the inverses of pity and fear: admiration and exhilaration. We admire
another who accomplishes what we too think worth accomplishing or wish
to accomplish; we are exhilarated in imagining ourselves doing likewise.
Openness to emotions of this kind that involve seeing oneself in another is
part of the human form of life from very early ages on.^62 The structure of
these emotions allows us to make some sense of the claims of Danto and
Cohen that metaphorical identification is a natural human ability that can be
exercised in both life and art, without recourse to quasi-emotions or to make-
believe. In sympathizing, being apprehensive, fearing, and pitying, and also
in admiring and being exhilarated, we see ourselves as Anna Karenina or
Luke Skywalker, in that we take ourselves immediately to share with them a
common humanity, with all its liabilities and prospects. The kind of thing
that happens to them might happen to us. In reading or viewing their
careers, we have the sense not so much that wearethem or are simulating
their point of view, but rather that a common humanity with common
liabilities and prospects is distributed among us, audiences and fictional
protagonists alike.
To have our emotions subjected to catharsis^63 is then to have these
emotions clarified: to have it made clear to one the kinds of things–actions,
events, incidents, characters, gestures–that are properly pitiable, fearful,
admirable, exhilarating, and so on for human beings such as we are. In
dwelling reflectively at length on the details of particular cases, it can become
evident that emotions are partly matters of immediate fellow-feeling but
partly also matters of rational understanding of and response to shared
human problems, possibilities, and liabilities. As Aristotle and Walton both
hold, the work of the catharsis of emotion makes our emotions both more
stable and more reasonably apt to their objects in life as well as in art.
Many more things are pitiable, fearful, admirable, and exhilarating, how-
ever, and properly so, than Aristotle supposed.ContraAristotle, we do not(^62) On the basis of fieldwork with great apes and with children, Michael Tomasello argues
that seeing others as having a point of view, being able to identify with them, being able
to imagine oneself having that point of view are abilities that are unique to human
beings. These abilities have a biological basis, but they then emerge explicitly only
through socialization progressively from the age of six months to into the third year.
See Tomasello,Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. These are also leading ideas of Witt-
genstein’sinPhilosophical Investigations.
(^63) See the discussion of the catharsis of emotions in Chapter 2 above.
220 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art