all there is to it. For example, the parallel with Vanya is not helpful.
My pity for Vanya is not a general mood; I know exactly what the object
of pity is: it is Vanya, wasting his life away working for a thoughtless,
vain academic whose wife he is desperately in love with. Third, suppose
you tell me a story about a girl who suffers a series of terrible misfortunes.
Suppose, too, that I don’t know whether or not the story is true. In such a
case, before knowing whether or not the story is true, I might be justified
in pitying the girl. It doesn’t seem as though I need to believe in her
existence in order to pity her. But here, still, we don’t quite have what
we’re after. In the case of the story of the girl, I don’t know whether she
exists or not. In the case of Vanya, I know full well he doesn’t exist, and
still I pity him. So even if we changed the third claim such that we feel
emotions for things, the existence of which is unknown to us, we haven’t
come any closer to understanding my pity for Vanya.
It is perfectly true that, although they help us to modify 3, none of
these kinds of emotion helps us to explain how I pity Vanya, knowing
that he does not exist. But they do suggest that we ought to be more
liberal about the kinds of emotions we have (and their causes) than
3 would suggest. They point to the possibility of ways of experiencing
emotion which are not as simple as, say, fearing the tiger that is directly
before my eyes. And if all of these various ways of experiencing emotion
are possible, then why is it impossible to experience emotion in relation
to afictional character? We feel things based on certain triggers. Some-
times we understand what those triggers are; sometimes we don’t. Of
course, sometimes when I feel fear, it’s the fear that this particular tiger is
going to eat me immediately. And sometimes I feel pity for a real person
facing a difficult situation. But I can experience fear without there being
any particular thing that I’m afraid of; and I can also feel pity for a little
girl you tell me about, before I know whether or not the story is true.
So why assume that I can’t feel for Vanya, whose story is so pitiable, who
suffers as I watch him? What we’re effectively suggesting here is that my
feelings for Vanya simply prove that we can feel for things that we
believe not to exist. So it’s just not true that we feel for things only when
we believe they exist (i.e. 3 is false), just because I can experience emo-
tions forfictional characters. Of course, sometimes when I pity a person,
I believe that they exist; but sometimes I don’t. As it happens, in Vanya’s
case, I don’t. Now, it is clear that for some philosophers the fact that
I know that Vanya doesn’t exist means I can’t pity him; but one might
respond that, for others, the fact that I pity Vanya means that I can pity
things when I know they don’t exist. This is something of an impasse,
and it’s not clear where we can go from here. But we might note that, of
the three claims we have considered, this third claim looks the least
firmly grounded.
Emotions 137