The Research Of The Problem Of Emotions In Tragedy Appreciation

As early as two thousand years ago,the philosophers of ancient Greece paid attention to the question of emotion in appreciation of tragedy.Why do people like to watch a tragedy?People obtained aesthetic pleasure in the process of appreciating the tragedy,although what they see always was tragic plot and bloody scene.How did it happen?Western thinkers have answered these questions.These answers are both good and bad.Firstly,we need to review the views of the former.Then we will take the nature of tragedy as our starting point to rethink these questions and try our best to answer the questions of the source,production mechanism and authenticity of the tragic pleasure.In Aristotle's view,through appreciating the tragedy,the audience's negative emotions could be cleansed.However,appreciating the tragedy is fundamentally different from treating an illness.As an art form,tragedy appreciation without any practical purpose is a kind of aesthetic activity.In Castelvetro's view,pleasure in the process of appreciating tragedy derived from moral cognition.People's understanding of tragedy plot yielded to pleasure.Nevertheless,pleasure derived from moral cognition is not aesthetic pleasure,as like as an apple to an oyster.In Edmund burke's view,when we watch a tragedy,we feel fear of the suffering of the protagonist.We feel sympathy for them.Cheerful emotion is derived from the compassion.However,when someone is in pain,how can we feel pleasure?Zhu Guangqian's theory is based on previous theory.He stressed that tragedy provided opportunity to vent and express their negative emotions.What he is concerned about is not the tragedy itself.In order to make it clear that emotion in appreciation of tragedy,we need to go back to the question of essence of tragedy.We hold the opinion that quintessence of tragedy is rooted in image.Perception of image brought aesthetic pleasure.It seems to Schopenhauer that tragedy art breaks the limit of "will to life" and gets rid of the law of sufficient reason.It seems to Giovanni Battista Vico that people's love for the image is in people's blood.As a kind of imitation art,tragedy art created a lot of images people never thought of.Appreciating tragedy constantly remains to be ideal way to obtain pleasure.We hold the opinion that emotion triggered by appreciating the tragedy must be true,although the plot of the tragedy is imaginary.Primary cause as follows:firstly,emotions triggered by appreciating the tragedy belong to human emotion;secondly,there is no different between production mechanism of emotion in appreciating the tragedy and other human emotion.In a nutshell,emotion in appreciating the tragedy is as true as emotion of daily life.We agree with Kendall Walton's theory of"make-believe",because this phenomenon is widespread in real life.We can take no risk to enjoy please lack in real life.However,we can't agree with his opinion that the emotion of the audience is just a similar emotion.There is no doubt that the emotions in art appreciation are real.Carroll thought that undetermined "thinking" makes us feel real with the help of imagination.However,he didn't explain the problem of production mechanism of the tragic pleasure.Peng Feng made use of the theory of psychosomatic relations to explain it.Nevertheless,he tended to think the emotion of the audience is not real.This is what we are firmly against.In addition,the theory of conversion from painful feeling to pleasure is untenable and it must be rejected.Painful feeling and pleasure are instantaneous in appreciating the tragedy.When we see frightening image,our body mistakenly assume that is a real threat.So we will feel fear,but fear does not turn into pleasure.Pleasures in tragedy appreciation are derived from the perception of the image.We think aesthetic pleasure in tragedy appreciation is far greater than the pain,or we experience from the tragedy aesthetic pleasure over pain.