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Imagining Emotions and Appreciating Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Susan L. Feagin
Susan L. Feagin*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri–Kansas City, Kansas City, MO64110-2499, U.S.A.
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Extract

The capacity of a work of fictional literature to elicit (some) emotional responses is part of what is valuable about it, and having (relevant) emotional responses is part of appreciating it. These claims are not very controversial; perhaps they are even common sense. But philosophy rushes in where common sense fears to tread, raising questions and looking for explanations.

Are the emotions we have in appreciating fictional works of art, what I call art emotions, of the same sort as those which occur in ‘real life’? Which emotions are appropriate to the work, and why: what justifies having one emotion rather than another? And why should we think emotionally responding to fiction is desirable, something which should be respected and encouraged, rather than looked at as a little weird or a waste of time?

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , September 1988 , pp. 485 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

1 There are debates about what beliefs are required for which emotions. I am citing these just as plausible examples. Nothing in this paper depends on the analysis one gives of the beliefs or desires involved in any particular emotion.

2 A selection of works addressing this issue is: Radford, Colin and Weston, Michael ‘How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. 49 (1975) 67-93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walton, Kendall ‘Fearing Fictions,’ The Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978) 5-27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novitz, David ‘Fiction, Imagination and Emotion,’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1980) 279-88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lamarque, Peter ‘How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (1981) 291-304Google Scholar; Charlton, William ‘Feeling for the Fictitious,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 24 (1984) 206-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mannison, Don ‘On Being Moved by Fiction,’ Philosophy 60 (1985) 71-87Google Scholar; Best, David Feeling and Reason in the Arts (London: George Allen & Unwin 1985)Google Scholar; Allen, R. T. ‘The Reality of Responses to Fiction,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 26 (1986) 64-8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 That the ‘logic’ of emotion derives from the ‘logic’ of the underlying desires has been persuasively argued by Robinson, Jenefer in ‘Emotion, Judgment, and Desire,’ Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983) 731-41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Andrew Woodfield's analysis of desire eschews this role for desire, claiming, like Robinson, that it alters the way one thinks about things (the kind of planning or deliberation engaged in), and only via this cognitive activity alters one's actions or behavior. See ‘Desire, Intentional Content and Teleological Explanation,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 82 (1982) 79. A view at the other extreme is exemplified by R.W. Leeper who takes emotions to act essentially as motives, pervading and organizing behavior. Magda Arnold';s ‘appraisal’ view also emphasizes the effects of emotion on behavior. See the discussions in Chapters Two and Four of Strongman, K.T. The Psychology of Emotion (London: John Wiley & Sons 1973)Google Scholar.

5 See Mandler, George Mind and Emotion (New York: John Wiley & Sons 1975), 113-14Google Scholar.

6 See Strongman, K.T. The Psychology of Emotions (London: John Wiley & Sons 1973), 71Google Scholar.

7 Gordon, Robert M. in ‘Fear,’ The Philosophical Review 89 (1980) 560-78Google Scholar, argues persuasively for this distinction, pp. 565-6. See also Scruton, Roger ‘Attitudes, Beliefs and Reasons’ in Casey, John ed., Morality and Moral Reasoning (London: Methuen 1971), 37Google Scholar.

8 See Taylor, Gabriele Pride, Shame, and Guilt (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1985) 1Google Scholar; Lyons, William Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980), 56-7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Green, O.H. ‘Emotions and Belief’ in Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph 6 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1972), 24Google Scholar.

9 See, e.g., Mandler, 66. However, see also recent work which has attempted to identify emotion-specific ANS activity, e.g., Edman, Paul Levenson, Robert W. and Friesen, Wallace V. ‘Autonomic Nervous System Activity Distinguishes Among Emotions,’ Science 221 (1983) 1208-10Google Scholar.

10 See Gordon, 566.

11 See Gordon, Robert M. ‘The Aboutness of Emotions,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 11 (1974) 27Google Scholar; and Scruton, 32.

12 For an idea of how diverse psychological theories of emotion are, see Plutchik, Robert and Kellerman, Henry eds., Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience, vol. 1: Theories of Emotion (New York: Academic Press 1980)Google Scholar. Also useful is Strongman, which contains descriptions of twenty theories of emotion and related research. For more philosophically oriented surveys see Lyons, Emotion,Google Scholar and Solomon, Robert and Calhoun, Cheshire eds., What is an Emotion? (New York: Oxford University Press 1984)Google Scholar.

13 See, for example, Stephen Stich's by now well known arguments against any unrelativized correct criterion for ascribing belief, and that belief ascriptions instead take the form of similarity judgments. My conclusions about imagining emotions and having art emotions are very similar to these conclusions of Stich's about belief. See From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1983).

14 An analysis of imagination similar to this one is developed by Adam Morton in Chapter III: Imagination, of Frames of Mind: Constraints on the Common Sense Conception of the Mental (New York: Oxford University Press 1980), esp. 65-71.

15 This phrase is meant to be indefinite between whether the emotion causes, consists in, involves, or is caused by this pattern of thought. Just as we need not, for the purposes of this paper, decide between whether beliefs are individuating devices or object-directed, we also need not decide between these or other alternatives.

The point here is that imagining having an emotion is different from merely imagining that someone or other has the emotion. The former, and not the latter, requires that one's own psychological state(s) mimics or simulates being in a state(s) which count as having the emotion. The former is not a propositional attitude, though propositional attitudes may be components of it.

16 For an explanation of how a desire might describe or explain a pattern of thought, see Woodfield.

17 See Schwartz, Robert ‘Infinite Sets, Unbounded Consequences, and Models of Mind’ in Savage, C. Wade ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, IXGoogle Scholar: ‘Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Psychology’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1978), 189-90. P.N. Johnson-Laird has advanced a theory about the actual psychological processes involved in problem-solving which do not involve applying inference schemata (such as modus ponens), even though one ends up with the same conclusions that applying inference schemata would produce. See Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983), Ch. 2, et passim. Ultimately what is at issue here is whether the mind works by applying, say, a propositional calculus (or some other logical apparatus). Whatever turns out to be the truth on this issue, I think has far-reaching implications for aesthetics. The only point being made here, however, is that even if the results of one’s mental performance can be modeled in a given way, it doesn't mean the mind operates by applying the principles employed in the model.

18 Perkins, D.N. The Mind's Best Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), 48-9Google Scholar

19 Lee, Vernon ‘Empathy,’ from The Beautiful, repr. in Weitz, Morris ed., Problems in Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan 1970) 757-61Google Scholar

20 Johnson-Laird has made a point somewhat similar to this in explaining one reason why the infamous ‘Chinese Room’ example fails as a counter-example to functionalism as an adequate theory of mind: the individuals comprising the Chinese room ‘might not interact quickly enough to maintain its real-time properties,’ and would thus rapidly lose contact with reality (Mental Models, 475). Likewise, we might say a faltering, over-active, or misdirected imagination leads us to lose contact with the book.

21 Ryle, Gilbert The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble 1949), 133Google Scholar

22 Mandler uses an information processing account of psychological processes to develop, not really a theory of emotion, but rather a description of how some psychological variables affect certain human actions, experiences, and autonomic activity (vii-ix). His discussions of emotional involvement and aesthetic emotions emphasize the importance of concreteness to emotionality. See especially 236-8.

23 See Tye, Michael ‘The Subjective Qualities of Experience,’ Mind 95 (1986) 1-17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who argues that knowledge of a particular experience does not constitute knowledge of any new facts. Paul Churchland has given a similar argument against qualia in ‘Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States,’ The Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985) 8-28, and very briefly in Matter and Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 1984), 33-4. A much more general but related point is made by Philip Johnson-Laird in Mental Models about consciousness in general. After pointing out that there are certain algorithms that can be executed only by a parallel processor (455), and arguing that consciousness is a serial process (468), he summarizes, ‘Consciousness is a property of a particular class of algorithms, not of the functions that they compute: it's not what you do; it's the way you do it’ (475).

All these writers emphasize that experiences or qualia are a way of knowing, not an object of knowledge (not a new fact to be known). I expand on this below by suggesting that our attempts to identify this way of knowing as some fact to be known are therefore ‘constructions,’ themselves involving imagination, rather than discoveries.

24 I am grateful to Béla Szabados, Dolores Miller, and Dabney Townsend and an anonymous referee of this journal for comments on earlier drafts of this paper, one of which was read at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics, Asilomar, California, in April, 1986.