Suffering Art Gladly is concerned with the ostensibly paradoxical
phenomenon of negative emotions involved in the experience of art:
how can we explain the pleasure felt or satisfaction taken in such
experience when it is the vehicle of negative emotions, that is,
ones that seem to be unpleasant or undesirable, and that one
normally tries to avoid experiencing? The question is as old as
philosophical reflection on the arts, beginning with Plato and
Aristotle, and subsequently addressed by Hume, Burke, Diderot,
Kant, and Schopenhauer, among others. Moreover, it is still an
important and unresolved question in contemporary philosophy of
art, where the discussion has been notably enlivened by recent
research on the nature of imagination, cognition, and the emotions.
Suffering Art Gladly comprises essays of two kinds, though the
division between them is not airtight. The first kind are essays
with a primarily historical focus, examining the problem of
negative emotion from art as treated by important figures in the
history of aesthetic thought, including Aristotle, Hume, Diderot,
Kant, and Schopenhauer. The second kind are essays with a primarily
contemporary focus, in which the methods and tools of contemporary
analytic philosophy are much in evidence. In addition to the
thirteen essays forming the heart of the book there is a general
introduction by the editor, motivating the basic problem with which
the essays are variously concerned and identifying the
presuppositions or assumptions that are involved in different
solutions to the problem. The individual essays are wide-ranging,
dealing with a variety of artforms, negative emotions, and specific
works of art, and the contributors, all recognized scholars in the
field of aesthetics, are a mixture of junior and senior figures
representing seven nationalities.
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