On the Cause of the Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects (1792)

Zelle offers a concise analysis of Schiller’s essay On the Cause of the Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects (1792). Zelle emphasises that the essay takes up an aesthetic trend in the second half of the eighteenth century. Schiller answers the question of the reason for tragic pleasure with the help of the late Enlightenment theory of mixed sensations, which is reformulated in the articulation medium of Kant's freshly received Critique of Judgment (1790), namely the Analysis of the Sublime contained therein. In doing so, Schiller relates the aesthetic emotional ambivalence that pleasure is aroused by displeasure to the anthropology of the human being’s dual nature, which is a mixture of sensuality and morality.