Art and painful emotion

Strohl, Matthew S.

doi:10.1111/phc3.12558

Cited by 16 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…See Prinz (2014: 586;588). 32 For discussion see Levinson, J (2011); Smuts, A (2009;and Strohl, M (2019). For a recent collection featuring several essays on this theme see Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotion in Art, ed.…”

Section: Parallels With the Paradox Of Painful Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain

Murphy

2024

British Journal of Aesthetics

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Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain, all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art—namely that if one is going to do so, one must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point, I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (although not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain.

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Section: Parallels With the Paradox Of Painful Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain

Murphy

2024

British Journal of Aesthetics

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“…22 For an overview of this puzzle and responses to it, see Levinson (2006Levinson ( , 2014, Smuts (2009), andStrohl (2019). Among philosophers who take the paradox of tragedy at face value, some, Hume (1757) among them, take the view that our negative emotions are transformed (for Hume, our passions are transformed by prevailing sentiments-including the sentiment of beauty-resulting in "one uniform and strong enjoyment" (1757, 192)); others take the view that negative emotions are the cost of achieving insight into artistic and experiential truths (see, for example, Goodman, 1968 andPacker, 1989); others still take the view that they are a necessary part of a valued whole (see Morreal, 1985, Levinson, 1982, and Eaton, 1982.…”

Section: Orcidmentioning

confidence: 99%

On grief's sweet sorrow

Atkins

2021

European J of Philosophy

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This paper draws attention to a neglected aspect of grief: its "sweet" sorrow. This sorrow presents us with a formidable challenge, namely, to explain how what is bitter-the misery of loss-can be found to be sweet. Those drawn into this sorrow suspect that it is somehow too sweet. Are their suspicions well founded? Why is it and it alone sweet to those who delight in it and why is it not just sweet but companion-like and even dear? Guided by the observations of St. Augustine and C. S. Lewis, I propose that this sorrow is a form of self-pity that displaces the significant other from the center of one's concern and affords an enhanced intimacy with oneself. The proposal vindicates the impression that one finds in this sorrow a companion that can take the place of the significant other and also positions us to address one of the most fundamental questions that might be raised in connection with grief, namely, whether the one who has died is a proper object of concern or whether our grief is ultimately for ourselves, for a loss that is ours and ours alone. | INTRODUCTIONGrief is sometimes classified as a sorrow, one felt in response to the death of a significant person. This sorrow is not simple or uniform in character, however, but multifaceted. There is, for example, the fresh sorrow of grief, 1 the sorrow that surfaces from the depths, 2 the sorrow that we do not recognize as our own, 3 the sorrow that leads us to search for the dead, 4 and the sorrow that leads us to stop searching. 5 Some of these sorrows have been catalogued.They have received names like "anguish" and "despair," recalling those that have traditionally had claim to philosophical attention, adding to the impression that the sorrow of grief is, invariably, difficult to bear. But the sorrow of grief is not always without charm. Perhaps the most neglected sorrow of grief is sweet.One of the few discussions of grief's sweet sorrow appears within the philosophical tradition, in the Confessions of St. Augustine. In Book IV of this work, Augustine recalls his grief after the death of a close friend. "[W]hatever I

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“…Some paradigmatic aesthetic goods—some artworks in particular—owe their aesthetic value to features that make them unsettling, jarring, emotionally taxing, or even painful to experience. There are various ways of coming to grips with this datum (see Strohl, , for an overview of research on the phenomenon), but one common strategy involves broadening the class of experiences that can ground aesthetic value to include some experiences that lack any positive hedonic tone, or even ones with decidedly negative felt quality. This move to evade the problem of painful art is among the main reasons why some contemporary aesthetic hedonists style their theories as value empiricism or experientialism instead of hedonism.…”

Section: Fault Lines In the Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

Berg

2019

Philosophy Compass

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This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives.

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Art and painful emotion

Cited by 16 publications

References 30 publications

Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain

Why Delight in Screamed Vocals? Emotional Hardcore and the Case Against Beautifying Pain

On grief's sweet sorrow

Aesthetic hedonism and its critics

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