Journal of Scottish Philosophy Forum 7.2

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Kames's Naturalist Aesthetics and the Case of Tragedy

Rachel Zuckert

Northwestern University

In this essay, I discuss Kames' aesthetic theory, as presented in his essay, ‘Our Attachment to Objects of Distress’ (concerning the problem of tragedy), and in Elements of Criticism. I argue that Kames' (non-)response to the problem of tragedy–that we find tragedies painful (not pleasing), yet are ‘attracted to them through the workings of the “blind instinct” of sympathy’–is intended to call the standard formulation of the problem of tragedy (‘why do we find such painful things pleasing?’) into question. This standard formulation, on Kames' view, mistakenly assumes that we cannot be attracted to anything but pleasure, whereas tragedy (among other phenomena) shows that human nature is considerably more complex than this. I argue, further, that Kames' treatment of tragedy exemplifies the character of his aesthetics more broadly: aesthetic values are explained by reference to general laws governing human nature (we are attracted to this sort of thing, averse to that, etc.)–or explanatory naturalism. But Kames also argues that we can, upon reflection, judge that this instinct and this exercise of it is good (as in the case of tragedy, which is, Kames argues, morally educative because it strengthens our sympathy), by contrast to other cases where instincts may not achieve their ends. Thus Kames also proposes a normative aesthetic naturalism, according to which we should educate our instinctual affective responses so that they will be appropriate to their objects and beneficial for the human goods that they are meant to promote.
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Comment on Rachel Zuckert’s “Kames’s Naturalist Aesthetics and the Case of Tragedy”

E.M. Dadlez
University of Central Oklahoma

In the course of her paper, Professor Zuckert argues, among other things, that Kames presents tragedy as moral educative insofar as it strengthens our sympathy and “educates our instinctual affective responses so that they will be appropriate to their objects” in life as well as art. It is this part of her paper – section V (155-7) on Kames’ account of tragedy – to which I will for the most part respond. This section is, for Zuckert, a step on the way toward making a more sweeping point, and so she has left room for others to develop an account Kames’ approach to the morally educative function of literature, and in particular to develop it along lines that encompass more than the role of sympathy in self-improvement and consequent self-approbation.

As Zuckert stresses, Kames observes that the kinds of emotional responses we have to tragic literature strengthen our general capacity for sympathetic response and may give rise to self-approbation on account of having, in the classic Aristotelian manner, responded in the right manner to the right objects. Tragedy arouses inherently social passions, and our concern and fellow feeling for characters is not unlike that which we feel for friends and loved ones. The exercise of moral responsiveness in one arena better prepares us for its exercise in another, “for the mind acquires strength by exercise as well as the body.” 1 Zuckert is concerned to show that any self-approbation occurring as a result of this is dependent on painful emotional engagement with the tragedy and is not an immediate feature of the art experience, since she argues that Kames dissolves or at least casts doubt on the problem of tragedy by proposing that we are attracted to painful events via the instinct of sympathy without on that account taking any kind of pleasure in them. But this depends on how broadly the term ‘pleasure’ is defined. Surely the achievement of an Aristotelian moral equilibrium (even devoid of self-congratulatory smugness) may be still regarded as a satisfaction if not an enjoyment, and on that account be counted more a pleasure than a pain. And surely such satisfactions can be experienced as an awareness of one’s responding appropriately while that response occurs, instead of falling under our reflective purview only long after the fact. I am a little less sure than Zuckert is that Kames’ account entirely dissolves the famous paradox, if the dissolution must remove all question of our taking pleasure in tragedy from consideration.

Be that as it may, Zuckert’s contentions about Kames’ position on literature as a source of moral education has even more support than she has had time to indicate in her paper. Consider Kames’ discussion of Aristotelian katharsis and its ability to “refine or purify in us all sorts of passions” 2 (EC II 653). Here “our pity is engaged for the person represented; and our terror is upon our own account” (EC II 654). This supports Zuckert’s (and my own) contention that Kames takes literature to contribute to the achievement of moral learning by inculcating a habituated response, given Kames’claim that “pity is here made to stand for all the sympathetic emotions…[which] are refined and improve by daily exercise” (EC II 654), whether that exercise involves a response to what is imagined or what is believed. It supports the further point that any satisfaction we take in tragedy may be a satisfaction in our moral responsiveness and the appropriateness of those responses.

Kames’ discussion of the fear component of Aristotle’s katharsis of pity and fear involves a somewhat different approach. The fear is not for the character but for ourselves. Many tragic reversals turn on “a wrong bias in the temper,” Kames tells us, a bias we may recognize in ourselves as a source of potential misfortune (EC II 654-5). This gives literature a different kind of role in self-correction, presumably a cautionary one that can act as a motivator to self-improvement, something which at least carries a prospect of satisfaction contingent on success.

Kames’ discussion of ideal presence offers another clear example of prospective moral and emotional habituation, as Zuckert points out (150). Ideal presence involves a kind of imaginative envisionment of a fictional (or indeed historical or remembered) situation “that supplies the want of real presence; and in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering, precisely as in an original survey” (EC I 69). Ideal presence, in short, is the imaginative entertainment of the fictional or other state of affairs of which one cannot be directly aware.3 The relevance of this to the moral impact of literature is obvious. Ideal presence is thought to account for our emotional response to fiction, much of which is morally significant. Approval and disapproval, indignation and admiration, affection and contempt all carry moral weight. I am less inclined than Zuckert, I think, to align every case of emotional response to fiction falling under the umbrella of ideal presence with sympathetic emotion. Of course Kames indicates that our sympathies (allied by Zuckert with cases of feeling for characters) are engaged, but there are many other emotions that are neither empathetic nor, as it were, character-supportive (pity, fear for, concern for, hope for) which will be aroused on account of our experience of a Kamesian ideal presence: contempt, amusement, outrage, malice, indignation, envy. We can, after all, fear a fictional outcome without necessarily fearing it on behalf of this character or that. We can disapprove of a character action or decision without resenting it on behalf of another character. We can devoutly wish that some noxious denizen of fiction meet a bad end without having this wish be a wish on behalf of one of her fictional victims. But, of course, such responses can be morally educative in the prescribed Aristotelian sense without being sympathetic. Habituated responses of disapproval toward vice don’t always require sympathy with the character who suffers on account of it. Imagine, for instance, the kind of self-indulgence and self-pity that lead a character always to place the worst construction on others’ motives in order to cast himself as a pathetic victim in all possible circumstances. A vice of this kind is ultimately more damaging to its possessor (with whom few are inclined to sympathize) than to those whose motives he misconstrues. A habituated response of contempt or disapproval upon imagining such a character certainly has a moral flavor but needn’t rely on sympathetic engagement of any kind. It is also possible, though not inevitably attractive, for us positively to enjoy contempt and moral disapproval, either on account of the sense of moral superiority it engenders, or in connection with the kind of battle-ready excitement that often accompanies such feelings. There is a potential source of pleasure here that can be taken even in the course of contemplating tragic events, though I will not venture to claim that it involves all or most cases of our response to tragedy. But all this shows is that Kames’ contentions about ideal presence offer more support for the thesis that literature is morally educative than may have been at first supposed.

One other potential candidate for pleasurable or at least positive emotional response to tragedy that has a direct bearing on its moral effects was suggested by Francis Hutcheson: we may have positive, admiring, enthusiastic responses to depictions of character virtues. This is especially true of those virtues that only seem to be observable under conditions of adversity and misfortune so typical of tragedy: courage and heroism require danger, compassion requires suffering, fortitude requires something to fortify one’s will against. 4 It is clear that we may expect many a tragedy to provide us with objects to admire and aspire to on the ground of the adversity component alone. Kames’ discussion of the sympathetic emotion of virtue is quite compatible with this proposal. When we entertain the thought of a virtuous act in imagination, says Kames, we experience not only admiration but a desire to do likewise and sometimes the very feeling that would accompany possession of the virtue in question:

A courageous action produceth in a spectator the passion of admiration directed to the author: and besides this well-known passion, a separate feeling is raised in the spectator; which may be called an emotion of courage; because, while under its influence, he is conscious of a boldness and intrepidity beyond what is usual, and longs for proper objects upon which to exert this emotion (EC I 49)…. For another example let us figure some grand and heroic action, highly agreeable to the spectator: besides veneration for the author, the spectator feels in himself an unusual dignity of character, which disposeth him to great and noble actions: and herein chiefly consists the extreme delight everyone hath in the histories of conquerors and heroes (EC I 50).

The sympathetic emotion of virtue, says Kames, bestows “on good example the utmost influence, by prompting us to imitate what we admire” (EC I 51). This is clearly the moral import of the proposal. But it also seems unlikely that the kinds of responses cataloged in the quotations above would be regarded by Kames as exclusive to histories of conquerors and heroes. As has been indicated, a great many virtues which Kames believes give rise to paroxysms of esteem and veneration, and further give rise to exciting feelings of intrepidity (or majesty, in the latter case), are just the kind depicted in tragic fiction. These are, it seems, highly pleasurable emotions and feelings, so there is one source of pleasure in tragedy that it appears Kames does (or at least would have to) acknowledge: the virtues that are in fact a kind of response to tragedy and tribulation, that depend on adversity for their existence.

I agree with Zuckert that it is false to assume that we cannot be attracted by anything but pleasure and I agree that that Kames offers an account of sympathetic attraction to suffering that opens new avenues for understanding the appeal tragedy holds for us. I also agree that the Kamesian view shows literature, both tragic and other, to promote the exercise of faculties and reactive dispositions employed in life in such a way as to develop and rehearse our specifically moral dispositions. I’m just not certain that any of this dissolves potential candidates for tragic pleasure, even within a Kamesian scheme of things.

1 Henry Home, Lord Kames, “Our Attachment to Objects of Distress,” in "Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion,” 3rd ed., (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Essay i. (Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, Inc.)

2 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, v.1 and II, 6th edition , Peter Jones, ed., (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), henceforth EC.

3 There is considerable disagreement about the extent to which we take this state to mimic actual perception – the extent to which we take ourselves to be imagining how things look and sound. I have always taken it that ideal presence signifies more than imagining sensa. But that is irrelevant to the present discussion.

4 Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), ii, 6.7, pp. 240-1.

Response to Prof. E. M. Dadlez

I am grateful to Professor Dadlez for her rich comments, particularly for her expansion upon my somewhat sketchy presentation of Kames’ view that we are morally educated through our emotional responses to literature. Dadlez is right to note that in fact we have emotional responses to literary events and actions that are not sympathetic in character, whether because they are (imaginatively) identificatory or emulative – I feel uplifted by a character’s virtue, as if I myself were or could be thus virtuous – or more broadly because they are (as Dadlez puts it) not “character-supportive (pity, fear for, concern for, hope for)”: we can fear a bad outcome, disapprove of an action, feel contempt for a character, without doing so “on behalf of” (or as identifying with) any particular character. As Dadlez also notes, Kames himself provides analyses of such non-sympathetic emotional responses -- in his characterization of the “sympathetic emotion of virtue,” for example – and her evocation of the “battle-ready excitement” we might feel along with our contempt for morally bad agents is surely quite in the spirit of Kames’ claim that we have a natural sense of justice, a natural desire to see the bad punished and the good rewarded. Thus Dadlez’s discussion brings out – as I was not able to do -- the rich resources available in Kames’ aesthetics for the description and analysis of the multiplicity of emotional responses (and types thereof) we have to works of art.

This multiplicity of types of emotional responses – multiple in structure (sympathetic, identificatory, spectatorial), and in content (sympathy, uplift, contempt) – does, moreover, lead to complications for the broader account of Kames’ aesthetic theory that I attempted to sketch in my paper. Presumably these different emotional responses have different sources in our emotional make-up (beyond the natural impulse to sympathize that I discussed) and it would require further investigation than I gave, or than I could give here, to establish whether they have (on Kames’ account or in fact) their own sources in natural impulses and drives, which these are, and why it is plausible to count them as natural impulses. Such further investigation of Kames’ aesthetic naturalism, following up on Dadlez’s excellent suggestions, would be quite fruitful both for an understanding of Kames, and for an understanding of the resources and possible limitations of naturalist aesthetics.

I am not sure, however, that these further types of emotional responses complicate my account of Kames’ response to the problem of tragedy, as Dadlez suggests. Though Kames himself does not say so explicitly, it is quite possible that on his view, as Dadlez contends, one ought to analyze spectators’ responses to a particular tragedy or tragedies as comprising many of these different emotional responses (not just the sympathetic response that I emphasize), and thus too that the spectator might indeed feel some pleasure(s) of the kinds she suggests in response to those tragedies. (I continue to be, however, somewhat dubious that immediate, spectatorial response to tragedy often includes moral self-satisfaction, even of one’s “achievement of an Aristotlelian moral equilibrium” in Dadlez’s terms: as I suggested in my paper, this seems to me distant from the dominant emotional tone of the engaged, immediate response to tragedy in particular, though it may be prevalent in responses to other genres, such as war films or television cop shows or mystery novels, etc., i.e., genres in which, crudely put, one’s dominant emotional orientation might be taking a “side” in a battle between good and evil, which might plausibly include taking pleasure in one’s own [imaginative] placement of oneself on the “good” side.)

Nonetheless, even if we do (occasionally or all the time) feel such pleasures in response to tragedy, and Kames ought to say so, it seems to me that Kames’ account still suggests that tragedy is no special, specially puzzling case. That is, Kames attempts (on my reading) to undermine the two concerns that might prompt one to see spectatorial attraction to tragedies as particularly problematic: the explanatory concern -- how can one take pleasure in something painful or in feeling pain? -- and the moral concern that so exercised many of his contemporaries – if human beings take pleasure in witnessing others’ suffering (even that of imaginary or fictional others), does this mean that we are naturally bad or cruel? Kames argues that these two concerns are not in fact pressing ones: we are naturally attracted to (some kinds of) painful experiences, and our attraction (in the case of tragedy) is prompted by the morally approvable natural tendency to sympathize. Hence the importance of sympathy in particular for Kames’ account of tragedy: it explains and normatively justifies the most prima facie puzzling aspect of our response to tragedy. Hence too, I think, the fact that tragedies may be attractive, even pleasing, for many additional reasons (depending on the particular tragedy), as Dadlez suggests, does not mean that tragedies are a particular case, requiring a special analysis. Many works in literature (or in other arts) might arouse similar emotional responses, to be explained (and normatively approved, or not) in similar ways. Kames himself, as I note briefly in the paper, explicitly mentions in Elements of Criticism that we derive pleasure from the formal excellences of tragedies. But such pleasures are not, on Kames’ account (as I understand it), meant specifically to explain the attraction of, or to compensate for, some sort of problematic painfulness of tragedy, or to answer a special problem. It is Kames’ analysis of our sympathetic impulse, rather, that obviates, he argues, the pressing problems that our attraction to tragedy is thought to pose. But this dissolution of the special problem of tragedy, one might think, opens the door for further, more complex and imaginative investigations of our emotional response to tragedy (and other forms) of exactly the kind Dadlez provides.

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