These three claims are paradoxical, since any pair of them entails the
negation of the third. Such paradoxes can readily be generated for other
media of art as well. Why can, do, or should we care about Cézanne’sBathers,
for there are no bathers really there, but only blobs of paint? Why should we
care whether Luke Skywalker will destroy the Death Star, since there is no
real Luke Skywalker, but only beams of light that project an image of an
actor? Why care about music, which is nothing but sound that signifies, so it
seems, nothing? Perhaps we should say,“well wedocare about arranged
paint, arranged sound, and fictional plots, and any theory of emotional
response must take account of these obvious facts.”But while this remark
may be true, it does not yet explain exactly how or why we care.
One way out of this paradox is to deny (2) and to hold that Anna Karenina,
though she does not exist in our actual world, is a fictional subject who exists
in some possible world, a fictional world.^5 The novel that bears her name is
then regarded as a description of the doings of Anna Karenina and other
fictional subjects. In this way, we can, among other things, seemingly explain
how certain sentences are true, for example,“Anna Karenina is married to a
dull bureaucrat.”Though this sentence is not true in our world, it is–so it is
held–true in or of some possible world, the nonexistent, fictional,“real”but
possible-not-actual world of the novel.
The difficulty with this maneuver is that it displaces rather than answers
the difficult question of why we can, do, or should care about Anna’s career
and fate. First of all, it is unclear what the identity conditions are for possible
objects or subjects. How many possible Anna Kareninas are there? Is the
possible Anna Karenina with a shorter haircut different from the possible
Anna Karenina with a longer one?^6 But even if we overcome our scruples
about talk of possibilia, including possible subjects, it remains mysterious
why we should care about them and their doings. They cannot talk to us, feel
(^5) See, for example, Thomas G. Pavel,Fictional Worlds(Cambridge, MA; Harvard University
Press, 1986). Broadly speaking, Nelson Goodman’s work on all descriptions, including
what we take to be scientific descriptions of our actual world, as our inventions that
highlight one way of being interested in things rather than neutral recordings of the real,
is sympathetic to this approach. See Goodman,Ways of World-making(Indianapolis, IN:
Hackett, 1978).
(^6) This is, of course, Quine’s criticism of possibilia-talk in general as unintelligible. See
W. V. O. Quine,“On What There Is,”in W. V. O. Quine,From a Logical Point of View,
revised edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 1–19.
Art and emotion 203