Some contributors to the debate focus on the question of how one can respond with pleasure to what tragedy depicts: Edmund Burke, for example, in his
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, took the problem to lie in the "common observation" "that objects which in the reality would shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the source of a very high species of pleasure" (1990, p. 41), and thus in effect construed the problem as one concerning the consistency of one's patterns of response. (As, in a sense, did Plato, though he took the inconsistency between our responses to depictions of suffering in tragedy and our responses to suffering "in reality" to lie not in the fact that the former involve pleasure and the latter "shock" or horror, but rather in that in the former we give vent to our emotions whereas in the latter we strive "to bear them in silence like men.")
Discussions that remain exclusively occupied with the pleasure that Plato holds that one takes in what tragedy depicts often proceed by attempting to resolve the apparent inconsistency in one's patterns of response by pointing to relevant differences between the contexts in question: for example, one's awareness of the fictional status of tragedy, the contribution of artistry, and "aesthetic distance" have all been cited as aspects of our experience of tragedy that are not involved in our experience of actual suffering, the functioning of which explains why pleasure is a characteristic element of the former while typically absent from the latter.
