An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art

like them, then we are back with the puzzle of how and why we havethemin

response to“mere sound.”

Susan Feagin suggests a solution along Walton’s lines in proposing that in

reading with feeling we often simulate the emotions and feelings of the

characters we encounter. Perhaps what Walton calls the experience of

quasi-emotion is better understood as a matter of taking oneself to be or to

be in the position of the protagonist of a representation and so“feeling with”

that figure. Both in ordinary life and when reading,

One can shift or slide into a psychological“gear”wherein one uses one’s own

mind to model what another person does psychologically (the mental activity

that person engages in) under certain conditions. This [modeling] activity is

crucial to empathizing with actual people, and a similar phenomenon figures

importantly in those emotional and affective responses known as empathizing

with a fictional character...One empathizes with a fictional character, whom

I shall call the protagonist, when one“shares”an emotion, feeling, desire, or

mood of that character. The“sharing”...is donethrough a simulation, which

explains not only what emotion or affect one has but also how one can come to

be in the phenomenological state identified with that affect.^31

As in Walton’s account, the problem of how we respond with emotion to the

plights of nonexistent characters is dissolved. There are no such actual

characters, but we pretend that there are, and we further imagine that we

are they. We simulate their doings and feelings, and so come ourselves to

feel. The difference from Walton is that what we feel in simulating the

mental activities of fictional characters are, according to Feagin, real emo-

tions. Her account seems to capture much of what people mean when they

remark that in reading a fiction (or watching a movie or a play) they learn

“what it is like”to be another person.

But is Feagin’s account of what happens quite right? Do I, for example,

feel bitter vengefulness, masking my own feelings of a love I will not myself

profess, toward Cordelia, when she refuses to proclaim her love publicly in

empty clichés? Lear feels that toward her, and I am intensely interested in

(^31) Susan L. Feagin,Reading with Feeling(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 85–86,
81; emphasis added. Gregory Currie develops a similar simulationist view in“The Moral
Psychology of Fiction,”Australasian Journal of Philosophy73 (1995), pp. 250–59, and“Realism
of Character and the Value of Fiction,”inAesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection,ed.
Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 161–81.
210 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art