Emotions
Emotions
To explain the complex history of the role of the emotions in art, this entry comprises three essays:
The first is an overview of the topic of emotions in the history of aesthetics, that is, how emotions are expressed, evoked, or otherwise (re)present(ed) in art. Then there is one essay each on how this topic has been understood in connection with literature and music, two art forms in which the topic of emotions has been a major artistic and philosophical concern. For related discussion, see Expression Theory of Art; Katharsis; Literature, article on Literary Aesthetics; Music, overview article; Pleasure; and Romanticism.An Overview
The history of emotions in aesthetics is bound up with the fate of emotions in philosophy. The history of the treatment of emotions in philosophy, however, is a history of abuse, often tempered with fear and awe. Insofar as (what we now call) aesthetics has been bound up with the expression of emotion, it has been sometimes villainized, often marginalized, irregularly celebrated, and sometimes even worshiped. Plato and Aristotle vigorously debated the place of the arts in the good life and the good society, and much of that debate had to do with the role and effects of emotions in the arts. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam witnessed many disagreements within and between themselves concerning the place of music and “graven images” in their respective religions, at least in part because of the emotional effects of art in the context of the larger emotion of faith and what is variously understood as spirituality. The history of modern (Western) philosophy—at least as it is usually taught and included on syllabi today—gives relatively scant recognition to either the arts or aesthetics, first of all because they do not fit into the largely epistemological and metaphysical program that has gripped so much of philosophy since the seventeenth century but also because philosophy has so keenly allied itself with reason and science that there is little room for the appreciation of art and the emotions art expresses and evokes. This picture is challenged, of course, by many philosophers, especially in Germany. Immanuel Kant praised the arts and the production of beauty despite the fact that he was so famously awed by “the starry skies above and the moral law within.” G. W. F. Hegel recognized the arts as one of the penultimate expressions of cosmic “Spirit”; Arthur Schopenhauer recommended the contemplation of beauty as a temporary respite from the ravages of the Will, and Friedrich Nietzsche celebrated art (at least in his early philosophy) as the highest form of human activity. Nevertheless, for much of the twentieth century, especially in England and the United States, both aesthetics and emotions were all but ignored. Today, however, both aesthetics and the study of emotions are flourishing in philosophy.
Insofar as philosophy has grown up as the pursuit of reason, the emotions have always lurked in the background, as a threat to reason and a danger to philosophy and philosophers. One of the most enduring models of reason and emotion has been the metaphor of master and slave, reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channeled or, ideally, in harmony with reason. Plato and later Horace compared the emotions to a spirited horse. The arts, accordingly, have often been viewed in the context of this metaphor, as a dangerous provocation and stimulus to the emotions, as a relatively safe and socially acceptable channel for expressing emotion, as emotional support and accompaniment for the right way defined by reason. The same philosopher or philosophy, however, might warn against one art or one set of emotions and encourage another. The different arts have often been deemed of different value because of the emotions they tend to express or evoke, and different emotions have been variously valued on the basis of their different roles in the philosophy, social life, and religion of a people. To mention just two outstanding examples, Plato condemns flute music as conducive to licentiousness, but he defends and encourages drama that supports the emotions of good citizenship. Nietzsche praises those arts (especially music) that evoke the grand passions he summarizes in the phrase “will to power,” but he condemns literature that encourages such oversentimental and self-demeaning emotions as pity and resentment. The history of emotions in aesthetics is rarely so simpleminded as to defend or condemn all of the arts or all of the emotions without distinction.
The idea that emotions are more primitive, less intelligent, more bestial, less dependable, and more dangerous, thus to be controlled by reason, led to both the marginalization and a certain view of the arts in terms of how much control the artist exercised (what Nietzsche later referred to as the “Apollonian”). Those arts that tended to overflow their bounds and provoke excessive emotion were condemned (though many of the early Greeks and, later, Nietzsche celebrated them as “Dionysian”). Insofar as emotions were akin to reason, they were clearly inferior (“confused perception” or “distorted judgment”). Thus it was a mark of his considerable iconoclasm that the eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic David Hume famously declared that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” In aesthetics, Hume rejected the suggestion that there could be rational disputing of matters of taste, falling back on the conservative position that what “men of good taste” had long judged excellent would serve as a guide to what deserves our admiration and praise.
In an early dialogue, Symposium, Plato discusses eros as the love of Beauty, thus suggesting that certain grand emotions are essential to wisdom, but the arts play no role in the progression from vulgar desire to philosophical enlightenment. Aristotle, on the other hand, suggests that both art and the emotions play an essential role. In his Rhetoric, he defines emotion “as that which leads one's condition to become so transformed that his judgment is affected, and which is accompanied by pleasure and pain.” Aristotle discussed certain emotions at length, notably anger, which he describes in remarkably modern terms. He defines anger as “a distressed desire for conspicuous vengeance in return for a conspicuous and unjustifiable contempt of one's person or friends.” It is worth noting that Aristotle had little to say about “feeling,” presumably not because the Greeks were anaesthetic but rather because what we (inconsistently) call “affect” and inner sensation generally held little interest for them and played no significant role in their language or their psychological discourse. Nevertheless, in his Poetics, Aristotle is quite clear about the healthy role of shared fear and pity in the theater, and the purpose of tragedy is to evoke and release such emotions (catharsis). Perhaps the most important single point to make about Aristotle's view of emotion, therefore, is that his analyses make sense only in the context of a broader ethical concern. Anger is of interest to him because it is a natural reaction to offense and a moral force, which can be cultivated and provoked by reason, poetry and rhetoric. So, too, fear and pity.
In Roman times, ethics and emotion conjoin in the philosophy of the Stoics. But whereas Aristotle took emotion to be essential to the good life, the Stoics analyzed emotions as conceptual errors, conducive to misery. The virtuous life depended on freeing oneself from such worldly values as health, wealth, and honor. Accordingly, Stoicism defended the arts only insofar as they encourage virtue. Their purpose was not catharsis, nor to evoke emotion. The Roman Stoic Seneca's version of Oedipus (one of his nine tragedies) can be contrasted with the better-known version by Sophocles, as Aristotle understands that play. Whereas Aristotle's Sophocles confronts us full-face with fear and pity, Seneca instructs us to endure tragedy. In general (for the movement lasted almost five hundred years, through two successive cultures), the Stoics insisted on the presumptuousness of moral judgment in anger, the intolerable vulnerability of love, the self-absorption of security in fear, and the inevitability of suffering. The alternative, “psychic indifference” or apatheia, could be found in reason and by getting straight about the pointlessness of emotional attachments and involvement. Thus the appreciation of beauty was subsumed under the more general category of virtue, and poetry, in particular, was appreciated for its beauty only insofar as it enhanced virtue.
Throughout the Middle Ages, the study of emotion was again typically attached to ethics, and it was central to Christian psychology and the theories of human nature in terms of which the medievals understood themselves. There were elaborate, quasi-medical studies of the effects of the various “humors” (gall, spleen, choler and blood) on emotional temperament, but there were also rich studies of the effects of the emotions on faith and moral behavior. Many emotions were linked with self-absorbed desires, and so the Christian preoccupation with sin led to elaborate analyses of those emotions identified as sins (notably, greed, lust, anger, envy, and pride). It might be noted that the highest virtues, such as love, hope, and faith, were not classified as emotions as such but were elevated to higher status. Medieval debates about the role of emotions in the arts (and the role of the arts in society) thus turned on the question of sinfulness, what encouraged sin and what encouraged faith and piety. Christian art and music flourished as the church defined the proper depiction of religious topics and appropriate musical forms. Medieval Judaism proscribed “graven images” as blasphemous, and Islam prohibited music. (Chanting the Qur' ān was not considered music.) These arts, accordingly, were not easily developed, and the emotions they tended to inspire were mixed with fear and revulsion.
In modern philosophy, with its emphasis on epistemology and logic, both aesthetics and emotion have tended to be pushed aside. René Descartes, for example, was a scientist and a mathematician by temperament, awed by “the natural light of reason.” Nevertheless, he paid more attention than most philosophers to the nature of emotions. Descartes defended a view in which the mind and body “meet” in a small gland at the base of the brain, and the latter affects the former by means of the agitation of “animal spirits”—minute particles of blood—which brings about the emotions and their physical effects in the body. Nevertheless, the passions (wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) are not merely agitations of the body but important perceptions of the soul. Although Descartes did not write about beauty, his inclusion of wonder and joy as basic emotions suggests its inclusion, and his strict rationalism would provide a guide for aesthetics for centuries to come.
Hume, in carrying out the Enlightenment directives of reason to challenge, debate, and question, came to examine the role and capacities of reason itself. What motivates us to right (and wrong) behavior, Hume insisted, were our passions, and rather than being relegated to the margins of ethics and philosophy the “sentiments,” in particular, deserved central respect and consideration. The sentiments became particularly important in aesthetics, where the moral sentiment theorists (Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Hume) defended an analysis of beauty and the sublime in terms of immediate “perception,” “impressions,” or “taste.” This raised the question of how differing tastes, like differing sentiments, could be disputed. Hume gave the emotions great importance, but he also concurred in the traditional view that the emotions, as impressions, are not rational. In order for aesthetics to progress, one might argue, the conception of emotions needed to be enhanced.
Such an enhancement can be found, for instance, in the aesthetic theories of Edmund Burke. He explained the feeling of beauty as love without desire and the sense of the sublime as including an experience of controlled or non-threatening horror. Like Descartes, he speculated on the physiology of such emotions, but more important for our purposes here is his attempt to develop an enriched conception of the aesthetic emotions, an effort which was also ongoing in Germany. Kant reinforced the distinction between reason and what he called “the inclinations” (emotions, moods, and desires) and dismissed the latter (including the moral sentiments) as inessential to morals. Nevertheless, in an early essay he proclaims compassion to be “beautiful,” and in his Critique of Judgment he attempts a full-blown aesthetic theory, at least partially in terms of “feelings.” Such feelings are most pronounced in our experience of the sublime, but in his analysis of the experience of beauty Kant can be read as attempting a deep structural analysis of our aesthetic emotions. Moreover, it was Kant who celebrated the importance of shared (“intersubjective”) feeling in the appreciation of beauty and the awe with which we try to comprehend the wonder of God's creation, and it was Kant, a quarter century before Hegel (who is credited with it) who insisted that “nothing great is ever done without passion.”
In Hegel's aesthetics, the attempt to develop an enhanced conception of emotion in the arts reaches its natural culmination as, in a sense, the distinct concepts of emotion and feeling virtually drop out of view. Feelings and the merely sensuous are integrated into a larger conception of spirituality, and emotions are expressions of “the Idea,” a holistic vision that is the conclusion of all of Hegel's “dialectical” works. Art develops along with human consciousness in distinctive stages, from symbolic through classical and culiminating in the deeply emotional and self-reflective romantic art of his own day. One might with some benefit compare the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, especially, with the developmental counterpoint of Hegel's major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). One should not think of “the Idea” as a particularly “intellectual” conception. Rather, it is Hegel's attempt to synthesize the most spiritual emotions with reason.
Hegel's efforts were soon compromised, first by the German Romantics, who considered art to be a distinctive expression of emotion and then by the Formalists, for example, Eduard Hanslick with regard to music. In the case of the Romantics, the emotions were not trivialized but bloated and rendered ineffable. Inspired by the English Romantics (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle), who emphasized the freedom but also the control of the imagination, the Germans (Friedrich von and August Schlegel, Novalis) celebrated the unbounded idea of the world as art and the work of art as a symbolic, organic whole. In its basic form, the Romantic view resembled Hegel's vision, but Hegel, who remained a rationalist, rejected the Romantics. So did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the leading Dichter of Germany, who declared Romanticism “sickly” for its uncontrolled excess of emotion. In terms of giving the emotions their due in aesthetics, the Romantics perhaps showed us that there can certainly be too much of a good thing.
Hanslick dismissed the claim that emotions are expressed in music, thus setting up one of the central debates in current-day aesthetics. Hanslick had nothing but abuse for those good bourgeois citizens who attended concerts in order to indulge their sentimentality. Indeed, it is about this time that the notion of sentimentality itself became a term of abuse, minimally suggesting an excess or deformity of emotion but, arguably, indicating a deep suspicion of emotions in the arts. But Hanslick did not deny that music arouses emotions. Indeed, he thought that there were good grounds for emotional responses to music, since the dynamics of music resembles the dynamic properties of human feelings. While the beauty of music was not a consequence of the emotions experienced while listening, musical beauty was nevertheless a function of “tonally moving forms” appreciated by the intellect.
The connection between emotions and music is, indeed, particularly baffling. On the one hand, since Plato it has been thought that music is the clearest expression of emotion, a belief endorsed in modern times by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. But, on the other hand, the source of that connection has proved notoriously hard to pin down. In the representational arts, it is often and obviously the subject matter that evokes emotion. When pure color or shape evokes emotions this can often be explained by reference to associations or resemblances (red as blood, the familiar shapes of female anatomy). But, except for music with texts, “program music,” and music associated with particular circumstances or natural sounds (e.g., a wedding march, bird calls), music does not seem to lend itself to such explanation. A more technical question, answered in one form by Hanslick, is whether the emotions are in the music (rather than merely associated with the music). One might mention, in this regard, rhythm, melody, harmony, counterpoint, interaction, complexity, key, amplitude, pitch, and instrumental timbre. One should also distinguish between music as an expression of emotion, music as provoking emotion, and music as representing or imitating emotion (apart from circumstances of composition and performance). What we should also note is how impoverished the range of such emotions (e.g., sadness, joy, and cheerfulness) is compared to the richness of the music itself.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were two philosophers for whom aesthetics took center stage. But for Nietzsche, passion was essential. Reason was a source of deep suspicion. Schopenhauer distrusted the passions and defended only a modest role for reason, but for him, the world was revealed as Will, which manifested itself in our passions. These passions had no ultimate purpose, however, and so Schopenhauer famously emerged the great pessimist, for whom life was essentially pointless and all willing a “burden.” Art, and music in particular, was both an expression of the Will and a temporary escape from willing, and thus took on its central importance. Nietzsche rejected Schopenhauer's extreme pessimism, but nevertheless he anticipated the global skepticism and conceptual chaos of the twentieth century, and like Sigmund Freud (who admired him), he described the darker, more instinctual human passions. The arts expressed these passions, and it was in our artistic expressions of suffering that we could come to see ourselves, like the early Greeks, as “beautiful.” But this was not to say that all passions are wise; some, Nietzsche declared, “drag us down with their stupidity,” and others, notably the “slave morality” emotion of resentment, are devious and clever but to a disastrous end, the “leveling” of the virtuous passions and the defense of mediocrity.
Following Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger gave emotions and art a central place in human existence. Heidegger's aesthetic views are by no means clear, but certain aspects are evident. First, Heidegger argues (in Being and Time) that mood is one of the basic “existential” categories through which we understand our “being-in-the-world.” He also argues that it is our preverbal practices, not our pursuit of knowledge and articulate philosophy, through which our world is “disclosed.” In his “Origin of the Work of Art” (1935) he argues that works of art (at least, great works of art) not only express the vision of their creators but, more important, shape the world. In a very different vein, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre developed a phenomenological analysis of emotions as “magical transformations of the world”—willful stratagems for coping with difficulty. But Sartre's later views commited him to the role of “the engaged intellectual,” in which he would give up his conception of emotions as “escape behavior” and view them instead as willful commitments to change society through his art.
In contemporary aesthetics in the English-speaking world, the role of emotion is still a matter of considerable debate. Much of this debate turns on the nature of emotion, which, as this brief history suggests, is no simple matter. How we conceive of emotion depends not only on science but also on ethics, one's conception of human nature and the good life. And to this short list we can add one's conception of the arts and their role in the good life. Insofar as emotions are conceived as primitive, unintelligent reactions or forces, straining for release, then aesthetics will reflect the satisfactions and dangers of such catharsis. On the other hand, insofar as one's conceptions of the emotions become more complex and sophisticated, aesthetics will become more complex and sophisticated as well.
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Emotions and Literature
The written word has enormous power to move its readers in various ways. Poems can make us feel lighthearted or melancholy; short stories can induce sadness, surprise, and delight. Novels produce a plethora of feelings and emotions, including those where we empathize and sympathize with various characters, or where we come to hate them, or wish a character would act differently. Plays can be read to oneself and not simply viewed in performance, and as Aristotle pointed out, a tragedy can induce pity and fear just in the reading without viewing the acting or spectacle. Not only fiction but also nonfiction—history, biography, news and magazine reports, travel writing, essays on culture, and opinion columns—can be emotionally moving; we may be horrified at events that have occurred, admire a courageous person, shocked by the actions of public officials, awestruck by descriptions of natural beauty, angry with the opinions expressed.
Although hardly anything seems more commonplace than such responses, they raise a whole host of philosophical questions, some of which show how central philosophy of mind is to doing aesthetics. For example, what is an emotion, anyway? How do various emotions differ from one another? How do emotions differ from other affective states, such as feelings, moods, and desires? Other questions focus on the relationships between responses to literature and responses to actual events. Are our responses to literature really emotions, that is, emotions in the same sense as emotions that arise when we actually experience an event in the course of ordinary life? Are the explanations of what produces responses to literature, especially fiction, different from the explanations of responses to real-life situations? Other questions focus more directly on aesthetic issues in particular. How is it possible to judge the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a response to literature? What kinds of assessments can be made of the relevance, appropriateness, or reasonableness of a response? Why is it important to respond to literature at all?
Currently, the most popular theory of emotions is a cognitive theory that holds that emotions have cognitive components as one of their defining features. A cognitive component is a belief, or in some theories it may be an “unasserted thought,” that is, a thought that is entertained but not believed. (Aristotle is credited with the first cognitive theory of emotion; Roger Scruton is responsible for the term unasserted thought.) Thus, the emotions fear, pity, anger, and pride require having a particular sort of belief (respectively, that one is in danger; that someone is suffering unjustly; that one has been done an injustice; and that one is responsible for bringing about something good in a way that required special skill, courage, or effort). Cognitive theories also typically require that one have certain sorts of values or desires (for one's self-preservation, that people not suffer unjustly, etc.). Feelings, on the other hand, include such states as tension, uneasiness, lethargy, or well-being, and are generally not taken to have cognitive components. They also need not be linked with a particular external object (think of a generalized sense of uneasiness, contentment, or well-being). Our vocabulary for real-life feelings, much less responses to literature, is woefully inadequate, metaphorical, and derivative of sensations of bodily states (light-headedness, tingling), which may also tell us something about the nature of these states. Moods—being cheerful, bored, belligerent—are mental states that color one's actions and reactions during a particular period of time. Reading also produces desires, everything from sexual desire to the desire that a fictional character act or not act a given way (e.g., a desire that Othello not kill Desdemona). Some desires are also cognitive in that they require a belief that what one desires would be good. It may be only because of that belief that one has the desire (such as a desire that I do the dishes). But some desires are desires to do things, desires to act, whether or not one has a belief that doing such a thing would be good (such as desiring to take a walk in the woods). In such cases, beliefs that doing what one desires to do would be good may arise because one desires it, rather than that one desires it because one believes it is good. Furthermore, we sometimes have irrational desires, desires for things we know will harm us or that we believe are not good. Plato believed that it was possible for fiction to give rise to such desires.
What is the relationship between affective responses to literature and responses to real-life situations? Responses to literature can often (though not always) be described using the same vocabulary we use for identifying emotions and affective responses to events in actual life. It would be rash, however, to assume that responses to literature are exactly the same as responses to real-life events simply because they go by the same names. Many philosophers have asserted that our responses to art, and hence literature viewed as art, are sui generis and entirely different from our responses to life. One consideration in support of this view is that our responses to literature are rarely accompanied by actions or desires to act. We do not try to console a grieving character, and we do not throw things or yell and shout at a character who makes us angry. Since affective responses to literature are not typically connected with desires and actions in the way responses to actual events are, there is something fundamentally different about our affective responses to literature. In addition, very often we know that what we are responding to is fictional (so we do not believe that, for example, a disaster happened, a person was betrayed, an orphan was rescued, and so on). This knowledge that what we are reading is fictional can account for the absence of action. Any theory about the nature of responses to fiction will have to account both for our use of ordinary emotion vocabulary to describe them, and for the different roles of belief and action in responses to real-life situations and to fiction.
If one is reading nonfiction, it is plausible to explain responses in terms of one's existing beliefs and desires or values. Suppose I read in a history book about life and death in Auschwitz during World War II; I am overcome with horror. Why? I believe what I read in the book, and it grossly offends my most basic sense of decency about how people ought to be treated. Thus, I am moved because reading produces (or calls to mind) a belief, which, in this case, conflicts with one or more of my values or desires. Horror is an emotion whose identity depends on my having certain beliefs and desires. I would not be horrified if I were a Nazi sympathizer and thought there was nothing wrong with, say, killing Jews just because they are Jewish.
But what if I am reading a work of fiction, and I do not believe those events actually occurred? In an influential article, Colin Radford challenged philosophers to explain how it was both possible and desirable for us to have emotional responses to fictional literature. Either such responses are irrational (and hence undesirable) because they depend on evidentially unsupported beliefs (after all, we are reading fiction), or we do not have the unsupported belief and the response is not an emotion as normally construed (because it does not have the relevant cognitive component). One reply to Radford is that the beliefs involved are of a more general sort. That is, I (justifiably) believe that events of the sort described have occurred, or that they are likely to occur, even if I do not believe in the existence of the particular people and situations described. Thus, I may respond as a result of my justified general beliefs about what the world is like.
Another reply to Radford questions his assumption that belief in the truth of what one reads is necessary for having an emotional response. It is alleged instead that the cognitive component of an emotion might be an unasserted thought rather than a belief, and hence one is not subject to the charge that the emotion is irrational because the belief is irrational. Simply thinking of things, imagining they happened, may be sufficient to generate an emotional response: simply imagining people being subjected to certain tortures can generate horror, even if one does not believe anyone was actually treated that way. But this cannot be the whole story. One reason Radford and others claim emotions require beliefs is that the belief explains why you get emotionally worked up in a way an unasserted thought does not. If you believe your friend was on the plane that crashed, you are distraught; when you find out she was not on the plane (you then believe she was not on the plane), you are no longer distraught but relieved. Furthermore, a lot of unasserted thoughts pass into our heads. Why are some emotionally affecting and not others? Something else besides simply having the thought (and the relevant desires or values) is necessary to explain why reading that generates such thoughts can be emotionally affecting. Finally, if you continue to imagine that your friend was on the plane when you know it was not so, and this imagining makes you distraught, it still seems you are being irrational. Why get so worked up over something when you know it is not true? One important factor that can influence the emotive power of unasserted thoughts or imaginings is the words that generate the thoughts or imaginings, such as diction, syntax, rhythm of the writing, metaphor and other imagery, narrative voice. (Is the story told in the first person? From the standpoint of an omniscient observer or an unreliable narrator? Are multiple points of view combined so that we do not know what to believe about what is true in the story?) Responses to poetry obviously require sensitivities to these features, but responses to prose, when considered as an art form whose medium is words, will also depend on them. The way a story is told leads the reader to read with feeling.
Moreover, the problem is actually broader than Radford proposes, for we respond to fiction not only with emotions but also with feelings, moods, and desires. Feelings and moods are not generally held to have cognitive components in the form of beliefs or unasserted thoughts (the jury is still out about desires). Thus, it is unclear how beliefs or unasserted thoughts could help to explain nonemotion affective responses, such as feelings and moods, that do not have cognitive components. Indeed, how does one explain such responses?
An explanation of the emotional effectiveness of fictional literature, precisely because it is fiction, will need to develop some account of how imagination is involved. Kendall Walton is one of the few who have developed a systematic account of imagination, arguing that reading and responding to fiction are an extension of ordinary games of make-believe, such as those that children play. He holds that in reading a work of literature we treat it as a prop in a game of make-believe, and it becomes true in the game that I believe Anna Karenina suffers unjustly, and hence true in the game of make-believe that I pity Anna. On Walton's view, just as it may be true in the game of make-believe that I am riding a horse when it is not true of me (simpliciter) that I am riding a horse, so also it may be true in the game of make-believe that I pity Anna even though it is not true of me (simpliciter) that I pity Anna.
It is also possible for a work—history as well as fiction—to glorify what we actually take to be abhorrent, or to denigrate what we value, leading us to respond in ways that are contrary to what we really value. This can happen because we identify or empathize with a character who sees things from a different point of view, or simply because we get “caught up” in a story and “forget” our usual values. These phenomena also cry out for a theory of imagination. Plato worried that poetry and drama could lead us both to believe things that were not reasonable or true (simply because we get seduced by the persuasive power of the words), and to change our values or desires. Thus, readers may respond without the relevant beliefs and without the relevant desires.
It certainly seems that anyone who cheers on Iago and laughs when Desdemona dies is responding inappropriately to William Shakespeare's play. What makes these cheers and laughter inappropriate? Little work has been done explaining how to make any such assessments of our responses, but clearly they are of the greatest import. For if one laughs when Desdemona dies, one has missed a very important part of what is valuable about Shakespeare's play: it is supposed to move us to sorrow and pity, and to tears. If we don' t experience those feelings, we haven' t gotten the value out of the work.
Assessments of responses as appropriate or inappropriate are intimately connected with questions about why it is important to respond to literature at all. So what if Shakespeare leaves you cold, if you don' t find Oscar Wilde amusing, if Marcel Proust does not make you reflective and pensive, if The Death of Ivan Ilych does not fill you with feelings of poignancy and compassion, if William Wordsworth's poetry does not instill a desire to explore nature, if “Kubla Khan” does not fill you with a sense of awe and mystery, and so on and so on? Is anything lost? Without such responses, one may wonder why bother reading literature at all. The value and importance of literature are wrapped up with our responses to it, and a failure to respond is (to that extent) a failure to appreciate the work. And this helps us understand why it is so important to have not just any old response to a work, but to have appropriate responses (conceding that several responses may be equally appropriate, revealing different qualities or aspects of a work).
But rather than settling the issue, this solution merely raises another question. Surely affective responses, when appropriate, are part of what it is to appreciate a work, but why is it important to appreciate a work? Put another way, why is it good to have things around such as works of literature that are supposed to (and presumably do) move us in the sorts of ways discussed earlier? A very old idea is that the function of the arts is to delight and instruct. (And/or: so that one point of having such responses is simply that we find it delightful or pleasurable. If you separate them, you can look at it this way. But, below, you can see the delight coming through the instruction.) Suppose we say that the function of art is to please or delight us. Then it would appear that we should respond with the emotions and feelings that provide the most delight or pleasure, which removes any objective standard for the responses (i.e., a standard that resides in the properties of the object, the literary work, to which we respond), and accepts the preferences of each reader. On the other hand, some ways of approaching literature may be more likely, in the long run, once they are mastered, to produce richer and more fulfilling pleasures than simply reacting or responding in any way one wishes. If so, the approach (or approaches) with the richest potential overall in the long run could provide a basis for judgments of the appropriateness of responses.
Delight, however, might not be separate from instruction. Aristotle pointed out that learning can be pleasurable. How can emotions and other affective responses instruct? Martha Nussbaum has argued persuasively that literature teaches us to “see,” where seeing involves not merely a cognitive or sensory dimension, but is broadly experiential and affective as well. Our ethical sensitivities, for example, are affective as much as cognitive, and influence how we experience the world and how we relate to other people. Others have argued that we can learn in a very straightforward way what it is like to be a certain sort of person, or in a certain sort of situation—how such a person would feel, and how he or she would experience things. It can thus enhance our capacity for empathy and understanding of other people in general. Susan L. Feagin argues that developing the cognitive and affective skills required to appreciate literary works of art expands the capacities of the human mind, increasing its strength and flexibility. It is important on Feagin's account that one genuinely appreciate a work, rather than merely accept whatever affective responses one happens to have, since only then will the powers of one's mind be enhanced, as opposed to simply further entrenching one's usual modes of experience and understanding.
Finally, there is one quite different unpleasant possibility to be explored. Jerome Shaffer (1968) has defended the view that emotions are irrational and indefensible. He agrees that here and there an emotion might be beneficial because it is pleasant or has some practical advantage, but his point is that, as a group, there is no good reason to have them and we would be better off without them. This view tends to make people very excited and angry (adding more evidence for or against Shaffer's thesis?). In contrast to Shaffer, the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio has argued that a capacity for emotion is necessary for practical judgments and actions based on them. Emotional commitments are also involved in our ethical lives—from the feelings that bind friends and family, to pangs of remorse and indignation over injustice. Is the importance of emotions to practical judgments and actions and our ethical lives reflected at all in our responses to literature? If so, how; and if not, why not?
See also Fiction.
Aristotle. The Poetics. Translated by James Hutton. New York, 1982.Find this resource:
Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York, 1994.Find this resource:
Feagin, Susan L. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.Find this resource:
Lamarque, Peter. How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions? British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (1981): 291–304.Find this resource:
Lyons, William. Emotion. Cambridge and New York, 1980.Find this resource:
Neill, Alex. Fiction and the Emotions. American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1993): 1–13.Find this resource:
Novitz, David. Knowledge, Fiction, and Imagination. Philadelphia, 1987.Find this resource:
Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature. Journal of Philosophy 82.10 (October 1985): 516–529.Find this resource:
Plato. Republic. Books 3 and 10.Find this resource:
Radford, Colin. How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supp. vol. 49 (1975): 67–80.Find this resource:
Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. New York, 1949. See chapter 4, “Emotion.”Find this resource:
Scruton, Roger. Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind. London, 1974.Find this resource:
Shaffer, Jerome A. Philosophy of Mind. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968.Find this resource:
Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.Find this resource:
Emotions and Music
That there is a relation of some kind between music and emotion has always been acknowledged, even by those who doubt that much of aesthetic moment hangs on the fact. The problem, however, is to account for it. A satisfactory account would provide answers to at least three questions: How is the relation between music and emotion grounded? How is it experienced? What value, if any, does the experience of it have, and why?
This way of posing the questions derives indirectly from Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful, published in 1854, the book that first established the problem as a philosophically interesting one. Hanslick was not the first to write provocatively on music and emotion: the Greeks had attributed the relation between the two to the distinctive characters of the various modes or scales; eighteenth-century thinkers had conceived of music as exciting or imitating those “animal spirits” in whose movements René Descartes had located the origin of emotion; and Arthur Schopenhauer had attested more gloriously than anybody to the sheer depth that a passionate engagement with music can have. But it was Hanslick who sharpened the problem and gave it the focus it still retains—by denying that the value of music has anything to do with emotion at all. “Only on the basis of a number of ideas and judgments,” he argues, “can our state of mind congeal into this or that specific feeling.” Feeling, so construed, “can only be precisely set forth in concepts” (for instance, “Love cannot be thought without the representation of a beloved person”), and these concepts “lie beyond the scope of music.” Music is capable of “reproducing” only “the fluctuations of our inner activity,” and these “can be similar with different feelings.” Therefore, music cannot express or represent particular feelings; and this means that the relation of music to emotion cannot function as “an aesthetic principle.” The beauty and the value of music, Hanslick concludes, “is a specifically musical kind of beauty,” which “consists simply and solely of tones and their artistic combination.” Thus Hanslick inaugurates musical formalism (in theory, at least: in his criticism he is unexpectedly fond of describing music in emotional terms).
The formalist view that the value of music is rooted exclusively in “tones and their artistic combination” encourages the claim that the relation between music and emotion, though real, is merely causal, and hence of little philosophical or aesthetic interest. This claim comes in two main forms. One involves the postulation of an innate or natural psychological mechanism, such that certain musical stimuli automatically produce an emotional response in the listener. A comparatively sophisticated version of this claim has been developed by Leonard B. Meyer. But even his account renders the connection between music and emotion philosophically boring—in much the way that the connection between the smell of food and salivation is philosophically boring. The other form of the claim, of which no sophisticated version is even possible, involves the postulation of an associational mechanism, such that the listener feels an emotion in response to music because he or she associates that music with something else (a love affair, perhaps, or a period of deep gloom). This, too, removes all philosophical and aesthetic interest from the picture. Just as the bell that set Ivan Pavlov's dogs drooling might as well have been an air-raid siren, so music, on this account, might as well be wallpaper, so long as someone has come to associate it with something. Nothing of moment swings here on the relation between music, specifically, and emotion. Hence this account, like the previous one, leaves no room for the antiformalist thought that music might be valuable at least partly in virtue of its relation to emotion.
It is, of course, perfectly possible that these causal accounts contain an element of truth—indeed, they surely do. But neither (nor both together) can be exhaustive. For even if we are sometimes triggered into feeling something by an innate or associational mechanism, we can nonetheless recognize an emotional quality in a piece of music without ourselves feeling anything (“What a jolly tune!”). And this fact shows, first, that the power of music to arouse emotion is not the only link between music and emotion; and, second, that the philosophically interesting questions cannot be removed by the mere postulation of mechanism.
Observations of this kind have prompted a critical return to Hanslick, and a variety of efforts to avoid his conclusion that the relation between music and emotion cannot function as “an aesthetic principle.” Opposite means to this end are well illustrated by two mid-twentieth-century writers. Susanne K. Langer takes issue with Hanslick's claim that emotion “can only be precisely set forth in concepts,” and argues instead that emotion can be “set forth” nonconceptually in “presentational symbols”—such symbols being found in pieces of music. Deryck Cooke, by contrast, appears to deny that the conceptual resources required to “set forth” emotion “lie beyond the scope of music”: his claim is that music really functions as a “language” of emotion, in which various musical phrases stand, like words, for various kinds of feelings. Neither of these accounts, however, commands much support today. Among their many difficulties, Langer's “presentational symbols” consistently defy explication, while Cooke's linguistic turn is both naive about language and mistaken about the degree to which any stable emotional connotation can be assigned to the same musical phrase in different musical contexts. Hanslick's doctrine of the “specifically musical kind of beauty” can be expected to withstand criticism from either of these positions, however artfully refined.
In one sense, though, Langer's approach has proved the more durable. If no one now takes the idea of a “presentational symbol” very seriously, it is nonetheless widely agreed that Langer was right to question the claim, central to Hanslick's formalism, that the conceptual inarticulacy of music necessarily debars it from “setting forth” particular feelings. Indeed, skepticism about this claim is clearly discernible in the work of Donald Ferguson, whose book Music as Metaphor introduces a number of themes that have become central to the philosophy of music and emotion. Concepts are not everything, Ferguson suggests, for the movement of music “may suggest distinctive characteristics of physical or nervous energy”, and these, in conjunction with “the intrinsic motor impulses of consonant or dissonant harmony,” may present “an apparently corporeal musical mass whose weight and volume may be adjusted (as, for instance, no dancer's body could be adjusted) to the portrayal” of the “vital impulse to motion activating a sentient being.” In effect, Ferguson denies Hanslick's claim that “the fluctuations of inner activity,” which music is capable of “reproducing,” are always “similar with different feelings.” Rather, in Ferguson's view, those motions (or “fluctuations”) may be distinctive, and so may allow music to “set forth” particular emotions. Much of the remainder of Ferguson's book is devoted, appropriately, to the presentation of evidence in support of this claim, through close musical analyses that remain models of their kind.
Ferguson's position can be construed in either or both of two ways: as asserting a link of some kind between music and the outward manifestations of emotion, that is, expressive human behavior; or as asserting a link of some kind between music and the inward dimension of the experience of emotion itself. These two constructions mark the limits within which most subsequent philosophical investigation has been conducted. Peter Kivy has inclined strongly to the former limit. In a series of books and articles he has revived and reinterpreted the eighteenth-century idea that the relation between music and emotion is grounded in the resemblance of the “contours” of musical movement to the “contours” of characteristic pieces of expressive behavior, including speech—so that “if the criteria of human expression are public, objective, immune from philosophical skepticism, so too are the criteria of expressiveness in music.” In Kivy's view, to say of a piece of music that it has the property of “sadness” may be to say something that is literally true, in just the way that it may be literally true to say that the piece has the property of being in E minor. Thus Kivy agrees with Hanslick that the beauty of music is a “specifically musical kind of beauty,” but he does not accept that talk of the “specifically musical” is confined “simply and solely” to talk of “tones and their artistic combination.” Rather, the expressiveness of a piece of music is every bit as much a musical feature of it as its tonality is.
This conclusion has won widespread acceptance, even if Kivy's warrant for drawing it is open to dispute. But perhaps the main problem with his account is that it cannot explain why someone might value a piece of music because of its expressive properties. To say that Mozart's Requiem would be a different piece of music without its terror-stricken quality is one thing; but to say that Mozart's work is valuable at least partly in virtue of its terror-stricken quality is quite another. Kivy's emphasis on the purely cognitive aspects of the listening experience—an experience in which the listener recognizes resemblances between musical and behavioral “contours”—renders him mute on this question. It is not surprising, then, that others have inclined to the alternative view that the crucial link is not so much between music and the outward manifestations of emotion as between music and the inward dimension of the experience of emotion itself. Malcolm Budd, for instance, impressed by Carroll C. Pratt's dictum that “music sounds the way moods feel,” has argued that an imaginative engagement with music can enable “the listener to experience imaginatively (or really) the inner nature of emotional states in a peculiarly vivid, satisfying and poignant form”—and in a form, moreover, whose value is inseparable from the value of the music so experienced.
It seems likely, however, that the truth lies somewhere between these views. For while Kivy's externalist position is hard-pressed to explain why it matters that music is expressive, the internalist position is equally at a loss to explain how the imaginative experience of music might be constrained in such a way as to allow the link between music and emotion to function as “an aesthetic principle.” A hint here can be gained from Jerrold Levinson. He suggests that “recognizing emotion in music and experiencing emotion from music may not be as separable in principle as one might have liked.” If this is correct (and it is certainly persuasive), it is perhaps possible to answer the questions posed at the outset in the following way. How is the relation between music and emotion grounded? In the resemblance between various features of music and the outward (and maybe also the inward) features of emotion. How is it experienced? Imaginatively, so that the listener grasps the expressive quality of a piece of music in coming “to experience imaginatively (or really)” the nature of the emotion expressed. What value does that experience have, and why? It has the value of granting the listener access to states of mind not otherwise available—for the experience described is conceivable only as a mode of experiencing particular pieces of music.
These answers may fail to convince, of course. If they do, it may be because Hanslick was right all along. But few contemporary philosophers of music appear ready to accept that conclusion. Whatever their disagreements, most do seem to be persuaded that the relation between music and emotion is both philosophically interesting and aesthetically important; and that, surely, is just as it should be.
Budd, Malcolm. Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London and Boston, 1985.Find this resource:
Budd, Malcolm. Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry, and Music. London and New York, 1995.Find this resource:
Cooke, Deryck. The Language of Music. New York and Oxford, 1959.Find this resource:
Davies, Stephen. Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca, N.Y., 1994.Find this resource:
Ferguson, Donald. Music as Metaphor: The Elements of Expression. Minneapolis, 1960.Find this resource:
Hanslick, Eduard. On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music. Translated and edited by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, 1986.Find this resource:
Kivy, Peter. The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression. Princeton, N.J. 1980. Expanded and reissued as Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions (Philadelphia, 1989).Find this resource:
Kivy, Peter. Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.Find this resource:
Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. Cambridge, Mass., 1942.Find this resource:
le Huray, Peter, and James Day, eds. Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries. Cambridge and New York, 1981.Find this resource:
Levinson, Jerrold. Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics. Ithaca, N.Y., 1990.Find this resource:
Levinson, Jerrold. The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.Find this resource:
Meyer, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago, 1956.Find this resource:
Pratt, Carroll C. The Meaning of Music: A Study in Psychological Aesthetics. New York, 1931.Find this resource:
Ridley, Aaron. Music, Value, and the Passions. Ithaca, N.Y., 1995.Find this resource:
Scruton, Roger. The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. London and New York, 1983.Find this resource:
Walton, Kendall. What Is Abstract about the Art of Music? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46.3 (Spring 1988): 351–364.Find this resource: