Antony Aumann is a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University. His work focuses on existentialism and contemporary philosophy of art.
A post by Antony Aumann
Lovers of art often extol its cognitive benefits. Among them is its ability to aid our imaginations. Novels, movies, pictures, and poems can enhance our native abilities in this domain. They can help us imagine things we otherwise couldn’t imagine (Feagin 1996, 83–112; Gerrig 1993; Nussbaum 1990; Oatley 2016; Peacocke 2020; Rowe 2009; Smith 2011, 109–10). But how far does this go?
There’s a famous limit on imagination. It’s said that we can imagine what an experience is like only if we’ve gone through it ourselves (Peacocke 2020, 1). My question in this essay is whether art can help us overcome this limit. Can reading novels etc. help us imagine what it’d be like to have experiences we haven’t had before? I’ll argue that they can—provided we add some qualifications.
The question of qualia
When we wonder what it’d be like to have an unfamiliar experience, we may be interested in several different things. First, we may want to know what external circumstances we’d encounter. Second, we may want to know what inner states we’d have to endure.
Works of art can help with these first two things. They can describe or depict the states and circumstances that the experience involves. They can also call our attention to devilish details we’d overlook if left to our own devices (Arpaly 2020, 131). In these respects, art is already a great boon.
Yet, there’s a third thing about a given unfamiliar experience that may interest us. We may be curious what it’d be like from the inside (Paul 2017, 22–26). We may want to know not just what circumstances we’d face but what it’d be like to face them. We may want to know not just what inner states we’d have to endure but what it’d be like to endure them. In short, we may be interested in the phenomenal quality of the experience.
Can art help us with this third thing? I believe so. But, as I’ve already stated, this thesis requires a few qualifications. In the rest of this essay, I’ll lay out the nature of and motivation for them.
Replicating experiences
Novels, poems, and songs often describe people's experiences. But there's a notorious gap between such descriptions and what the experiences are actually like. No matter how good, descriptions come up short. Words fail when it comes to qualia (Paul 2014, 9, 13, 53, 77).
What’s easily overlooked, though, is that works of art can do more than describe experiences. They can also give us experiences (Peacocke 2020, 5–6). More precisely, works of art can replicate the sights and sounds that an experience involves, and these stimuli can give rise to the relevant physical and mental states within us. We can thereby gain first-hand knowledge of what it's like to have the experience.
Consider the opening of Saving Private Ryan. It doesn’t just depict soldiers storming the beach at Normandy. It recreates some of the sights and sounds those soldiers experienced. As a result, we feel something of what those soldiers felt.
A work of art need not replicate the exact conditions of an experience. Similar ones often suffice. Herein lies an important truth: few phenomenal states have only one possible source; most can be caused in a variety of ways by a variety of means.
Moviemakers take advantage of this fact. They seldom give us the exact sensory inputs that the characters experience. They may include a soundtrack, for instance, so we may hear things the characters do not hear. Yet, these alternative inputs can evoke sensations similar in kind to those the characters do experience. Scary music can make us feel unsettled in the way someone walking through a graveyard at night might feel. The cause is different but the effect is (close to) the same.
Limits on replicating experiences
Some aspects of some experiences can’t be replicated. Often this is a matter of medium. Books can’t reproduce sensations of smell, taste, and touch. Neither can films. Sitting in the theater while watching Saving Private Ryan, we can’t feel the ground shake from explosions, smell the salty sea breeze, or taste the blood in our mouths from a wound.
Installation art has a leg up in this regard. It’s possible to feel the graininess of sand between one’s toes while walking through Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, and it’s possible to smell the dank humidity of earthy air while standing before Walter De Maria’s Earth Room.
Yet, even here there are limits. Some aspects of some experiences can’t be replicated by even the most inventive art. A variety of things fit into this category, but let me call attention to two. First, some circumstances are inescapable. One can’t put down and walk away from one’s Blackness or gayness as one can a book. Similarly, one can’t mute the incessant crying of a newborn as one can an annoying song on the radio.
Second, some circumstances are wearing. They’re difficult precisely because they must be endured day after day. The burden of microaggressions, for example, doesn’t lie in the pain of any particular slight. It lies in how slights compound with slights over the years. The qualitative feel of this temporally extended burden can’t be replicated in a mere ninety-minute movie.
Yet, a work of art can bring to mind the felt quality of an experience without replicating it. One way it can do so is by triggering our memory of the experience (Peacocke 2020, 16–18). Saving Private Ryan may not be able to reproduce the smell of the salty sea air, but many of us have had this sensation before. Saving Private Ryan can leverage this familiarity to get us to imagine the olfactory aspects of storming the beach at Normandy.
The same goes for the other two examples I mentioned. Many of us suffer from inescapable circumstances and shoulder burdens whose weight lies in their everydayness. Although a work of art can’t replicate these things, it can draw on our familiarity with them to bring their phenomenology to mind.
Imaginative scaffolding and its limits
A work of art can get us to remember only what we’ve previously experienced. So, it can’t rely on our memory to help us grasp the phenomenology of something new. Yet, that’s not quite right. Even when a given experience is foreign to us, its component parts may not be. And we may be able to leverage our familiarity with these parts to develop a sense of the whole. By piecing together what we already know, we may be able to build up to what we don’t. Amy Kind calls this “imaginative scaffolding” (Kind 2020; 2021).
Caution is in order. Being acquainted with the parts of an experience doesn’t automatically entail being able to imagine the whole. We need to know how the parts fit together, and this isn't always obvious. I see here a role for art. Novels, movies, paintings, and songs can guide us through the scaffolding process. They can replicate the parts or draw on our memories to bring them to mind. Then, they can describe or depict how the parts must be combined to generate the experience in question.
Now, imaginative scaffolding requires access to the relevant raw materials. We must be familiar with the parts out of which the whole is constructed. But what if we aren't? Well, I’m not sure how often this happens. Ekman thought all emotions could be reduced to a basic six (Ekman 1992). Le Blon held that the whole color wheel is reducible to the three primaries (Bleicher 2012, 23). Perhaps all aspects of human experience are like this. If so, the typical adult may have access to all the raw materials they need.
Yet, suppose we lack access to some part of some experience that interests us. This won’t necessarily be a problem. For the missing part may be incidental. We may be able to grasp the whole without it, just as we can grasp the image constituted by a puzzle while there are as yet many missing pieces.[1]
Of course, sometimes a missing piece is essential and there’s no getting around it. The qualitative feel of sound is inaccessible to a deaf person, for example, and even the best art won't help. So, it’s just not possible for such a person to imagine what it'd be like to get a cochlear implant prior to getting one (Paul 2014, 57–70).
What it’s like for others versus what it’s like for us
One final issue deserves our attention. A given experience may unfold in different ways for different people. In part, this is a result of individual differences in psychology. We each have our own way of processing and responding to any given stimulus.
This fact gives rise to another limit on what art can do. A movie or novel may be able to show us what it’s like for some other (fictional) person to go through a given experience. But there’s no guarantee this is what it will be like for us. It might be, but it also might not.
Of course, works of art often seduce us into thinking they’ve revealed what a particular experience will be like for us. We often come away believing we’ve learned what would happen if we made this or that choice. Telling the details of this story will take us far afield from the present essay, however, and I’ve already attempted it elsewhere (Aumann 2022). So, I’ll let the matter rest for now.
[1] Thanks to Matthew Bemis for this example.
References
Arpaly, Nomy. 2020. “What Imagination Teaches.” In Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, edited by Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler, 122–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aumann, Antony. 2022. “Art and Transformation.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, March, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2021.40.
Bleicher, Steven. 2012. Contemporary Color: Theory and Use. 2nd ed. Clifton Park, NY: Cengage.
Ekman, Paul. 1992. “An Argument for Basic Emotions.” Cognition & Emotion 6 (3–4): 169–200.
Feagin, Susan L. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Kind, Amy. 2020. “What Imagination Teaches.” In Becoming Someone New: Essays on Transformative Experience, Choice, and Change, edited by Enoch Lambert and John Schwenkler, 133–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2021. “Bridging the Divide: Imagining Across Experiential Perspectives.” In Epistemic Uses of Imagination, edited by Christopher Badura and Amy Kind, 237–59. New York: Routledge.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination.” In Love’s Knowledge, 148–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oatley, Keith. 2016. “Fiction: Simulation of Social Worlds.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (8): 618–28.
Paul, L. A. 2014. Transformative Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2017. “De Se Preferences and Empathy for Future Selves.” Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 7–39.
Peacocke, Antonia. 2020. “How Literature Expands Your Imagination.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1–22.
Rowe, Mark W. 2009. “Literature, Knowledge, and the Aesthetic Attitude.” Ratio 22 (4): 375–97.
Smith, Murray. 2011. “Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind.” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 99–117. Oxford: Oxford University Press.