Vincenzo Grasso is a PhD student in Aesthetics both at the University of Genoa and at the University of Milan. He is part of the research project The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts (P.E.A.). His interests concern sensory imagination and its connection to the experience of literary works.
A post by Vincenzo Grasso
“Emma was not sleeping, she was pretending to be asleep; and while he dozed off next to her, she would grow more wakeful, dreaming other dreams. [...] Often, from the top of a mountain, they suddenly caught sight of splendid city with domes, bridges, ships, groves of lemon trees, and cathedrals of white marble on whose sharp steeples storks were nesting. [...] And then, one evening, they would arrive at a village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliff and the line of shanties. It was here that they would stay and make a life for themselves; they would live in a low house, with a flat roof, shaded by a palm tree, at the far end of a bay, by the edge of the sea. ”
(Flaubert 2010/1857, pp. 171-172)
Emma Bovary, in the grip of her torment, finds comfort in imagining pleasant scenes, often, as is well known, in the company of her favourite novels, or else, as in the passage quoted above, on her own. The imaginative pleasure Emma seeks is, however, to be understood as a maladaptive response, symptomatic of a profound dissatisfaction with her life. At the same time, we should not make the mistake of thinking that this pleasure is always tied to dangerous forms of escapism or wishful thinking. Taking pleasure in imagination is, after all, extremely common. On a tedious afternoon at work, we may take pleasure in imagining ourselves on a beach, lulled by the sound of the waves and the coolness of the breeze. In the absence of a loved one, we may comfort ourselves by calling up a representation of their face. Or again, after visiting the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, one might try to prolong the pleasure once felt before the sculptural beauty of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by reconstructing it in imagination.
How should we identify the source of such imaginative pleasure? One possible answer is to locate the pleasure in the content of the mental act: what is pleasurable about my imagining is a content that would itself be pleasurable to perceive. Since sensory imagination preserves, at least in part, the phenomenal character of the perceptual experience it aims to capture, it seems plausible to say that, in cases where one takes pleasure in imagining, this is because the content itself is something one would enjoy experiencing perceptually. One would no doubt take even greater pleasure in actually being on a beach, or in the company of a loved one, or before the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa; but in their absence, why not settle for imagining?
Although this hypothesis has a certain appeal, I do not think it captures the only pleasure afforded by imaginative activity. There may also be, as others have suggested, a pleasure explained by the exercise of the activity itself, independently of its content (Feagin 1984; see also Picciuto 2009 for an analogous claim in the case of supposition). As Feagin argues, this is an activity in which we would not take pleasure if, instead of imagining, we were actually perceiving. Her central example is fictional literature, where the pleasure afforded by the exercise of sensory imagination does not necessarily depend on a content we would enjoy perceiving. Some of the main reasons offered in support of this view can be grouped under three arguments: the argument from sensory enhancement or substitution; the argument from neutral content; and the argument from negative content. In all three cases, what we imagine is not necessarily something we would enjoy experiencing.
The argument from sensory enhancement or substitution holds that, given the characteristically weakened nature of imagined sensations, we ought to derive greater pleasure if, while reading, our experience were enriched by real sensations, or even replaced by them altogether. Yet this does not seem to be so. If, while reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), my experience were supplemented even only by illustrations of what is being described, I might say, on the contrary, that the pleasure had been taken away from me and that my attention had been redirected elsewhere. The argument from neutral content and the argument from negative content share a similar structure. Would I really take more pleasure in finding myself before the puddle described by Alain Robbe-Grillet in Snapshots (1962), or before the stoning scene in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery (1948)? In the first case, it is plausible that the sight of a puddle would provoke nothing but indifference. And yet literature often offers descriptions of neutral contents that still prompt the exercise of sensory imagination: interiors, inventories of objects, scenes of extreme ordinariness. Nothing in any of this seems to discourage the exercise, or the pleasure that may be drawn from it. As for negative content, it is certainly plausible that some readers may be discouraged from imagining, and that the more sensitive among them may even be led to stop reading. Even granting this, however, what should we say about those who, having developed a taste for horror, take pleasure precisely in imagining gruesome scenes that they would in no way want to undergo?
As Feagin suggests, the cases discussed so far admit of an alternative explanation, one that appeals to imaginative activity itself, without referring back to a pleasurable content to be perceived, and thus frees imaginative experience from being conceived merely as a repetition of perceptual experience. If the phenomenology of imagination is not exhausted by being a repetition of sensory experience, how are we to vindicate its specificity and thereby better understand its distinctive pleasure? According to Robert Hopkins (2024), echoing and revisiting a view already introduced by Fabian Dorsch (2012), imagining bears a fundamental connection to agency. This is because, unlike perception, whose character is at least partly receptive, imagining is wholly spontaneous, if by “spontaneous” we mean something that originates within the self. More precisely, the notion of spontaneity at work here links imagining to agency through control: imagining is spontaneous because it arises from that part of the self that is responsible for control, namely the agent. In this sense, the phenomenology of imaginative experience reflects its agential nature. We are the authors of our imaginings: when they are deliberate, we can exercise control over them; and when they escape our will, we can at least try to regain that control.
At least in deliberate cases, the exercise of control allows us not only to initiate or terminate our imaginings, but also to do much more besides. We can shape the development of our imaginings and intervene in various ways in the process by which sensory representations are formed. We can decide whether to imagine from the inside or from the outside; choose the sensory modality of the experience; try to increase the level of detail by making the content more determinate; or heighten the intensity of sensory qualities such as brightness or volume. At the same time, because the representations formed are not as stable as those of perception, it falls to us to try to hold them in place rather than letting them slip away. We may also try to alter spatial relations, or we can draw on combinatory operations to produce more complex, sometimes even creative, representations. My suggestion is that, from this perspective, imaginative experience is rich enough to be rewarding in its own right, without functioning merely as a substitute for sensory experience. In this way, the proposal to locate imaginative pleasure in the activity itself can be understood in light of its agential character. What is at stake, in other words, is a pleasure taken in a particular exercise of one’s own mental agency: the pleasure of imaginative agency.
It is tempting to treat the pleasure of imaginative agency as belonging to the broader family of pleasures of agency (Montero 2016, Nguyen 2019). Some pleasures of agency are connected with movement and bodily awareness, as in dance. But there are also pleasures of agency that belong to the mental sphere, such as those enjoyed by the chess player in the course of decision-making, or by the philosopher trying to bring an additional distinction into view within logical space. These pleasures of mental agency are likewise connected with a form of inner awareness, often described in terms of concentration or absorption. Imagining itself is an experience of inner awareness, one in which the focus shifts from the outer world to the inner one, and it can give rise to states of great concentration or absorption, symptomatic of intense involvement of the reader with the work.
Then, through Flaubert’s description, we allow ourselves to be guided in the unfolding of our imaginings. Thus we first shape, for instance, the low house, then make a flat roof and a palm tree appear upon it; after that, we place the same house within a gulf, by the seashore. Contrary to what others have thought in criticizing this model of literary engagement (Kivy 1973), this is not a “cinematic model”, in which we enjoy scenes passing across the silver screen of consciousness. On the contrary, we are involved in an experience that is agential through and through. Although the discussion so far has focused on fictional literature, the exercise of sensory imagination can just as well be guided by non-fiction, from the cities of Asia described in Marco Polo’s Travels to the memoirs of Annie Ernaux. It might be that, rather than its status as fictional or not, it is the literariness of a work that calls for a certain model of engagement (Langkau 2025). The great applicability of sensory imagining in literature is reflected in the familiar tendency of readers to enjoy how literary artefacts “spark” or “ignite” our imagination. One of the functions of literary artefacts may be to crystallise the pleasure of imaginative agency: to gather, refine, and concentrate such pleasures. In this respect, their merit as “technologies of the imagination” may lie precisely in giving vigour to our imaginative agency, assisting us in the construction of other worlds: some real, some possible, some fantastical.
Even if sensory imagining is often used to provide pleasure in place of a real experience, reducing its hedonic function to that would, in my view, risk undermining its power. There is at least one pleasure of imagining capable of escaping this picture: the pleasure of imaginative agency, which offers an experience that is rewarding and phenomenologically rich. In a mental life partly shaped by personal desires and concerns, such that we often find ourselves imagining something pleasant or unpleasant depending on circumstance, literary artefacts can reveal an alternative source of imaginative pleasure.
References
Dorsch, Fabian. 2012. The Unity of Imagining. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Feagin, Susan L. 1984. “Some Pleasures of Imagination.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1): 41-55.
Hopkins, Robert. 2024. The Profile of Imagining. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kivy, Peter. 1973. “Reading and Representation.” In Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences, 55-83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Langkau, Julia. 2025. “Imaginative Freedom and Epistemic Constraints in the Context of Literary Text.” In Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind, edited by Fotini Vassiliou, Efi Kyprianidou, and Katerina Bantinaki, 45-60. London: Bloomsbury.
Montero, Barbara Gail. 2016. “The Pleasure of Movement and the Awareness of the Self.” In Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind, 178-191. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Picciuto, Elizabeth. 2009. “The Pleasures of Suppositions.” Philosophical Psychology 22 (4): 487-503.