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.In the experience of many audiencemembers, many artworks do evoke unpleasant emotions.(Though it must be saidthat the experience of Othello and the death of Desdemona is less harrowing thanthe experience of a real murder.) Compensatory solutions to the puzzle face nosimilar general objection.My proposal is that, when audiences choose toexperience works which they know cause unpleasant emotions, they can becompensated with knowledge.The value of the knowledge gained can outweighthe disadvantages of the unpleasant emotions.If so, nothing is puzzling about thewillingness of sensible people to view tragedies when they know unpleasantemotions will result.We already know that explorers and scientists will undergo110 ART AS INQUIRYconsiderable hardship for the sake of knowledge.Audiences in search ofknowledge might do so as well.In some cases, the painful emotions that accompany the experience of art aresimply an undesirable epiphenomenon.In other cases, the knowledge we gainfrom a tragedy is intimately connected with the unpleasant experiences it evokes.This will be the case when the knowledge gained is knowledge of the evokedemotion.Sometimes we will have no convenient way to acquire some knowledgeother than by experiencing works of art that evoke unpleasant emotions.If so,audience members would be wise to gain knowledge of unpleasant emotions byhaving them aroused by works of art rather than by placing themselves inunpleasant situations in ordinary life.For a start, as already noted, the experiencewill not be as unpleasant as it is when the similar emotions are evoked in thecourse of real life.As well, when emotions are experienced in an artistic context,audiences can focus on understanding the emotions.When faced with realtragedy, it will generally be the case that people are too overwhelmed to learnmuch.In general, audiences can reasonably expect to be compensatedwith insights when they willingly incur unpleasant emotions by experiencingworks of art.Turn now to the other feature of the experience of art which is in need ofexplanation.Some works of art are experienced as profound.King Lear, Bach sSt Matthew Passion and Beethoven s late string quartets are examples of suchworks.The Importance of Being Earnest, on the other hand, is not experienced asprofound.(Wilde s plays are profoundly amusing, but we are not concerned withthe adjectival sense of profound.Rather, we are concerned with a propertyartworks can possess.) I suggest that artworks can be profound only because theycan have cognitive value.Not every artwork with cognitive value is profound, butonly works with cognitive value can have this property.Before I can defend thisclaim, however, something must be said about the property of profundity.Two sorts of profundity can be identified.The first sort of profundity ispossessed by important matters.So, for example, love, death, human fulfilment,redemption, weakness of will, and self-sacrifice are often characterised asprofound matters.Notice that a profound matter is not simply an importantmatter.Profound matters are important, but not all important matters areprofound.Healthful exercise, for example, is important, but the need for healthfulexercise is not a profound matter.As the term profound is generally used, aprofound matter is one that touches on essential aspects of the human condition.It has a moral or metaphysical component.The second sort of profundity ispossessed by works (not just artworks) which are about profound matters.So, forexample, works which take as their subjects love, death, human fulfilment and soon are potentially profound.Notice that the mere fact that a work is about a111 ART AND KNOWLEDGEprofound subject matter does not make it profound.Another condition, still to beidentified, must also be met.Given that profound works of art are about profound subjects, certainconceptions of art have difficulty explaining the profundity of art.Consider, forexample, the view that artworks are not about anything and, consequently, notrepresentational.On this view, the profundity of artworks is difficult to explain.The problem is particularly pressing for musical formalists.The musical formalistis a clear case of someone who believes that something can be an artwork, yet notabout anything and a representation of nothing
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