Is it possible that the ideal of perfection is flawed from the root and contradicts human nature? We experience happiness, beauty and pleasure in a more complex way than theories of salvation and utopia often suggest. Pleasure and pain are not the opposites they might appear to be. Physical pain is often associated with sexual or spiritual pleasure. Fear, pity and sorrow are tantalising emotions, they make us feel alive, healthy, fortunate.
If the expectation of happiness leads to disappointment, then is the existence of terror a source of comfort? The paradox of beauty through horror has been defined in Aristotle’s Poetics, though the accounts of the cathartic power of the tragedy and our “delight in contemplating the most exact likenesses of things that are in themselves painful to see.” Perhaps abolishing disease does not mean an end to suffering, as pain - or the fear of it - is something we need as humans?
Kant calls the sublime a “negative pleasure”, attributing to it a redemptive insight; the realisation of human freedom from natural law. (Matthew Kieran, Contemporary debates in aesthetics and the philosophy of art). Perhaps the pain of illness is simply too real to evoke beauty or pleasure, as it represents the exact opposite: human’s complete submission to the natural law.
These theories of beauty or pleasure derived from terror are relevant within the context of art. Art is the filter through which we can enjoy these negative emotions safely. However, if pure science can be seen as an art form, it most definitely one excelling in fusing both beauty and terror.
Post a Comment