: (i) the painful-yet-pleasurable aspects of theexperience and its uneasiness in contrast to experiences of beautiful artworks—utilizinghis theory of the sublime helps him capture the ambivalence of tragic pleasure, an aspectoften lost in conversion and enjoyment-of-intense-emotional-state solutions; (ii) thefeeling that a spectator is both humbled and elevated by engaging with tragic drama; (iii)the sense of the ethical importance of tragic drama.

Thus, Schopenhauer’s approach to the problems of tragedy combine aspects of hedonic-compensatory and ‘value of knowledge’ solutions, to offer an explanation of what makesthe experience of tragedy cognitively rich, sublimely pleasurable, and ethically salient.

One facet of the pleasure involved in tragedy that is inadequately treated inSchopenhauer’s theory are what might be called the ‘connoisseurial’ pleasures—that is,pleasures taken in both the artistry of the text and the performance. Like many nineteenth-century writers on drama, Schopenhauer paid little attention to the performance-basedfeatures of tragedy, and even with respect to the text, he writes only cursorily of the‘difficulty of the achievement’ (WWR, I, §51, 252). His account can consistently and oughtto be supplemented to take into consideration this source of pleasure in tragedy, thusmaking an already multifaceted solution more complex.

In contrast to more univocal solutions, Schopenhauer proffers a multifaceted approachto the problems of tragedy that recognizes that our engagement with tragedy is not so

much paradoxical as it is a cognitively rich oscillation between feelings of humility andpride. In so far as we gain deep insight into the hellish side of the world, in a manner inwhich, as subjects, we feel not crushed but rather, conscious of our attitudinal power, it

34 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Against the Well-Made Play’, in Brandt (ed.), Modern Theories of Drama, 101.




makes good sense why many of us do cognitively value and even enjoy the disturbingexperience of tragic drama. The desire to streamline the solution to the problem of tragedyis natural to philosophers, but to do justice to the genre, the philosophical account shouldalso be complex.35

Sandra ShapshayIndiana [email protected]

35 I would like to thank Gary Ebbs, Lydia Goehr, Steven Wagschal, and two anonymous referees for the BJA for helpful

comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks are due to Alex Neill in conversation with whom the ideas in this paper

developed considerably.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

schopenhauer and tragedy

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