> Many explanations have been given, among them explanations in terms of the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis, according to which it is beneficial for humans to purge their negative emotions by experiencing art.
I'd change the last sentence to:
> [...] purge their negative emotions by experiencing them.
Negative emotions are easy to repress: we don't want to show weakness, in what's an everyday rats' race. How many times did you have to put up a happy mask when entering the office, coworker asking you, "how are you", like on auto-pilot you put up a smile and respond "good, and how are you?" while dying a little bit inside. You're wasting your life on a 9-5 job you hate, your best friend's old cat died, your ex posted a vacation picture with their new partner, you're in conflict again with a person you love, and you're a shoulder-to-cry-on short. You go home to the safety of your noise-cancelling headphones and you put on some Anathema to force the tears out.
No wonder that many people find social interactions to be draining.
I am perfectly okay with putting on the usual polite/fake persona when I'm in a good headspace. When I'm not though I just want to avoid those interactions as much as I can.
"What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?"
"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."
Interesting thread! As a serious listener of music and someone who gets deeply affected by it, this is 100% true for me. Almost all my favorite music is sad. I had never thought of catharsis as a possible reason. I thought it was the music itself, not the lyrics or underlying pathos.
I grew up in India. There's a Hindi saying about Bollywood film music, a rich tradition going back 75+ years: "One sad song is worth a hundred happy songs." From my experience, absolutely true.
In fact, we usually believe that only sentient beings can express emotions. Given that works of music are not sentient, emotions cannot be expressed in them. However, many scholars have recently begun to show renewed interest in organicist cosmology, in which objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence
That's a fantastical explanation for humans just fetishizing stimuli as being real (map vs. territory). Which is a close enough approximation for most practical purposes.
> Many explanations have been given, among them explanations in terms of the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis, according to which it is beneficial for humans to purge their negative emotions by experiencing art.
I'd change the last sentence to:
> [...] purge their negative emotions by experiencing them.
Negative emotions are easy to repress: we don't want to show weakness, in what's an everyday rats' race. How many times did you have to put up a happy mask when entering the office, coworker asking you, "how are you", like on auto-pilot you put up a smile and respond "good, and how are you?" while dying a little bit inside. You're wasting your life on a 9-5 job you hate, your best friend's old cat died, your ex posted a vacation picture with their new partner, you're in conflict again with a person you love, and you're a shoulder-to-cry-on short. You go home to the safety of your noise-cancelling headphones and you put on some Anathema to force the tears out.
(inb4 depressed rollcat, don't worry, I'm actually OK.)