Eric Studt

Collingwood argues that art is a remedy for what he calls a “corrupt consciousness.” Consciousness becomes corrupted when agents do not admit that they are starting to experience an emotion. Instead of becoming conscious of the emerging emotion, which is usually a difficult one, agents become conscious of an emotion that is easier to handle. Collingwood sees the corruption of consciousness as epistemically and morally problematic mainly because it is a form of dishonesty that infects the activity of the imagination and the intellect. While highlighting the importance of Collingwood’s notion of the corruption of consciousness, this paper argues that this notion would benefit from being situated in an explicitly top-down model of attention and emotion as opposed to the bottom-up model that Collingwood proposes. This shift preserves the central insights of Collingwood’s aesthetics – most especially his emphasis on the specificity involved in the expression of emotion – while ironing out some of the implausibility in his underlying analysis.

This paper integrates previous attempts to resolve the paradox of horror with a fresh perspective from contemporary work in affective science. I argue that previous attempts to resolve the paradox fall short of their aim while nevertheless offering valuable insights into how fear often responds to the content of horror stories. In many cases, the reason previous attempts fail is that they rely on the unpleasantness-pleasantness model of affective valence, which I show to be faulty. I claim, by contrast, that the aversion-attraction model of valence is more coherent and does a better job of explaining the functional role of valence both in narrative and in real-world contexts. Furthermore, I demonstrate that adopting the aversion-attraction model of valence resolves the paradox of pleasurable fear in response to horror stories.