Peter Langland-Hassan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Explaining Imagination, forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2020. This post previews an argument from the book.
A post by Peter Langland-Hassan.
We can choose what to imagine. Therefore, if the affect we experience in response to a fiction depends on what we are imagining, we should be able to choose the affect we experience in response to a fiction. But we cannot choose the affect we experience in response to a fiction. Thus, by modus tollens: our affective responses to fiction do not depend on what we are imagining.
Any takers? Just me?
Let’s consider an example: I am watching Romeo and Juliet and feel pity and shades of despair as the dual suicides unfold. (Apologies for the spoiler). To counteract these emotions, I should be able to imagine that Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after. For it is my imagining that they are committing suicide that, on the Standard Account of Things[1], is essential to my experiencing negative affect. Try as I might, though, I am unable to remove the pit in my stomach simply by imagining that Romeo and Juliet live happily ever after. For I still believe that they die in the fiction. This belief easily overrides anything I might try to imagine.
Examples are easily multiplied: we are engrossed in a heartwarming romantic comedy. Everything works out in the end and we are heart-warmed. But now, as the credits roll, we choose to imagine that the happy ending is upended—that the romantic relationship at the center of the narrative is permanently undermined by further (entirely avoidable!) misunderstandings. There is no difficulty in imagining such a thing. Yet it won’t undermine our warm glow. By contrast, suppose that the film really contains the less satisfying ending in three additional minutes tacked on to the end. In that case, our emotional response really will be undermined. The reason is not that, in the second case, we are imagining that the relationship comes to a dismal end. We did that before, on our own, after the credits rolled. The reason is that we now believe that, in the fiction, the relationship flops.
It does not matter that when we imagine the relationship ending, of our own accord, such an imagining would not be appropriate to the fiction, or that it is not what the fiction prescribes us to imagine. The fiction can prescribe whatever it wishes; it doesn’t thereby force our hand. What we imagine is still up to us.
But perhaps, one might suggest, engaging with a fiction poses a special barrier on our imaginative capabilities in making us extremely unwilling to imagine—or flat out incapable of imagining—things that conflict with the imaginings prescribed by the fiction. Could it be that we have discovered a new species of imaginative resistance—resistance at imagining propositions that conflict with what a fiction is asking us to imagine?
I don’t think so. It doesn’t seem difficult, while enjoying a play or a film, to imagine that things are going otherwise than as the fiction suggests. We don’t get the classic feeling of blockage or perplexity characteristic of other cases of imaginative resistance—as explored, e.g., by Gendler (2000), Weatherson (2005), and many others. Moreover, the most common explanations of imaginative experience don’t fit the case: we are not imagining an impossible proposition, or a violation of supervenience relations (Weatherson, 2005); we are not imagining propositions we find morally problematic (Gendler, 2000). To simply infer from our lack of emotional change that we in fact fail to bring about the contrary-to-fiction imaginings is question-begging.
You might think, however, that the contrary-to-the-fiction imaginings do indeed require us to imagine impossibilities: that Romeo and Juliet both die and survive, for example, or that the infuriating couple at the center of the romcom both do and do not stay together. But that misdescribes the cases. My claim—which I offer as intuitive, on its face—is that we can stop imagining that Romeo and Juliet have committed suicide and then start imagining that they survive—just as, in the normal case, we stop imagining that Romeo is alive at some point and start imagining that he is dead. For what we imagine is up to us. We can choose our own adventure. The romcom scenario is even clearer, as it doesn’t require any revision of the fiction. We just imagine an extra scene.
Fortunately, there is a promising alternative explanation close at hand for our lack of emotional change in such cases. What matters to my affective state when enjoying a fiction is not what I am imagining—which can depart from anything the fiction prescribes—but what I believe is true in the fiction, combined with what I desire to be true in the fiction.This offers a natural explanation for why I cannot adjust my emotional response to a fiction willy-nilly. For I can no more choose the judgments I make about what is true in a fiction I’m enjoying than I can choose my judgments generally; mutatis mutandis for my desires about a fiction. It is my beliefs (qua judgments) about what is true in the fiction that combine with my desires about what is true in the fiction to generate fiction-directed affect.
[1] The Standard Account of Things, as I will understand it, holds that our imaginings combine with desires to generate fiction-related affect (a la Kind (2011), Spaulding (2015), and Meskin & Weinberg (2003)), or that our imaginings combine with i-desires (an imaginative analog to desire) to generate fiction-related affect (a la Doggett & Egan (2012) and Currie (2010)), or that our imaginings trigger related emotions directly, without input from desires or i-desires (Nichols, 2006; Van Leeuwen, 2016).
References:
Currie, G. (2010). Tragedy. Analysis, 70(4), 632-638.
Doggett, T., & Egan, A. (2012). How we feel about terrible, non-existent Mafiosi. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84(2), 277-306.
Gendler, T. (2000). The puzzle of imaginative resistance. Journal of Philosophy, 97(2), 55.
Kind, A. (2011). The Puzzle of Imaginative Desire. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(3), 421-439.
Meskin, A., & Weinberg, J. M. (2003). Emotions, Fiction, and Cognitive Architecture. The British Journal of Aesthetics, 43(1), 18-34. doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/43.1.18
Nichols, S. (2006). Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn't Behave Like Believing. Mind and Language, 21, 459-474.
Spaulding, S. (2015). Imagination, Desire, and Rationality. Journal of Philosophy, 112(9), 457-476.
Van Leeuwen, N. (2016). The Imaginative Agent. In A. Kind & P. Kung (Eds.), Knowledge through imagination (pp. 85-109). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weatherson, B. (2005). Morality, Fiction, and Possibility. Philosophers' Imprint, 4(3), 1-27.