A post by Enrico Terrone

A popular view in contemporary aesthetics, which draws on seminal essays by Kendall Walton (1990) and Gregory Currie (1990), states that fictions are prescriptions to imagine. Here, I’ll not discuss this view but just endorse it with the aim of considering whether fictions prescribe a sui generis imaginative experience or rather mobilize the same sort of imagination that one deploys when one thinks about one’s life. The latter imaginative episodes are those that occur, for instance, when one imagines how one’s life would have been had one made different choices—the sort of imagining that may trigger affects such as anxiety or regret.

First, I will offer a Kant-inspired account of fictional worlds that seems capable of sharply distinguishing the imaginative response to fiction from imagination about one’s life. Secondly, I will consider a Spinoza-inspired strategy to bridge that apparent (Kantian) gap between those two sorts of imagination.

The imaginative response to fiction seems to be special since fictions prescribe us to imagine fictional worlds. But what is a fictional world? A conception which is quite popular among analytic philosophers associates fictional worlds with clusters of propositions (see Walton 1990, Stock 2017, García‐Carpintero 2019). Although this conception may play explanatory roles in philosophical accounts of fiction, it falls short of non-philosophical engagement with fiction. When we engage with a work of fiction leaving philosophy apart, indeed, we do not cast a fictional world as a cluster of propositions but rather as a spatiotemporal framework different from ours in which fictional objects and events have their place just as actual objects and events have their place in our spatiotemporal framework. In short, our non-philosophical engagement with fiction consists in applying, in the domain of the imagination, the concept of world that is crucial to our ordinary experience.

Drawing on Immanuel Kant’s (1781/1787) seminal contribution, Peter Strawson (1959, 1966) and Gareth Evans (1982, 1985) have argued that the world of our ordinary experience essentially is a spatiotemporal framework.  Strawson (1966, 29) points out that “Kant’s genius nowhere shows itself more clearly than in his identification of [...] the possibility of distinguishing between a temporal order of subjective perceptions and an order and arrangement which objects of those perceptions independently possess—a unified and enduring framework of relations between constituents of an objective world”. In a similar vein, Evans (1985, 369, my emphasis) insists that “Kant argued with tremendous force that it was not possible to have a conception of an objective world—a world whose states and constituents are independent of one’s perception of them—without conceiving of that world as spatial, with oneself as located within it and tracing a continuous path through it.”

A fictional world, I contend, is an imaginary framework of this sort but without “oneself as located within it and tracing a continuous path through it”. Imagining a fictional world, in this sense, amounts to imagining a spatiotemporal framework in which we do not have any place. Here is the specificity of the imaginative response to fiction. When one imagines about one’s life, one also considers an alternative spatiotemporal framework, but the latter remains a framework with oneself as located within it and tracing a continuous path through it. Thus, imagining an alternative world when one thinks about one’s life is just imagining how our world might have been, with the aim of comparing that alternative state of our world with the way the latter actually is. The imaginative response to fiction, on the other hand, leads us to focus on a world that does without us and is of interest to us precisely because of that. When one engages with fiction, the fictional world is the primary focus of attention, and comparing it to the actual world may be something one does secondarily to supplement one’s appreciation of the work of fiction but is not crucial to the imaginative experience in the way such comparison is when one imagines about one’s life.

All that seems to encourage us to sharply distinguish between imagining in response to fiction and imagining about one’s life. Still, these two sorts of imaginings can be brought closer if one endorses a determinist conception inspired by Baruch Spinoza’s (1677) Ethics (which I take to be the sort of conception that stems from the causal closure of the physical universe, see Kim 1993). From the Spinozian perspective, we are not only located within the actual world and tracing a continuous path through it, but we cannot help but follow our determined path. Although one may be inclined to draw a sharp distinction between imagining in response to fiction and imagining about one’s life, one can resist such inclination by acknowledging that one’s existence has no room for alternative paths through one’s world. Once Spinozian determinism has been endorsed, imaginings about one’s life can be cast as peculiar imaginings about fictional worlds which have fictional counterparts of us among their fictional characters. That is to say that, in the Spinozian universe which is ruled by deterministic necessity all the way through, the possible comes down to the fictional. Hence imagining about one’s life is a sort of autofiction.

Spinoza’s Ethics proposes a discipline of the imagination in view of the pursuit of happiness. It is worth noting that what Spinoza means by the term “imagination” (“imaginatio” in the Latin original) is broader than what is meant by this term in contemporary philosophy—and in the rest of my text. According to Spinoza (1677, V, § 34), “An imagination is an idea by which the mind considers a thing as present [...], which nevertheless indicates the present constitution of the human body more than the nature of the external thing”. In Spinoza’s philosophy, memory and even sensations can be subsumed under this conception of the imagination, which is thus quite broader than the contemporary one.

However, the contemporary notion of the imagination is a core component—arguably the core component—of the Spinozian notion, according to which imagining amounts to considering something as present regardless of its existence. Such an overlapping between the two notions is enough to make my point. From a Spinozian perspective, one should discipline the imagination because certain imaginings about one’s life risk to prejudice one’s happiness unless one learns how to properly deal with them. My point is that such discipline involves tracing imagining about one’s life back to imagining fictional worlds. Although one is naturally prone to cast imaginings about one’s life as imaginings about ways in which one’s life might have been, thereby focusing on the comparison between the actual world and its imaginary alternatives, one should acknowledge that imaginings about one’s life are nothing but another imaginative construction of fictional worlds which is worth keeping detached from the actual world.

Although Spinoza does not focus explicitly on the relationship between imagination and fiction, the philosophy of fiction helps us to elaborate on the Spinozian ethics of the imagination. It does so by explaining that one engaging with fiction can feel, and often does feel, intense emotions towards fictional scenarios and yet should remain capable of keeping the fictional world sharply detached from the actual world. Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are notoriously pathetic characters precisely because they are unable to keep the fictional world of the literary works in which they are absorbed (epic poems and romantic novels respectively) detached from their own world. The Spinozian ethics of the imagination alerts one to the dangers of behaving pathetically like Don Quixote and Madame Bovary as regards not only the barrier between reality and fiction but especially that between one’s life and one’s imaginings about one’s life.

From the Spinozian perspective, the imagination may be ethically problematic because the pursuit of happiness, which is the ultimate goal of ethics, essentially depends on acknowledging what must be the case in the actual world. The imagination may interfere with that pursuit by intertwining what is actual with what is imagined. In this sense, the imagination may be harmful. Fiction, however, offers us a paradigm of virtuous deployment of the imagination since it encourages us to imagine fictional worlds while being aware of their essential disconnection from the actual world. The risk of captious interference of the imagined in the actual is thus neutralized. One can safely feel emotions towards fictional individuals and events, and even learn from one’s engagement with fiction, precisely because one knows how to keep the fictional world at the right distance from the actual world. Engaging with fiction, in this sense, is a way of disciplining the imagination which may serve as a model for the discipline of the imaginings about one’s life that according to Spinoza is the key to one’s happiness.

References

Currie, Gregory (1990), The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Evans, Gareth, (1982), The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Evans, Gareth, (1985), “Molyneux’s Question”, in Collected Papers, Oxford: Clarendon, 364-399.

García‐Carpintero, Manuel (2019), “Normative Fiction‐Making and the World of the Fiction”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 77, 3, 267-279.

Kant, Immanuel (1781/1787), Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Kim, Jaegwon (1993), Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spinoza, Baruch (1677), Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order, translated by Edwin Curley in The Collected Writings of Spinoza, vol. 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Stock, Kathleen (2017), Only Imagine, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Strawson, Peter (1959), Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen.

Strawson, Peter (1966), The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, London: Methuen.

Walton, Kendall (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press.