Schillers Theorien des ›tragischen Vergnügens‹ in »Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen« und »Über die tragische Kunst«
AbstractIn his »Über den Grund des Vergnügens an tragischen Gegenständen« and in »Über die tragische Kunst«, Schiller offers two different explanations of ›tragic pleasure‹, thereby addressing two different explanatory targets. In the first of these writings, Schiller identifies positive aspects in the tragic content that serve as objects of corresponding positive emotions; in the second, he argues that certain aspects of watching tragedy are intrinsically pleasurable. Hence, Schiller’s two writings on tragic pleasure involve two different conceptions of ›pleasure‹: on the one hand, he holds that pleasure is an emotion directed towards a suitably qualified object; on the other hand, he describes ›pleasure‹ as the felt quality (›hedonic tone‹) of a broader range of mental attitudes or states. This article offers a systematic reconstruction of Schiller’s theses that includes showing that the reconstructed theses have been historically available; and it also hints at how Schiller’s theses might be evaluated.