their situations.”^27 All of these suggestions seem apt answers to the first
question of why we play such games. But they sidestep the second question:
what is the relation between quasi-emotions and genuine emotions? If they
are not identical–as Walton surely intends in calling them quasi-emotions–
and quasi-emotions are only the phenomenological or felt accompaniments
of genuine emotions, then how exactly are skills of responding with genuine
emotion trained by experiencing quasi-emotions? How do we arrive by pre-
tending at deepened awareness of which genuine emotions it is appropriate
to feel when in daily life? Walton can reply to these questions that fictional
or quasi-emotions are not identical with genuine ones, but are close enough
that practice in response via quasi-emotions carries over into training in
emotional response in daily life. But if quasi-emotions and genuine emotions
are thus brought close together, then the termsquasi-emotionandfictional
emotionseem introduced to solve the problem of tragedy by verbal fiat, for we
seem in having quasi-emotions to care a good deal about Anna Karenina,
Emma Bovary, King Lear, and so on, and this is what was initially puzzling.
We can see the same dilemma troubling Jerrold Levinson’s similar
account of emotional response to music. Along Walton’s lines, Levinson
claims that we feel emotions such as grief and sadness in response to music,
but not in a“full-fledged”^28 way. The appropriate object of awareness (some-
thing really to be sadabout) and physiological responses (crying or doing
something about it) are largely absent. As a result, it is only“somethingvery
much likethe arousal of negative emotions”^29 that we experience in listening
to sad or mournful music. Often weimagineourselves to experience the
emotion expressed.^30 Like Walton, Levinson suggests that the benefits of
the experience of somethingvery much likean emotion or of imagining oneself
to experience an emotion include enjoyment, understanding, reassurance
that one is capable of powerful feeling, coherent work-guided development
of an emotion, emotional closure, and a sense of oneself as having expressive
power. But here too we must ask, are the quasi-emotions or imagined emo-
tions real emotions? If they are quite unlike them, then the significance of
experiencing them for our regular emotional life is unclear. If they are quite
(^27) Ibid., p. 257.
(^28) Jerrold Levinson,“Music and Negative Emotion,”inMusic and Meaning, ed. Jenefer
Robinson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 215–41 at p. 217.
(^29) Ibid. (^30) Seeibid., pp. 234–36.
Art and emotion 209