An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

many, given the time pressure, felt and acted fairly immediately. The

greeting card is formulaic, even clichéd. While it expresses an emotion in

one sense of“express”–it gets it out–and invites a response, there is no

clarification of that emotion’s specific bases and meaning. It is, perhaps,

more described and even simulated rather than articulated and clarified.

This is not to be scorned; a simulation of an emotion might itself both

express a deep and genuine one and invite a deep and genuine response.

Perhaps, for example, it is important, for whatever reason, for the parties to

relationships in which the exchange of this card might figure to acknowledge

and accept the full ordinariness and yet value of their lives together. Yet the

card can also seem hollowly sentimental. In the third case, the response that

is invited is more a matter of specific engagement and feeling-with, rather

than the upsurge of an emotion that is independently describable and suit-

able to other occasions. Unlike Larry and either a giver or the writer of the

greeting card, the protagonist, Lambert Strether, is a fictional character who

does not, in the most obvious sense, exist.

Just what is going on when we are absorbed in and moved by the career

and fate of Lambert Strether? How is our being moved related to the fact that

we encounter him in an artistic representation, a supreme work of fiction?

How do learning and the development of feeling, as opposed both to felt

response immediately discharged in action and to formula, figure in an

emotional response to art?

The paradox of fiction

To some theorists, emotional responses tofictionseem toposea special problem

that can be summed up in the following paradox developed by Colin Radford.^4

1. We are moved by the career and fate of Anna Karenina (for example).


2. Anna Karenina does not exist, and we know this.


3. Being moved by the career and fate of a subject requires belief in the real
   existence of that subject; it is impossible really to care about something
   that one knows does not exist.

(^4) Colin Radford,“How can We be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?,”Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, supplementary vol. 49 (1975), pp. 67–80. Radford’s own conclusion is
that“our being moved in certain ways by works of art, though very‘natural’to us and in
that way only too intelligible, involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence”(p. 78).
202 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art