paradigm, central case of understanding something to be the recognitive
perception of an object present to the senses. They perhaps feel an urge to
explain in detail how we identify with and understand characters in fictional
texts (or presented subjects in paintings and works of music) in part because
the understanding of these works seems so much less clear to them than
telling a hawk from a handsaw, since there is no actual object present to be
recognized, apart from the physical vehicle itself. Something like the
imaginative processing of information taken from the mere physical marks
or sounds out of which a work is constituted must be going on, they may
think, and it seems reasonable to try to say what that processing-in-
imagination is.
Danto and Cohen perhaps feel this urge less strongly. They are less
oriented toward recognitive perception as the central cognitive act, and they
are struck by the primitive mystery and wonder of the fact that we some-
times do manage, somehow and to some degree, to understand another
person in real life. To them, it seems more apt and useful to compare the
imaginative understanding of art to this primitive, mysterious, and wonder-
ful understanding of another. We have no account of the mechanisms of
processing through which we do this, and any account that might be offered
of these mechanisms seems likely to miss or betray the distinctiveness of
what we understand about another. For them, seeing oneself as another, in
an act of imaginative apprehension or metaphorical identification, is a
mysteriously emergent and unanalyzable human ability. Our feeling with
and about another then attaches directly to apt exercises of this ability.Aristotle on catharsis
Even if, however, we cannot aptly specify the mechanics of imaginative
metaphorical identification and attendant emotional response, we might
nonetheless wonderwhatwe tend most persistently and strongly to identify
with in others, in art and in life, when we see ourselves“in”them. In the
PoeticsAristotle takes up this question, as he argues that the function of
tragedy is to accomplish“by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such
emotions.”^59 Just what does Aristotle mean by pity (eleos) and terror (deos;(^59) Aristotle,Poetics,p.7.
218 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art