terrifying scene that makes me laugh instead of making me afraid. In
such cases, it is not clear how the make-believe plus quasi-emotion
structure could help me to understand what is happening. Naturally, one
would say that it wasn’t scary, or that I just didn’t feel for any of the
characters. But for Walton that was never a possibility. Why is it that
sometimes we experience quasi-fear and sometimes we don’t, given that we
are just as willing to make-believe in each case? This is no less mysterious
than the problem we began with.
Second, just as there are times when I do not feel anything in response
to the performance, so there are times when I do feel something, but
I very strongly wish that I hadn’t. At a grotesquely sentimental play for
children, I might weep as the naïve but war-stricken boy is finally
reunited with his long-lost horse. But I hate myself for being so suscep-
tible to this trash. Naturally, I would say what Walton cannot: that
I pitied the boy and his horse, even though I didn’t want to. And there is
nothing strange or irrational about feeling something and wishing
I didn’t. Walton, however, would have to say that I make-believed not
only the boy, the horse and the reunion, but also that I make-believed my
own pity–the same pity that Ifind myself so disappointing for being
unable to control. The idea that I am make-believing both a story and an
emotional response to that story that both has the force of bringing me to
tears and also disgusts me is, to put it mildly, not a very intuitive account
of what is going on. It’s much simpler to forget about the make-believe
and say that the boy–horse reunion made me feel a genuine pity that
I wish I hadn’t felt. The position that we are seeking to reject is the
irrational one of holding all three inconsistent claims, above. But it’s not
clear that the picture offered by Walton of me make-believing emotions
that I detest is in any way more rational that the picture of me feeling
sorry for characters I know not to exist.^15
Denying 2: we don’t always know that the characters aren’t real
Denials of the second claim are relatively rare, but we have come across
one of them already. In our discussion of theatre and illusion, we noted
Stendhal’s view that, for brief moments during a performance, the spec-
tator really does believe that what she is seeing is real (moments of‘per-
fect illusion’). Thus, one can explain why I ‘cry so copiously’ at the
theatre: for brief moments, I believe I am seeing Vanya, not the actor
playing him; and I believe that Vanya exists. Needless to say, my belief is
false; but many people are scared of plenty of things that they falsely
believe to exist (hell, for example) and there is nothing strange about that.
I am very sympathetic to the idea that, for brief moments during the
performance, we really are experiencing perfect illusion. We can get
Emotions 135