Jonathan Gilmore is a philosopher of art and art critic. He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center and Baruch College, CUNY.
A post by Jonathan Gilmore.
“We . . . become . . . aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs.”
—Pauline Kael, review of The Sound of Music
Among the tv shows I’ve binged on while locked down during the pandemic is Mrs. America, a fictionalized portrayal of Phillis Schlafly, an American conservative whose claim to fame (that is, infamy) was her staunch and ultimately successful role in organizing opposition to the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Played by Cate Blanchett, the television Schlafly is a fount of regressive politics and bigotry, yet for stretches of the series, garners a politically liberal viewer’s uncomfortable allegiance, even while pursuing her decidedly reactionary aims. Some reasons for aligning with her would justify a sympathetic attitude to her counterpart in real life—she’s condescended to by virtue of her gender, she’s clever and creative—but other reasons could count only within the context of an audience’s engagement with the quasi-fictional drama. Blanchett’s beauty as an actor is “imported” into the story as the beauty of the character she plays, and some of our rooting for her likely stems from a positive bias toward people occasioned by their physical attractiveness. (Dion, Berscheid, and Walster, 1972). Also, we initially see things through her eyes, inviting the natural affiliation we are disposed to form with those whose mental perspectives we simulate—a tendency that can generate identification on even arbitrary grounds (Kaufman and Libby, 2012; Goldstein and Cialdini, 2007).
That we have one sort of emotion, or express one sort of evaluation, for what we imagine to be the case which is contrary to how we’d respond if the scenario were real, is a familiar experience. Shaun Nichols calls these asymmetries “discrepant affects” (Nichols, 2006). Illustrate with your favorite anti-hero (Tony Soprano, Beatrix Kiddo, Humbert Humbert, Milton’s Satan, and so on) or inappropriate fantasy .
Discrepant responses like those are puzzling when considered against a background of findings that there is a substantial degree of overlap in the mental and neural bases of both our perceptual, doxastic, affective, and evaluative attitudes toward the real world and analogous responses toward what is only imagined. Neural and mental mechanisms are shared across, inter alia, perceptual imagery and actual perception (Ganis, Thompson, and Kosslyn, 2004); motor imagery and actual movement (Fischer and Zwaan, 2008); understanding fictional characters’ motivations and those of people in real life (Speer et al., 2009); and, affective responses to fictional stories and those caused by actual situations (Wallentin et al, 2011; Harris, 2000). If so much of the same mental machinery is employed when attending to some state of affairs in real life as when it is imagined, why aren’t the affective responses more similar? Of course, there’s a difference in belief in the two contexts, but why does the content of an imagining evoke evaluations and emotions distinct from those when it is the content of truth-apt attitudes?
In recent work (warning: book-plug), I argue that the difference is explained by a difference in the set of internalized norms governing our affective, evaluative, doxastic and conative responses to what we, alternatively, take to be fictional and real (Gilmore, 2020). Specifically, I argue that, sometimes, the content of an imaginative representation furnishes reasons for our response that would not count as reasons for a like response if the content were believed.
I call this a discontinuity thesis. Its denial, a commitment to continuity, is evinced in the approaches of many philosophers and psychologists to fiction-directed imagination. There, the thought is that, in order to provoke a given reaction to a fictional scenario, authors present what would bring it about in real life. That mirroring relation is assumed in the idea of fiction as moral edification: what nurtures our empathetic connection with certain kinds of characters within a story carries over to engagement with their real-life counterparts (Nussbaum, 1992). Correlatively, one’s response to a morally-freighted fictional scenario is supposed to reveal the contours of one’s evaluative disposition toward what is real (Moran. 1994). And, finally, in psychological studies of emotions that deploy imagined scenarios to elicit affective states, a commitment to continuity lies in the assumption that such devices tell us about emotions in the wild, not just those triggered by acknowledged fictional depictions in the lab (Oatley, Mar, and Djikic, 2012).
Here’s the problem with positing that the internalized norms that shape such responses apply invariantly across fictional- and real-world instantiations: a difference in what such responses are answerable to makes a difference in how they can be justified. While beliefs and other real-world-directed representations “aim at truth,” imaginings aim at what is true in a fiction or imagining (Walton, 1990; Currie, 2014). This means that considerations that would count as reasons justifying a response to content that is imagined may not count as reasons for that response to the content as part of a veridical representation. Let me illustrate that thought with reference just to fictions.
We tend to take the valence of feelings experienced roughly contemporaneous with a situation as an indication of its value, even when the feelings stem from a wholly independent source (Slovic et al., 2002). This affect heuristic is exploited in films in the elicitation of certain moods that promote the assignment of value to objects independent of the feeling’s source (Smith, 2003; Clore, Gasper, and Garvin, 2001). Nonlinear sound with abrupt frequency transitions played during a film can prompt anxiety or loathing of whatever might be presented on screen. Physical disgust elicitors in a fictional work can provoke moral disgust about a character, a process that would no doubt fail to appropriately detect vice in a real person (Wilson and Brekke, 1994; Schnall et al., 2008). Stylistic and formal qualities of an artistic representation can be construed as figurative properties of whatever content the work embodies, evoking emotions that don’t fit that content considered independently of the medium. Thus, a painter may induce us to conceive of someone as violent or powerful merely through brushstrokes aggressively applied. A writer’s choice of names--Gradgrind, Willy Loman, Becky Sharp--causes attitudes toward the represented individuals that wouldn’t thereby be justified toward real people.
Indeed, we allow ourselves to be influenced by biases in our engagement with fictions that we would try to correct for in ordinary life. The tendency to see people as motivated by stable psychological dispositions, rather than much more powerful situational factors, distorts our understanding of real people’s actions, but is often instrumental to certain genres in eliciting understanding of why characters behave as they do. Studies of verbal processing find statements that rhyme are construed as more insightful than those that don’t, even when meaning is held constant (McGlone and Tofighbakhsh, 1999). That’s a cognitive bias friendly to popular music, listening to which we exhibit cognitive, affective, and behavioral signs suggesting we endorse promises of eternal devotion, or anthems of violence and mayhem, even though we wouldn’t accept those avowals in contexts of real-life.
Here, considerations that serve only as causes of (a- or irrational) reactions to things in real experience can count as justifications of responses to what is only imagined or fictional.
I don’t think this difference points to anything peculiar about fictions or artistic engagements (contra Goldie, 2003). Instead, it reflects how the kinds of reasons that justify affective or evaluative responses to imaginings are indexed to the functions of the practices in which they are elicited.
In some cases, imaginative activity has an epistemic or practical role like that of beliefs and perceptions, where the aim is to, e.g., plan for the future or solve a problem. Those projects are better realized if affective and evaluative judgments of the imagined scenario are based on reasons that speak to relevant properties of their object, and are not the result of some independent cause.
Many fiction- and imagination-directed responses, however, are generated in practices that are constitutively oriented toward ends—e.g., pleasure, vicarious experience, and absorption—that don’t need the responses to be rationalized by facts about their objects. We can recognize that how we feel about something shown in a fiction, an advertisement, a daydream, isn’t merited by a descriptive accounting of its properties; and yet the manner in which it is imagined prompts us to be affected that way nonetheless. Of course, as Kael’s derision for the musical illustrates, even if an artistic encounter successfully provokes certain feelings about an imagined state of affairs, we may conclude on moral grounds, or those of self-respect, that we’d have been better off not submitting ourselves to the experience in the first place. After a performance of Wagner in 1917, the conductor Otto Klemperer, perhaps succumbing too fully to the composer’s grandiose vision, remarked to his sister, “when I like Wagner, I do not like myself” (Heyworth, 1996).
References
Clore, Gerald L., Karen Gasper, and Erika Garvin. 2001. “Affect as Information.” In Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition, edited by Joseph P. Forgas, 121–44. Psychology Press.
Currie, Gregory. 2014. “Emotions Fit for Fiction.” In Emotion and Value, edited by Sabine Roeser, 146–68. Oxford University Press.
Dion, Karen, Ellen Berscheid, and Elaine Walster. 1972. “What Is Beautiful Is Good.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24(3): 285–90.
Fischer, M. H., and R. A. Zwaan. 2008. “Embodied Language: A Review of the Role of the Motor System in Language Comprehension.” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(6): 825–50.
Ganis, Giorgio, William L. Thompson, and Stephen M. Kosslyn. 2004. “Brain Areas Underlying Visual Mental Imagery and Visual Perception: An FMRI Study.” Cognitive Brain Research 20(2): 226–41.
Gilmore, Jonathan. 2020. Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind. Oxford University Press.
Goldie, Peter. 2003. “Narrative, Emotion, and Perspective.” In Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, edited by Matthew Kieran and Dominic Lopes, 54–68. Routledge.
Goldstein, Noah J., and Robert B. Cialdini. 2007. “The Spyglass Self: A Model of Vicarious Self-Perception.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92(3): 402–17.
Harris, Paul. 2000. The Work of the Imagination. Blackwell.
Heyworth, Peter. 1996. Otto Klemperer. Vol. 1, 1885–1933: His Life and Times. Cambridge University Press.
Kaufman, Geoff F., and Lisa K. Libby. 2012. “Changing Beliefs and Behavior through Experience-Taking.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 103(1): 1–19.
McGlone, Matthew S., and Jessica Tofighbakhsh. 1999. “The Keats Heuristic: Rhyme as Reason in Aphorism Interpretation.” Poetics 26(4): 235–44.
Moran, Richard. 1994. “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.” Philosophical Review 103(1): 75–106.
Nichols, Shaun. 2006. “Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave like Believing.” Mind & Language 21(4): 459–74.
Nussbaum, Martha. 1992. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press.
Oatley, Keith, Raymond A. Mar, and Maja Djikic. 2012. “The Psychology of Fiction: Present and Future.” In Cognitive Literary Studies: Current Themes and New Directions, edited by Isabel Jaén and Julien J. Simon, 235–49. University of Texas Press.
Schnall, Simone, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan. 2008. “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(8): 1096–109.
Slovic, Paul, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor. 2002. “The Affect Heuristic.” In Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, edited by T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, and D. Kahneman, 397–420. Cambridge University Press.
Smith, Greg M. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge University Press.
Speer, Nicole K., Jeremy R. Reynolds, Khena M. Swallow, and Jeffrey M. Zacks. 2009. “Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences.” Psychological Science 20(8): 989–99.
Wallentin, Mikkel, Andreas Højlund Nielsen, Peter Vuust, Anders Dohn, Andreas Roepstorff, and Torben Ellegaard Lund. 2011. “Amygdala and Heart Rate Variability Responses from Listening to Emotionally Intense Parts of a Story.” Neuroimage 58(3): 963–73.
Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Harvard University Press.
Wilson, Timothy, and Nancy Brekke. 1994. “Mental Contamination and Mental Correction: Unwanted Influences on Judgments and Evaluations.” Psychological Bulletin 116: 117–42.