Criticism and study of Adam Smith's view on the issue of tragic pleasure and its comparison with the views of Hume and Burke

Document Type : علمی - پژوهشی

Author
Davoud Mirzaei
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy of Art, Faculty of Art and Architecture, Bu-Ali Sina University, Hamedan, Iran
10.48308/kj.2026.242849.1391
Abstract
This article has sought to explore the views of Adam Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, on the aforementioned issue, known as "tragic pleasure" or the "paradox of tragedy." In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith locates the solution to this problem neither in egoistic theories such as Thomas Hobbes's view (which attributes pleasure to the awareness of one's own safety) nor merely in David Hume's formalist theory based on eloquent and refined expression, but rather in the concept of "sympathy." For him, sympathy is not an automatic reaction but a process grounded in the faculty of imagination and moral judgment. Through the imagination, the spectator places themselves in the situation of the character, and the primary pleasure arises not from the suffering itself, but from the "harmony of sentiments" and the "approval" of the character's appropriate emotions in that situation. Consequently, this theory, by emphasizing the inseparable connection between aesthetics and ethics, appears to transform sympathy into a means for cultivating virtue and benevolence, thus presenting a more comprehensive and ethical solution to the paradox of tragedy compared to other proposed solutions. Since his solution differs, on the one hand, from that of David Hume and resembles, on the other, that of Edmund Burke, comparing it with the ideas of these two thinkers and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of his viewpoint in contrast to theirs has constituted the conclusion of the present study. The method of this research has been descriptive-analytical, based on library data.
Keywords
Tragic Pleasure
Sympathy
Adam Smith
David Hume
Edmund Burke
Subjects
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  • Receive Date 09 December 2025
  • Revise Date 04 January 2026
  • Accept Date 24 June 2026