Mirrors of the Soul: Art, Tragedy, and Self-Understanding

This paper lays out and resolves what I call the paradox of tragedy during tough times: we sometimes pursue sad artworks more when we are sad from life events. Why? In contrast to hedonic based solutions, I argue that our motivations during such times are epistemic. When a tragic life event happens, there is a lot of processing that occurs. We want to make sense of all the events culminating in, say a breakup, to help us answer the questions we have, determine how we feel, and form evaluations. Part of this process is coming to a narrative understanding of the chain of events in one’s life. After describing the complexity of this task, I argue art can help us attain a narrative understanding because it can be utilized as what Elisabeth Camp calls “frames”1, representational vehicles which express open-ended, intuitive, ways of thinking about things. Using art as a frame for our lives helps us make sense of life’s tough moments in two manners. First, art can help us recognize, and shape, how we feel about a significant life event. Second, art can make the task of structuring life events narratively less complex by bringing important aspects to prominence and bracketing other details.