of consciousness and control. Such immediate responses to potential dangers
(as well as to pleasures) are presumably evolutionarily adaptive, and they are
indifferent to any distinction between the real and the fictional. “Pre-
cognitive affective appraisals do not discriminate between real and imagined
scenarios.”^42 All that is necessary for immediate affective appraisal is the
mere thought that I or something“like‘me or mine’”^43 faces some threat or
promise of success. When I am reading, Anna Karenina is enough like me or
mine to solicit an immediate affective appraisal. We need not worry about
whether it is Anna herself (the fictional character), the mere thought of Anna
and the onrushing train, or some real world counterpart of Anna about
whom we feel.^44 We are involved in imaginatively experiencing Anna-in-
danger, and that is enough to initiate affective appraisal.
At the same time, however, we do always already know that we are
reading a fiction or watching a movie, and how we while knowing this
continue to be emotionally involved over time in the events presented
remains something of a puzzle. Caring for what happens to Anna in the
course of the development of her relationship with Vronsky does not seem
very much like being startled by a loud noise. As Dr. Johnson famously
observed,“the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first
act to the last, that the stage is only a stage and that the players are only
players.”^45 Robinson can reply that immediate, noncognitive affective
appraisal still lies at the basis of our continuing emotional involvements,
themselves now subjected in part to reflective control. This line of thought
seems, however, not to explain why we actively seek out and maintain our
interest over time in complex nonactual objects of emotional involvement.Danto and Cohen on powers of attentive involvement
Perhaps it is simpler and more accurate, then, simply to accept without
explanation the thought that we are emotionally involved with the doings
and fates of nonactual beings and to take for granted the thought that works
of fiction are made in order to invite and sustain such involvements. Arthur(^42) Ibid., p. 145. (^43) Ibid., p. 139. (^44) Ibid., p. 145.
(^45) Samuel Johnson,Preface to Shakespeare’s Plays(Menston: Scholar Press, 1969), p. 27; cited
in Alex Neill,“Art and Emotion,”inThe Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson
(Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 421–35 at p. 428.
214 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art