Grief and Belief

In her searching essay on the nature of grief in its real-world and fiction-directed forms, Catherine Wilson addresses two long-standing problems in the proper characterization of our engagement with works of art: Do we respond with genuine emotions to what we take to be only fictional? And, Why are we often drawn to certain kinds of tragic and distressing fictions despite the negative emotions that they seem to elicit? Wilson’s answer to the latter question, we shall see, is that we value the emotions provoked by imagining fictional losses for the same reason we value grief over real ones, because such sadness serves as a concrete testimony or memorial to our attachment to those we care about. But before advancing that view, Wilson addresses the first question to defend the position that not only grief but emotions in general that are elicited by fictions can indeed be genuine. Wilson’s opponents are irrealists about fiction-directed emotions.1 They argue that while genuine emotions can be provoked by a work of fiction—as when a novel about a devastating plague induces one to feel anxious about contracting the common cold—those directed at the fictional contents of a work (the individuals, events, states of affairs we imagine as existing as we follow the work) are not literally felt but only pretend or make-believe, despite often being accompanied by physiological and automatic processes characteristic of reality-directed emotions.2 The contrary realist position, of course, is that genuine emotions can be felt for the contents of fictions: our emotional responses are outside of the scope of the operator ‘it is fictional (pretend, make-believe) that ...’, but are directed at what is within

Aesthetics · Anger · Art · Distressing · Epistemology · Grief · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sadness · Value (mathematics · Aesthetic Perception and Analysis · Computer Science · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Disjunctivism and the Paradox of Tragedy

  Open Access•Richard Gaskins, Richard Gaskin•The Philosophical Quarterly•2023

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