enjoying tragedy doesn’t involve bringing about horrible events, we can
set about doing what we always do, namely enjoying watching them
unfold. Note, then, that to deny 1 we do not need to claim that we like
making each other suffer, nor that we like watching our friends and
relatives suffer. All Burke claims is that, given the suffering of others, we
often seem to like watching: and that is all that theatre requires.
Although Burke avoids one problem (the unintuitive claim that we
actively try to hurt each other), he is still left with another. For as a
description of the psychology of tragedy, this looks unintuitive (at least
for some tragedies, in which we take a certain pleasure). We don’t crane
our necks to watch the characters meet their sticky ends: often the deaths
do cause us some discomfort and we do find ourselves experiencing
negative emotions such as sorrow, pity and so on. It’s not clear where
Burkefinds space in his discussion to admit that some of the emotions
that we feel in response to tragedy might really be unpleasant.
According to the weaker version, though, I feel some sorrow at watching
Hamlet meet his end; but I also take pleasure in his suffering, perhaps for
other reasons. Hobbes, for example, writes:
As there is novelty and remembrance of own security present, which is
delight, so there is also pity, which is grief. But the delight is so far pre-
dominant, that men usually are content in such a case to be spectators of the
misery of their friends.^28Note that Hobbes isn’t denying the significance of feelings of pity and
sorrow, nor that the experience of such feelings is negative. It’s just that
pleasure from the fact of our own security trumps whatever pity we feel,
and thus enables us, on balance, to enjoy the sufferings of others,
including those of our friends.^29 Thus he is not faced with the same
problem as Burke, for he does not deny that we feel a genuine grief at the
sufferings of others.
One problem for Hobbes is that he seems to assume a psychology,
according to which we normally forget about our security and are
reminded of it by being shown the misfortunes of others. But there is no
obvious reason why (at least for some people) it shouldn’t work exactly
the other way around. Why assume that my reaction would be one of
relief at being reminded that some misfortune is not happening to me
right now, as opposed to terror at being reminded that it might? Perhaps
Hobbes (or the defender of a solution arising from his remarks) would
claim that we take more pleasure, the more certain we are that the mis-
fortunes depicted couldn’t harm us. Certainly, his examples from the
same section–following Lucretius, the pleasure of watching from land as
a ship is tossed in a storm–suggest that we take pleasure in threats to
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