A Lust of the Mind: Curiosity and Aversion in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics

Abstract

Theories that offer hedonic analyses of aesthetic value confront a stubborn version of a traditional question: What accounts for the profound value found in art that arouses disturbing emotions, if that value comprises enjoyment or pleasure? Tragedy arouses pity and terror, as well as grief, sorrow, even despair. Other forms of art deliberately prompt disgust, indignation, anxiety, dread, and a host of other uneasy affects hard to give precise names. All of these emotions are in some way ‘negative’; psychologically speaking, they are ‘painful’. This raises the familiar puzzle: How come human beings seek out experiences that produce pain of any sort? And what kind of pain is this anyway?

Desire to know why and how, CURIOSITY, such as is in no living creature but man; so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals, in whom the appetite of food and other pleasures of the sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes, which is a lust of the mind that, by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceeds the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)