Deeper Than Reason Caspar David Friedrich, Large Enclosure at Dresden,c.1831. Photograph ß AKG London. Deeper Than Reason Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art JENEFER ROBINSON CLARENDON PRESSÁ OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Jenefer Robinson 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0–19–926365–5 9780199263653 13579108642 Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk To John, Jane, and Neil This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements I have been working on the issues in this book for over twenty years. My first published paper on the emotions appeared in 1983. It was a piece of armchair theorizing and I have changed both my views and my methods quite a bit since then. Nevertheless the foundations of the ‘anti-judgementalist’ view I defend here were already partly in place at that time. More recent papers from 1995 and 1998 reflect the influence of the empirical research that I studied in the intervening years and especially the influence of my colleague, the psychologist Bill Dember, with whom I co-taught courses on the emotions over a long period. My interest in aesthetic questions goes even further back, starting with a Ph.D. dissertation on representa- tion and expression in the arts. Indeed I was led into emotion theory when I began to question exactly what was meant by saying that works of art express and arouse emotions, that artistic style is an expression of temperament or personality, or that the meaning of music is its emotional content. Because my thinking on these questions has evolved over such a long period, it is inevitable that I won’t remember everyone who has helped me along the way; but I hope I have remembered those who had the most important influence. There are several people I’d like to thank who have had a global influence on my thinking since the beginning of my career. Unfortunately Monroe Beardsley and Richard Wollheim are no longer with us, but I can at least thank my former teacher at the University of Toronto, Francis Sparshott, who set me on the road that led to this book. Among those who have been the most supportive and helpful to me are some whom I have singled out for criticism. In particular, everything I have ever written on emotion theory begins by a critique of the views of Bob Solomon, someone who has been unfailingly generous and supportive of me over the years. I am also consistently critical of the views of Peter Kivy who has been equally helpful and kind for a very long time. Other friends who come in for attack include Noe¨l Carroll, Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, and Kendall Walton. I hope these friends will remain so. On emotion theory, my biggest debt is to my friend and colleague William Dember, who introduced me to the psychological literature on viii acknowledgements emotion and continues to be a source of wisdom. John Bickle and Bob Frank helped me with the neuro-science, and David Ricks gave me a clinical perspective on emotion. I have also learnt from exchanges with Ronald de Sousa, Patricia Greenspan, Paul Griffiths, Jesse Prinz, and Robert Solomon. On literature, my biggest debts are to Michel Atkinson and Ellen Peel, from whom I learnt a lot both when I co-taught courses with them and subsequently, and to Cathryn Long and Don Bogen with whom I regularly discuss literary questions. On the literary-philosophical front, I have also learnt from Peter Lamarque and Bob Stecker. On music, I am particularly grateful to Steven Cahn, Gregory Karl, Severine Neff, and Edward Nowacki. Jennifer Judkins, Andrew Kania, Jonathan Kramer, Fred Maus, Mary Sue Morrow, Frank Samarotto, and Allen Sapp helped me on specific points. Others to whom I am indebted in various and sundry ways include Rose Bianchi, Donald Gustafson, John Hancock, Diane Haslam, Van Quinn, Earl Rivers, and Jim Young. I owe a special debt to Cathryn Long and Taffy Ross who have for years listened sympathetically and offered helpful suggestions as I mulled over these topics. Several people made the ultimate sacrifice of actually reading and com- menting on parts of the book: I would like to thank especially Noe¨l Carroll, William Dember, Stephen Davies, Susan Feagin, Christopher Gauker, Gregory Karl, Jerrold Levinson, Ellen Peel, Stephanie Ross, and Michael Sontag. John Dilworth, Jennifer Judkins, Andrew Kania, Jerrold Levinson, and Sarah Worth commented on versions of chapters that I gave at meetings of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics. Numbers of students have also been exposed to my work and have often given helpful feedback. They include Zac Cogley, Fred Harrington, Gregory Johnson, Jon Long, and Michael Sontag. Some people read huge chunks of manuscript. I am particularly indebted to Malcolm Budd, Gregory Currie, and Ronald de Sousa who read the whole thing and made numerous useful suggestions, as well as to Cathryn Long and Alex Neill, who each read and commented on substantial portions. Audiences at various presentations I have given have also indirectly improved the manuscript. They include audiences at the University of British Columbia, University of Bristol, California State University at Full- erton, California Polytechnic State University at Pomona, College of Charleston, the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cin- cinnati, Duke University, Florida State University, University of Leeds, University of Southampton, Sussex University, University of Texas at acknowledgements ix Arlington, Victoria University, University of Virginia, Virginia Polytechnic University, the University of York, various meetings of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society for Aesthetics, and the meetings of the International Society for Research on Emotion in Quebec City, and the British Society for Aesthetics in Oxford. I have tried to take account of most of the comments I received in one way or another, but I do not expect to have satisfied everybody. In the summer of 2002 Jerrold Levinson directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science, which Dominic Lopes and I co-directed. I would like to thank the members of the Institute for helpful discussion, especially Amy Coplan, Stacie Friend, James Harold, Jerrold Levinson, Dominic Lopes, Shaun Nichols, Laura Perini, Miles Rind, Stephanie Ross, and James Shelley. During the academic year 2002–3 I was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the National Humanities Center. The Office of the Vice-President for Research, the Charles Phelps Taft memorial fund, and the Dean of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati also provided some support. The National Humanities Center was an ideal place to work and I’d like to thank the Endowment, as well as the fellows and staff for a very happy and profitable year. Sigrun Svavars- dottir and Sue Hirsch in particular were constant sources of encouragement. I am also grateful to Peter Momtchiloff and his excellent staff at Oxford University Press, and to Greg Johnson who helped enormously with the index. Finally, and most warmly of all, I thank my husband, John Martin, for loving support over a period of almost thirty-five years, and my children Jane and Neil Martin, who have also helped to keep me emotionally sane. This book is dedicated to the three of them. They have provided a rich source of fieldwork on the emotions, and among the many happy experi- ences we have had together, some at least have been aesthetic. As I said at the beginning, this book was over twenty years in the making, and perhaps would have been written sooner if I hadn’t had a family to think about. But both my life and this book would have been much the poorer. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 draw on material in ‘Emotion: Biological Fact or Social Construction?’ in Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 28–43; ‘Theoretical Issues in the Role of Appraisal in Emotion: x acknowledgements Cognitive Content Versus Physiological Change’, in Robert R. Hoffman, Michael F. Sherrick, and Joel S. Warm (eds.), Viewing Psychology as a Whole: The Integrative Science of William N. Dember, (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1998), 449–69; and ‘Startle’, Journal of Philosophy 92 (1995), 53–74.