Nevertheless, even if we find this general invocation of imagination, as the “synthesizing force” within perception, vacuous or unilluminating, we may yet feel that the imagination has some special role to play in aesthetic experience and that the reference to imagination has some special value in explaining the precise way in which a content and an experience become “fused” (to use George Santayana’s term). Whether or not Kant was right to refer to a free play of imagination in aesthetic experience, there certainly seems to be a peculiarly creative imagination that human beings may exercise and upon which aesthetic experience calls. It is an exercise of creative imagination to see a face in a picture, since that involves seeing in defiance of judgment—seeing what one knows not to be there. It is not in the same sense an imaginative act to see a face in something that one also judges to be a face. This creative capacity is what Jean-Paul Sartre is referring to in L’Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’ima-gination (1940; “The Imaginary: The Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination”; Eng. trans. The Psychology of Imagination) when he describes imagining as “the positing of an object as a nothingness”—as not being. In memory and perception we take our experience “for real.” In imagination we contribute a content that has no reality beyond our disposition to “see” it, and it is clear that this added content is frequently summoned by art when, for example, we see the face in a picture or hear the emotion in a piece of music.
Sartre, Jean-PaulJean-Paul Sartre, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1968.Gisele Freund
Recent work in aesthetics, to some extent inspired by the seminal writings of Sartre and Wittgenstein, has devoted considerable attention to the study of creative imagination. The hope has been to provide the extra ingredient in aesthetic experience that bridges the gap between the sensory and the intellectual and at the same time shows the relation between aesthetic experience and the experience of everyday life—an enterprise that is in turn of the first importance for any study that seeks to describe the moral significance of beauty.
Consider, for example, the spectators at a performance of William Shakespeare’s King Lear. They see before them an actor who, by speaking certain lines and making certain gestures, earns his bread. But that is not all that they see. They also see a hoary king, cast down by age, pride, and weakness, who rages against the depravity of humankind. Yet the spectators know that, in a crucial sense, there is no such king before them. It is intellectual understanding, not psychical distance, that prevents them from stepping onto the stage to offer their assistance. They know that the scene they enjoy is one that they invent, albeit under the overwhelming compulsion induced by the actor and his lines. The spectators are being shown something that is outside the normal commerce of theoretical and practical understanding, and they are responding to a scene that bears no spatial, temporal, or causal relation to their own experience. Their response is quintessentially aesthetic. For what interest could they have in this scene other than an interest in it for its own sake, for what it is in itself? At the same time, what it is in itself involves what it shows in general. In imaginatively conjuring this scene, the spectators draw upon a wealth of experience, which is brought to mind and, as it were, condensed for them into the imaginative perception of the play. (Hence, Aristotle believed that poetry is more general than history, since its concreteness is not that of real events but rather that of imaginary episodes constructed so as to typify human destiny in exemplary form.)
King Lear with the body of Cordelia, illustration by Friedrich Pecht in Shakespeare-Galerie, 1876.Mary Evans Picture Library
Such an exercise of the imagination clearly has much to tell us about the nature of aesthetic experience. Whether or not it could found a theory of the “missing link” between sensory enjoyment and intellectual understanding, it at least provides a paradigm of the relation between aesthetic experience and the experience of everyday life. The former is an imaginative reconstruction of the latter, which becomes interesting for its own sake precisely because—however realistic—it is not real. Emotion, response, and enjoyment
It is natural to suppose that a spectator’s response to King Lear is at least in part emotional and that emotion plays a crucial role both in the enjoyment of art and in establishing the value of art. Moreover, it is not only art that stirs our emotions in the act of aesthetic attention: the same is or may be true of natural beauty, whether that of a face or of a landscape. These things hold our attention partly because they address themselves to our feelings and call forth a response which we value both for itself and for the consolation that we may attain through it. Thus we find an important philosophical tradition according to which the distinctive character of aesthetic experience is to be found in distinctively “aesthetic” emotions.
This tradition has ancient origins. Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic partly because of their capacity to arouse futile and destructive emotions, and, in his answer to Plato, Aristotle argued that poetry, in particular tragic poetry, was valuable precisely because of its emotional effect. This idea enabled Aristotle to pose one of the most puzzling problems in aesthetics—the problem of tragedy—and to offer a solution. How can I willingly offer myself to witness scenes of terror and destruction? And how can I be said to enjoy the result, set store by it, or accord to it a positive value? Aristotle’s answer is brief. He explains that by evoking pity and fear a tragedy also “purges” those emotions, and that is what we enjoy and value:
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
Aristotle implies that this purgation (katharsis) is not unpleasant to us precisely because the fictional and formalized nature of the action sets it at a distance from us. We can allow ourselves to feel what we normally shun to feel precisely because no one is really threatened (or at least no one real is threatened).
Attractive though that explanation may seem, it immediately encounters a serious philosophical problem. It is a plausible tenet of philosophical psychology that emotions are founded on beliefs: fear on the belief that one is threatened, pity on the belief that someone is miserable, jealousy on the belief that one has a rival, and so forth. In the nature of things, however, these beliefs do not exist in the theatre. Confronted by fiction, I am relieved precisely of the pressure of belief, and it is this condition that permits the Aristotelian katharsis. How, then, can I be said to experience pity and fear when the beliefs requisite to those very emotions are not present? More generally, how can my responses to the fictions presented by works of art share the structure of my everyday emotions, and how can they impart to those emotions a new meaning, force, or resolution?
Various answers have been proposed to that question. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, argued that our response to drama is characterized by a “willing suspension of disbelief,” and thus involves the very same ingredient of belief that is essential to everyday emotion (Biographia Literaria, 1817). Coleridge’s phrase, however, is consciously paradoxical. Belief is characterized precisely by the fact that it lies outside the wilclass="underline" I can command you to imagine something but not to believe it. For this reason, a suspension of disbelief that is achieved “willingly” is at best a highly dubious example of belief. In fact, the description seems to imply, not belief, but rather imagination, thus returning us to our problem of the relation between emotions directed to reality and those directed to merely imaginary scenes.