Philosophy and Horror 2009

Welcome to the webpage for Philosophy 255A: The Philosophy of Horror. Here for your amusement and edification are a few quotes from important theorists of the supernatural and the horrible.

The Horror Genre and the Sublime

As H.P. Lovecraft observes in Supernatural Horror in Literature, the “weird” makes it appearance in the various arts long before the establishment of the horror genre itself in roughly the 18th Century. Lovecraft points out that one finds the “weird” in ancient tragedies and poems, in folksongs and folklore, in the various religious and mystical traditions of the world, and in towering artistic figures like Shakespeare and Cervantes. Both the aesthetic concept of the sublime and the literary genre that we have come to call “horror” are products of the 18th Century. Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), like Lovecraft, links the sublime to intense fear and suffering.

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

In The Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant countenances two forms of the sublime; the mathematically sublime and the dynamical sublime in nature. The first has to with objects of immense size that defeats our powers of apprehension, the second with the contemplation of the defeat of human products (and lives) by the forces of nature.

Religious Emotion and Terror

In The Idea of the Holy (1923), Rudolf Otto suggests a connection between horror and what he calls "the numinous." Thus, for Otto, religious emotion has an archaic connection to terror.

“It (religious dread) may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering.”

Otto on religious dread- “Its antecedent stage is ‘daemonic dread’ (the horror of Pan) with its queer perversion, a sort of abortive offshoot, the ‘dread of ghosts’. It first begins to stir in the feeling of ‘something uncanny’, ‘eerie’, or ‘weird’. It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history. “Demons” and “gods” alike spring from this root…”

Otto on the emotion of horror- “… the natural man is quite unable to ‘shudder’ or feel horror in the real sense of the word. For ‘shuddering’ is something more than ‘natural’, ordinary fear. It implies that the mysterious is already beginning to loom before the mind, to touch the feelings.”

H.P. Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature

For Lovecraft, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Lovecraft argues that our fascination with horror has its basis in physiology. The “unknown”, and the experience of dreams, condition our emotional lives in such a way that there is “an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue.” For this reason, the horror genre in some form has been remarkably resilient. On the other hand, the audience for horror is likely to remain relatively small as it will appeal mainly to those with a lively imagination and eccentric tastes.

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside…”

For Lovecraft, the appeal of the weird will continue to be felt, at least by a few, in the age of science and reason. The basic reason for this, according to Lovecraft, is that our brains are “hard-wired” to fear the “cosmic unknown.” In combination with imagination and wonderment, the feeling of cosmic fear nourishes the impulse to create and enjoy works of art treating of “weird” events and places.

“Children will always be afraid of the dark and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”