Art and Pleasure

Taste and Tragedy

Tragedy explains how an audience gains pleasure from negative feelings such as despair and fear. These feelings would not normally give you pleasure but it is because of when the negative feelings stop, you are pleased that they have stopped which is what you delight in. When the mind is bored, it will look for anything that will take it out of this moment of emotionless boredom such as plays or public executions.

Storytellers use as much emotions as possible, especially negative emotions to grasp their audience as much as possible. The audience enjoys these negative emotions more when it is placed in front of them as they see them as safe emotions, they are not real and therefore cannot truly harm them.

Collingwood on Art as Amusement


Collingwood gives us his view on what pleasure is and how it is defined. Many people enjoy work or reading books but means that they take value in it and nothing more. The term pleasure needs to be defined more as something that is enjoyable, what makes it enjoyable?

Happiness and pleasure are only just synonyms and the polar opposite of pain. Both of these tendencies can be found in Utilitarianism which has had a huge impact on society, allowing these ideas to develop further.

Collingwood states that 'art as amusement' is very different to 'art proper' and the two should never be confused. He does not say that people cannot find amusment in art but simply that people who look to go to the cinema or read a book for pleasure are more than likely to read or see something much simpler rather than people who would go see an independant film or read a far more challenging book. The simpler pleasure seems to be the most common.

Mill on Higher and Lower pleasures


Under the assumption that we gain pleasure for art, we cannot all value art to the same extent. Different people have different views on what is pleasurable, for example, people may enjoy listening to Queen whilst other people may not, even more complexly someone who enjoys Queen more than others. Should we use pleasure as a measurement for how good something is as people have different opinions on different things.

David Hume: The Enlightenment

The Scottish Enlightenment was an intellectual movement that happened during the 18th Century. It covered a wide range of ideas in the areas of philosophy, chemistry, geology, architecture, poetry, engineering, technology, economics, sociology, medicine and history.

David Hume believed in hard evidence, if you could not use facts or proof then it was not true. He stood firmly against the church for that same reason, they could not provide a shred of evidence to support their claims of god or heaven and hell, and that they used these ideas to take a hold of the faithful.