Reflections on aesthetic for aesthetic's sake are, for all intents and purposes, rather useless. Pondering beauty can not bring any results which have real-world applications, or at least one would assume so. But still, so much is done merely for enjoyment and no other scope, why should this be any exception? If for no other reason, let us reflect upon aesthetic just to flex our brains a bit and enjoy doing so.
A common question regarding the arts is how is it that people enjoy tragedies when the point of such works is to exhibit negative emotions? So many works in so many art-forms across all genres - from fiction to fantasy - are focused entirely on the pains and woes of good people. From sad songs to tragic plays to gritty movies to moving books, how do negative emotions give rise to pleasure?
This conundrum, however, is founded on an important mistake made from the get-go. We assume that emotions can be classified into two large groups with sadness, grief, anger, disappointment and all the "negative ones" on one side and all the "positive ones" - surprise, joy, relief, excitement and so on- on the other. We then ask how is it that elements on the negative side can give us a positive effect. But we only put these things on the negative side because we thought they would give rise to a negative effect, and likewise for the positive side. If we are questioning the very criterion with which we have formed our two large groups, evidently our method of organization was incorrect - for what was meant to be negative is acting as if it were positive!
I propose, therefore, that "positive" and "negative" are not inherent traits in an emotion, but rather an emotion gets its traits from the context in which it is put. At once this seems foreign to us. Can we contemplate a "sadness" without the negative aspect built-in? Well, we can agree that sadness and disappointment are both negative emotions and still tell them apart, so there must be some other defining features to an emotion other than its polarity- it's emotional "shape" which we intuitively recognise, despite the fact that there exists no established word in the English vocabulary to describe such a concept (at least not yet). And so I propose that we do not recognize emotions from one another by their polarity but by their shape.
Why then, do emotions appear outside the traditional positive/negative framework only in the arts? This question is entirely misleading. Very often we experience "good sadness" outside the arts, such as when we leave a place where we want to remain but know that leaving is so much more beneficial, or when we work ourselves to the bone and feel so depressed by the work, yet at the same time satisfied. In both cases, as in many more, we feel an emotion we would typically identify as negative, but simultaneously that feeling invokes a positive response in us, such that we know that given the choice we would do it again.
And what then of a reverse case; a traditionally positive emotion causing a negative response? Another common occurrence in everyday life, from feeling joy at another's expense, for example, or from indulging in a pleasure only to be wrecked by guilt afterwards.
From this analysis one can see how a dichotomy approach to organizing emotions is quite lacking. Rather than using such a cut and dry approach perhaps an approach which is based on the shapes of emotions and knowing that positive/negative responses arise from an emotion's context may be more useful- particularly in predicting how we will feel about our decisions after we have made them.
And so it seems our intellectual indulgence has had a pragmatic result after all.
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