Nathan Louis Strebel
University of Zurich
Most people can relate to the rather interesting phenomena of craving emotional experiences through consumption of art that they would otherwise try to avoid in real life. This paradoxical motivation has been termed the “paradox of painful art” in philosophical literature since Aaron Smuts’ paper of the same name in 2007. Smuts examines any artistic pursuit aimed at evoking prima facie painful emotions in the viewer, such as disgust, anger, sadness, pity and fear, with horror movies being the most prominent example.
To resolve this paradoxical nature of human motivation, Smuts presents The Rich Experience Theory. However, while Smuts’ argumentation that a desire for rich experiences explains our pursuit of painful art represents a persuasive general account, it lacks specific epistemic insight into the matter. Thus, I propose a new theory to delve more deeply into the psychology behind craving painful art experiences – the Psychedelic Theory, based on Schopenhauer’s worldview and Carl Jung’s understanding of the human psyche.
With Schopenhauer’s philosophy, I argue that the world is inherently a place of suffering, and in order to develop any meaningful metaphysical arguments, this fact must be acknowledged. Second, I briefly examine Jung’s conceptualization of the soul as a compensatory motivational system, meaning that individuals unconsciously crave what they devalue in their consciousness. Building on these premises, I argue that painful art can be seen as an epistemological bridge between the world of suffering and our unconscious desires. The motivational component underlying this desire is argued to be the craving for authentic representations of the world, further enhanced by a desire for truthful revelations of our own psyche. The argument can be summarized as follows:
1. Suffering in the world is omnipresent.
2. Art is a representation of the world.
3. One strives for realness, in life as in art.
4. Accordingly, one also wants to see the world represented as suffering.
5. This desire is reinforced by a conscious devaluation of upsetting experiences and the accompanying unconscious growth of a compensatory desire.
6. Painful art reveals to us this unconscious desire of the soul, resulting in the most enriching experience of realness: the experience of a truth about ourselves.
Chair: Maciej Jarzębski
Time: September 8th, 15:20-15:50
Location: SR 1.005
SOPhiA 2026 