Instead, then, offeeling actualemotions, Waltonproposesthat wemake-believe
that we feel them. It is“fictional that we feel sorrow or terror.”^21 We imagine,
pretend, or make-believe that there are these people, and we imagine, pretend,
or make-believe feeling appropriate emotions in response to their actions and
plights. When we do this, we can frequently feel what Walton calls quasi-
emotions, such as quasi-fear or quasi-terror. Feeling these involves having
“constellations of sensations or other phenomenological experiences character-
istic of real emotions”^22 – the felt quality of terror, say, but without the belief
that anyone is in danger. Since we do not feel real emotions, the problem of
tragedy collapses: there is no need to explain why we feel full-blooded painful
emotions. (Walton notes, by the way, that there can be cases where we do feel
full-blooded painful emotions as well as quasi-emotions. For example, we might
make-believe in watching Eisenstein’sfilmIvan the Terriblethat we are actually
seeing people being slaughtered and so have quasi-emotions, but also feel
genuine sorrow toward the actual, historical victims of the tyrant.^23 He also
notes that being sad or sorrowful is not always in itself an unpleasant experi-
ence. Though what we are sad or sorrowful about may be unpleasant, it may be
appropriate to feel sadness or sorrow, and one may enjoy feeling
appropriately.^24 )
As Walton is well aware, however, this way of solving the problem of
tragedy immediately raises the questions of why we play such games of
imagining, pretending, or making-believe and of what the relation is between
the quasi-emotions that occur in the playing of these games and real emo-
tions in daily life. Why do and should we bother to feel even quasi-emotions,
since these may themselves be genuinely painful?^25 “What is to be gained
fromfictionallycaring?”Walton asks.“What is in it for us? Why do we
participate?”^26 Among the answers that Walton suggests are that we are
trying out skills of emotional response, that we are purging ourselves of
emotions, that it is enjoyable to do such things, and, above all, that by
game-playing audiences arrive at“deepened awareness of themselves and(^21) Ibid., p. 256. (^22) Ibid., p. 251. (^23) Ibid., p. 256. (^24) Ibid., p. 257.
(^25) Alex Neill notes that Walton remains committed to the view that we do actually feel
something(phenomenologically) in response to some fictional representations. “On
[Walton’s] view,”Neill observes, we can actually bemovedby works of fiction, but it is
make-believe that what we are movedtoisfear.”(Alex Neill,“Fear, Fiction, and Make-
Believe,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism49, 1 (winter 1991), pp. 47–56 at pp. 49B–50A.)
(^26) Ibid., p. 272; emphasis added.
208 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art