Gregory Currie has noted, there are genuine emotions in life that are not
connected with any disposition to immediate action, for example, emotions in
response to planning to do something later.^39 Why should we not then say that
our emotional responses to fictions and to abstract works are also real, even if
they do not dispose us to any immediate actions? And yet we may still wonder
how this is possible.
Robinson on affective appraisals: denying (3)
To move away from accounts that emphasize pretending, making believe,
and simulating to an account that emphasizes the fact of full-blooded emo-
tional response is to retract (3) straightforwardly and to hold that we can be
directly moved by the career and fate of a fictional subject or a depicted
subject matter, even when subject or subject matter have no further exist-
ence apart from the work. Why should we not say this? It seems possible for
me to care directly about numbers of things that do not exist: say, perfect
justice, my own fluent performance of Bach’s cello suites, or the future of my
children. But while this is a start, and (3) is false, it remains puzzling how we
come to care about the careers of fictional characters and to respond to
representations of nonactual subject matter. When I care about the future
of my children, I care about something that will matter to them and to me.
They will live through their futures in some measures or absences of happi-
ness and meaningfulness. They will experience them. But just what are the
mechanics of the process of coming to care about a fictional protagonist?
Jenefer Robinson has argued that an emotional response in general,
whether to actual or fictional events, is rooted in“a non-cognitive affective
appraisal [of a situation] followed by physiological changes of a certain
sort,”^40 as in when one is startled by a loud noise or made afraid by the
sudden onrush of a large bird. Though such immediate responses may often
be“followed in turn by a cognitive appraisal of the situation (each aspect of
the process feeding back upon the other)”^41 – was that a gunshot or an
innocent backfire?–they first occur automatically and below the thresholds
(^39) Currie,“The Capacities that Enablue Us to Produce and Consume Art,”pp. 297–98.
(^40) Robinson,Deeper than Reason, p. 144. See the discussion of Robinson on emotion in
Chapter 4 above.
(^41) Ibid.
Art and emotion 213