Nico Frijda writes that emotions are governed by a psychological principle called the “law of apparent reality”: emotions are elicited only by events appraised as real, and the intensity of these emotions corresponds to the degree to which these events are appraised as responses elicited by works of art raise counterexamples.
Frijda’s law accounts for my panic if I am afraid of snakes and see an object I correctly appraise as a rattlesnake, and also for my identical response if I see a coiled garden hose I mistakenly perceive to be a snake. However, suppose I am watching a movie and see a events, because we know they are not real in the way a living rattlesnake is real.
Most psychologists, perplexed by the feelings they acknowledge are aroused by aesthetic experience, have claimed that these emotions are genuine, but different in kind from nonaesthetic emotions. This, however, is a descriptive distinction rather than an empirical observation and consequently lacks explanatory value. On the other hand, Gombrich argues that emotional responses events we recognize as being represented rather than real cannot elicit emotion in the first place.
Frijda does suggest that a vivid imagination has “properties of reality”—implying, without explanation, that we make aesthetic objects or events “real” in the act of experiencing them. However, as Scruton argues, a necessary characteristic of the imaginative construction that can occur in an emotional response to art is pretending. This is what distinguishes imagination from psychotic fantasy.
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