Uku Tooming is a JSPS international research fellow in the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences at Hiroshima University. He mainly works on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and epistemology.
A post by Uku Tooming
The following lines are from John Cale’s song “Paris 1919”:
Efficiency efficiency they say
Get to know the date and tell the time of day
As the crowds begin complaining
How the Beaujolais is raining
Down on the darkened meetings of Champs Élysées
The album with the same title, described by Cale as “an example of the nicest ways of saying something ugly” is full of wonderfully impressionistic imagery, centered on the theme of Europe around World War I. One (presumably unintended) effect that this album has on me is a rather intense pleasure when thinking of the last two lines in the excerpt. The imagery of experiencing Beaujolais (which I rarely drink) falling down on me on the streets of Paris (where I have never been) is surprisingly enjoyable.
However, when I start to think more closely about the imagined situation, then a complication arises. I quickly come to realize that if I actually were to experience wine raining on me, the overall experience would not be that wonderful, given that my clothes would get soaked in wine, which is far from pleasant. By trying to imagine the scenario more accurately, I come to enjoy it far less. Only by avoiding this can I reap the maximal hedonic reward. This might be an idiosyncratic response on my part, but I am sure that many people delight in some imagery that upon further scrutiny wouldn’t be so pleasing.
Take another case. My favorite parts of the books that I read as a teenager were those that included elaborate descriptions of various meals. These were my favorite parts because I enjoyed imagining the taste of what was described. However, much of it was something I had never actually tried, which suggests that eating those foods in real life would have been quite a different experience. Therefore, when I started to ponder about what the experience would actually be like, my enjoyment waned. As in the Beaujolais example, the pleasurability of the imaginings seemed to depend on keeping certain questions at bay.
That our affective responses to imagined situations can differ from how we would feel if we encountered them in real life has been a well-acknowledged phenomenon in philosophical aesthetics (see, for instance, Currie 1997; Tullmann 2016; Jonathan Gilmore’s recent post on this blog). The present cases are about sensory imagination and corresponding sensory pleasure in particular. In addition, they are meant to illustrate how differences in hedonic response to a scenario can also obtain not just between imagination and actual experience, but within the imaginative context. Imaginings can have different hedonic effects, depending on how their content is imagined. In this blog post, I suggest a (hopefully fruitful) way of thinking about it.
Here I borrow some ideas from philosophy of science. It is generally acknowledged that scientific models often deviate from the aim of accurately capturing the phenomena that they purport to represent. A distinction has been drawn between abstraction and idealization (Chakravartty 2010). An abstract model only represents the features of the target system that are deemed relevant by the modeler. Although they are not fully accurate with respect to the target, they still capture some nomologically possible system. An idealizing model goes further and changes the parameters of the target system in some way. As a result, idealizations give a distorted representation of the target system and may even represent nomologically impossible objects.
If we now think of the Beaujolais example, my imaginings are best suited to cause me pleasure when the tactile experience is omitted from the simulation of that scenario. Insofar as the framework of scientific models is applicable to sensuous imaginings, this suggests that my imagining in such a case involves constructing an abstract model of the scenario. This also fares well with the idea that imaginings, in contrast with perceptions, have degraded or schematic content.
However, by ignoring the tactile component, my imaginings arguably distort the experience of rain falling down on me. If I imagine myself being physically present when the rain falls, but without the unpleasant tactile sensations that accompany it, my imagination seems to idealize. I would not be able to have this experience if I were to encounter the event in the real world. What is more, since the affective character is a feature of the overall experience, already the fact that I take greater pleasure in imagining the scenario than I would enjoy experiencing it in real life suggests the imaginings distort what they simulate in a way one expects from an idealization.
Idealization seems to occur also in the example of reading about meals. It is not just that I focused my attention on particular elements of the described food and took pleasure in imagining them. Instead, I tried to elaborate on my imaginings and the result did not seem to be a schematic representation of familiar sensory components which I already liked but an indeterminate blend of novel and familiar flavors which probably could not reflect the taste of those meals I was reading about.
Pleasurability of an imagining thus seems to correlate with how its content is idealized, at least in some cases. Why is that? Here is a speculative thought. Perhaps it is the idealization itself that can make imaginings more pleasurable than they would otherwise be. The idealization in question can be taken to be a kind of imaginative play with sensory contents: in response to hearing the relevant description, the agent combines elements of their previous experiences, with which the content of the description can be (approximately) compared, into novel sensory blends (see Barron et al. 2013). These blends are novel to the agent because one has to improvise in trying to imagine what one is only partially familiar with. Idealizing imaginings would then be enjoyable in virtue of the novelty of what one imagines and/or the sense of one’s creative role in constructing the relevant idealization. The pleasure in idealizing imagination would be a pleasure in a kind of play. This also suggests, perhaps not surprisingly, that sensory pleasure has a generative character, in that what one can enjoy is not limited to those sensory properties that one has experienced or could experience in the actual world.
Finally, that idealizing imaginings can generate pleasure may also contribute to our understanding of why many people enjoy depictions of painful and terrifying things. An idealizing response to such depictions can represent their content in a playful manner, transforming them into something that is enjoyable. The idealizing function of imagination can thereby lend some further credence to the Humean idea that in our response to tragedy negative affective responses are converted into pleasure. Admittedly, my examples included cases in which the valence of one’s response was positive from the start, without any conversion from the negative to the positive. But nothing excludes the possibility that idealizing imagination could deliver the latter as well. This is by no means an entirely novel idea, given that it has been acknowledged that our engagement with fiction provides us with a way to represent tragic events without dealing with their consequences. The present suggestion allows the transformation of imaginative content to go further from a mere subtraction, however.
References:
Barron, H.C., Dolan, R.J. and Behrens, T.E., 2013. Online evaluation of novel choices by simultaneous representation of multiple memories. Nature Neuroscience, 16(10), pp. 1492–1498.
Chakravartty, A. 2010. Truth and representation in science: two inspirations from art. R. Frigg & M. Hunter, Beyond Mimesis and Convention. Representation in Art and Science. Spinger Netherlands, pp. 33–50.
Currie, G. 1997. The paradox of caring. In M. Hjort, & S. Laver, Emotion and the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–77.
Tullmann, K. 2016. Sympathy and fascination. British Journal of Aesthetics, 56(2), pp. 115–129.