A Philosophy of Emoting (original) (raw)

Journal of Narrative Theory, 2004

Abstract

This study examines the experience of stirring up emotion in reaction to fiction. Contemporary theoreticians call this experience narrative emotion, while philosophers traditionally use the expression aesthetic emotion. Unlike most of the existing literature on the topic, this research takes a phenomenological approach to studying narrative/aesthetic emotion. The purpose of this investigation is to target the essence of narrative emotion, to list its components so as to develop a functional understanding of what philosophers refer to as 'aesthetic emotion'. This may lead us to a better understanding of the cultural and psychological need for fiction. This research considers fiction in a very broad perspective. It embraces any representational art that uses mimesis to narrate a story. In this manner, I use the term virtual world interchangeably with fiction, perhaps because this expression evokes new means of conveying fiction-like virtual reality. My approach consciously rejects fiction as a material object. I am not interested in the format itself. From this perspective, fiction can be conveyed in the form of books, plays, screenplays, films, operas, interactive media, art installations, etc. It is a construction of an author or authors that takes form through the workings of the spectator's imagination. This analysis concentrates on fiction as a practice. It is solely concerned with the virtual world as a cognitive and affective phenomenon. Taken in its functional sense and seen as a performance, fiction consists in the practice of viewing a drama, a film, a puppet show, an opera, reading a book or interacting. In the first part of this analysis I expose how the empiricists' influence in the seventeenth century has lead to a viable study of aesthetics. However, studying aesthetics and studying aesthetic emotions are two different things.Because philosophy has a strong tradition of rational approaches, which does not leave much room for emotion, it is only since the 1970s that contemporary philosophers have started to address aesthetic emotion. And, since the late 1980s, philosophers who have had interest in aesthetic emotion actually focused obtusely on logic. In fact, currently the little written on the topic of aesthetic emotion relates to a logical conundrum, the paradox that fictional stimuli produce "real" emotions. Contemporary philosophers keep approaching emotion with logic and this very stance leads to the paradox. In the second part, I flash-back in philosophical time to the 1970s, in order to debate Kendall Walton's notion of 'quasi-emotion' and dispute his arguments in regard to the necessity for motor reaction. This detour will be useful for two reasons: because Walton's theory has the intrinsic merit of probing the specificity of narrative emotion and, more especially, because Walton addresses one major specific trait: the non-voluntary reaction In the third part, I target a few more specific traits of narrative emotion. I observe that the chief characteristic of narrative emotion pertains to the fact that it is an emotion felt for the sake of someone, or something, else: a virtual other. Narrative emotion is an emotion by proxy. Another trait of narrative emotion is that it leads to a voluntary passivity. I explain this voluntary passivity with the concepts of pathivity and symbolic embodiment. For the sake of clarity and brevity, using Robert J. Yanal’s terms “emoter” in order to signify the agent feeling a narrative emotion, and “emoting” to refer to the state of being aroused by a fiction-generated emotion will lead to conclude that emoting is a non-motor, purposeless reaction that takes place for its own sake. Or rather, for the absurd sake of fusion with a virtual other. Emoting finds its stimulus in a representation, in a virtual realm and reacts to it emotionally in a way similar to real-life experience of other beings.

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