Every year millions of people pay to watch films that make them cry, read novels about murder and play songs about heartbreak on repeat. If someone offered to make you miserable for two hours in real life, you would refuse. Why do we seek out painful feelings in art? And why do we feel anything at all for people who never existed? These two puzzles are among the oldest in aesthetics.

The paradox of tragedy

The paradox of tragedy asks why people enjoy art that makes them feel sadness, fear or pity, emotions they try to avoid everywhere else. Philosophers have offered several answers.

Aristotle's Poetics defined tragedy as the imitation of a serious action that, in S. H. Butcher's 1895 translation, works "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions." The Greek word is catharsis. Catharsis is Aristotle's idea that tragedy purges or clarifies pity and fear. Scholars still debate whether he meant a medical cleansing, a moral purification or an intellectual clarification. On any reading, the painful emotions end up doing us good.

Hume, in his 1757 essay "Of Tragedy," offered a different solution. He noticed that events which would cause real distress become pleasing when told with skill. Hume argued that the eloquence of the art converts painful feelings into pleasure: the beauty of the telling takes over the sorrow and turns its energy toward enjoyment. A clumsy report of a murder only disturbs us; a great tragedy about one moves and delights.

Modern philosophers add other answers. The compensation view holds that we accept painful feelings for the sake of other rewards, such as insight, the pleasure of a well made plot, or the sense of being understood. Others say painful emotions can themselves be rewarding in safe settings, the way a roller coaster makes fear fun. Surveys of listeners suggest that sad music often brings comfort rather than misery, which fits both views.

The paradox of fiction

A second puzzle goes deeper. In 1975 the philosopher Colin Radford asked how we can be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina when we know she never existed. Normally, emotions depend on beliefs: you pity a friend because you believe they are suffering, and if you learned the story was invented, your pity would vanish. Yet with fiction we know from the start that nothing happened, and we weep anyway. The paradox of fiction asks how we can feel real emotions toward characters we know do not exist.

Radford's own conclusion was provocative. Radford concluded that our emotional responses to fiction are natural but irrational, a kind of inconsistency built into human beings. Others have looked for a way out.

Three ways out

Kendall Walton offered the make-believe theory in 1978. When we engage with fiction, he argued, we play a game of pretend in which the story serves as a prop. Walton called our feelings toward fiction quasi-emotions, felt while playing a game of make-believe. His example: Charles watches a horror film about a creeping slime, shakes and grips his chair, but does not flee the theater or call the police. Walton says Charles fears the slime only in make-believe. Critics reply that Charles's pounding heart seems real enough.

The thought theory takes a different route. The thought theory holds that emotions do not require belief: vividly imagining something is enough to move us. You can shudder at the thought of falling off a cliff while standing safely on solid ground. On this view, fiction simply supplies vivid thoughts. Philosophers including Peter Lamarque and Noël Carroll have defended versions of it.

A third reply says our emotions are really aimed at real things: we pity people like Anna, or fear what such a monster would mean if it existed. Critics answer that this misdescribes the experience, since we weep for Anna herself, not for women in general.

Why it matters

Whatever the solution, the fact that we can feel for invented people has moral weight. The historian Lynn Hunt has argued that eighteenth century novels, by inviting readers to identify with characters of other classes and of the other sex, helped spread the sense of shared humanity behind early declarations of rights. Her claim is debated, and evidence that reading fiction makes people kinder is mixed, but it suggests why stories have been both treasured and feared.

Worked example: tears at the station

Near the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Anna throws herself under a train. A reader finishes the chapter in tears, then feels a little foolish. Apply the theories. Radford would say the tears are understandable but irrational. Walton would say she is playing a game in which it is fictional that Anna dies, so her grief is make-believe grief, though the tears on her cheeks are real. The thought theory says that vividly imagining Anna's despair is enough to sadden anyone. As for why she will gladly read the novel again, Aristotle points to catharsis, Hume to the power of Tolstoy's telling, and the compensation view to what she learned about jealousy, love and the cruelty of polite society. Each answer explains part of the experience; you can test them against your own.