(1)We Want the Fiction to Be Such That Something, E, Occurs in It

Tragedy

Gregory Currie

1 The problem

Hume thought it puzzling that members of an audience are sometimes ‘pleased in proportion as they are afflicted.’[1]We demand our money back if some rewriting has Desdemona alive at the end of Othello--not merely because it contradicts Shakespeare’s intentions, but because it seems dramatically wrong. At the same time, her death is deeply upsetting. While we want the fiction to go a certain way, and certainly to include the death of Desdemona, we don’t, it seems, want Desdemona to die. Put more generally:

(1)we want the fiction to be such that something, E, occurs in it,

while

(2) we react in ways which make it tempting to say that we want E not to occur.

I’ll call such a combination of states a tragic response, and the fiction to which it is a responsetragic or a tragedy. But my description of the response has so far been rather tentative, at least in regard to (2). Is the tempting thing to saythe right thing? If not, what is the right thing?This is my problem of tragedy, and my answer to the first part is No; my answer to the second will take longer to develop. This is not Hume’s problem of tragedy. Hume wondered why people seek tragic fictions;to this I give no answer. But answering my question is a step towards answering Hume’s; if we want to know why viewers enjoy being in certain states it helps to know what states they are in.

What counts for me as a tragedy is observer relative; perhaps this is not how we ordinarily think about tragedy. Tragedy in the ordinary sense, or something close to it, is that which merits, or aspires to merit, a tragic response. So if what I say here is right, we shall learn something about how tragedy, in the ordinary sense, works.

2Three solutions

According to the simple solution, the tempting thing to say is the right thing. Instead of (2) we should say

(3) We desire that E not occur.

So the viewerdesiresOthello to be a play where Desdemona dies, but also desiresthat she not die. The change-of-content solution has it that(3) correctly identifies the attitude—desire--butgets the content of the desire wrong; the right thing to say is

(4) We desire the fiction to be such that E not occur in it.

So the viewer desiresOthello to be a play wherein Desdemona dies, and desires it to be a play wherein she does not die.[2]The change-of-attitude solution has it that (3)gets the content right,but gets the attitude wrong.[3]Viewers don’t really desire E not to occur, though they are in stateseasily confused, even by their possessors, with desires. These are imaginative counterparts of desires, just as what we ordinarily call ‘imaginings’ are counterparts of beliefs.[4]Following Egan and Doggett, I’ll call them i-desires. This solution, the one I favour, replaces (2) with:

(5) We i-desire that E not occur.

3 Against thesimple solution

Some reject the simple solution because these supposed desires, as in (3), don’t have motivating tendency; we don’t leap on stage to save Desdemona. Defenders say that we can account for the inertness of these desiresin this way: desires motivate in conjunction with beliefs, not in conjunction with imaginings; the viewer genuinely desires Desdemona not to be killed but merely imagines that this will happen, and so does not act.[5]

Nothing I shall say against the simple theory depends on claims about inertness. Nor does my case depend on supposed difficulties in the way of having desires concerning things we know don’t exist. I’ll consider a case where the fictional character in question is a real thing, really known by the viewer to exist. I argue that even in this case, where the viewer does have genuine desires concerning the fictional character, the simple solution will not work.

Suppose I am watching a BBC drama set in the 1980s called Death of a Prime Minister which imagines the assassination of Margaret Thatcher and its political aftermath. I will stipulate a couple of things: (i) watching the play, I desire that, in the play, Mrs Thatcher is killed; that seems the best way to explore dramatic and political possibilities; (ii) as a matter of fact, I admire Mrs Thatcher, and wish her a long and happy life.[6]

(i) and (ii) are, respectively, instances of our schemas (1) and (3) above. The simple solution claims that it is instances of (1) and (3) which characterise tragic responses. Given (i) and (ii), and assuming the simple solution is correct, Death of a Prime Minister should elicit from me a tragic response. But it doesn’t. Agreeing to (i) and (ii) leaves it open how I respond as I watch the drama. Admiring of Mrs Thatcher as I am, I may still be ‘on the side’ of the assassin, especially if care is taken to highlight his steely Jackal-like professionalism. True, if I am an admirer of Thatcher this won’t be easy; it means overcoming my natural inclination to favour her cause, even as represented in fiction. But fictions do surprise us with their capacity to re-align our natural inclinations. It would also be wrong to insist that my taking the assassin’s side reveals me as a self-deceived anti-Thatcherite. It could be that way, but it doesn’t have to be. We should accept that I have the right attitudes to count, by the lights of the simple theory, as someone for whom this is a tragedy. Yet I am not such a person.

It is sometimes saidof such cases that the object of my thought is not the real Mrs Thatcher, but an unreal Mrs Thatcher-of-the-play, so my desires about the real Mrs Thatcher are irrelevant. For reasons given by Stacie Friend (2003), this is not a promising move. When I tell my daughter stories about her adventures with lions their appeal depends on it being she who figures in them. Of course, in all cases the story tells of things which did not happen to Mrs Thatcheror to my daughter. In that sense, they are about Mrs Thatcher and the rest fictionalised. But Mrs Thatcher fictionalised is Mrs Thatcher.

A simple theorist might allow thatI have, as stipulated, the desire that Mrs Thatcher not be killed. That’s a stable, background desire of mine. She mightalso say that I have the desire that she be killed.That’s a highly salient, condition-dependent desire; a desire triggered by the specific condition of watching the drama.For the duration of the drama, the condition-dependent desire dominates my thinking, inhibiting my tragic response. Now the simple theorist need only tweak her theory to deal with the counterexample. Instead of saying that a drama will be tragic for an agent if the agent has desires of kinds (1) and (3), she says instead that the drama will be tragic if the desires in question are both possessed and not dominated bymore salient contrary desires. This more demanding condition is not satisfied in the case of Death of Prime Minister.

People do sometimes have genuine desires which are condition-dependent and which contradict their more stable desires. A person whose long term background desire is to stay sober may, when confronted with temptation, acquire the desire to drink. This is a condition-dependent desire, and not a conditional desire; it is not the desire to drink if confronted by certain things, but the desire simply to drink: a desire the subjecthas just when so confronted. The condition in which one has that desire is a trigger; it is not part of the satisfaction condition of that desire; the satisfaction condition is merely that I drink now. The subject has a desire of the one kind to drink, and a desire of the other kind not to.

That is not how it is with me as I watch Death of a Prime Minister. My long-term, stable desire that Mrs Thatcher thrive has a certain satisfaction condition; it is satisfied if she thrives. What is the satisfaction condition of my supposed desire, prompted by the drama, for the death of Mrs Thatcher? If it really is a desire, it should be satisfied by her death. It wouldn’t be.[7]Suppose that, while I am watching the play and cheering for the assassin, Mrs Thatcher runs in pursued by an assassin who proceeds to murder her. That would seem to me a wholly bad thing.

Perhaps my unhappiness at the outcome does not show that my desire was frustrated. People sometimes have desires the satisfaction of which leave them unhappy. But that’s not plausible the case here. If you and I are watching the drama, and bet on whether my desire (we casually call it that in our conversation) will be satisfied, the bet isn’t decided by what happens when,amazingly, Mrs Thatcher appears pursued by an assassin; it is decided by what happens in the play. This state, which we ignorantly call a desire, is not satisfied by the death of Mrs Thatcher, but by her death according to the fiction.[8]

This gives us a clear test that will distinguish i-desires from desires:

(SC) A putative desire, is an i-desire and not really a desire if  has satisfaction conditions, a canonical statement of which makes reference to a fiction which is not also the object of 

That is how it is with my putative desire in the present case.What we call my desire that Mrs Thatcher die is really an i-desire, as the change-of-attitude theory claims. The simple theory is wrong.

The example which has carriedthis argument is atypical, being a case where the fiction concerns a real thing. I don’t believe thisaffects the generality of the conclusion. If we agree that what characterises my response to Death of a Prime Minister is an i-desire then we agree that there are i-desires, something opponents of the change-of-attitude theory have always denied. It would be odd to claim that, when fictions concern real things it is i-desires which are in play, but that in the case of fictions involving nonexistents, real desires take over.

4 Against the change-of-content solution

At this point a change-of-content theorists, from whom we have not so far heard, will protest. Why insist that there are odd states called i-desires,with odd satisfaction conditions, given by (SC), which don’t match their contents? We can explain everything using onlyreal desires with respectable satisfaction conditions. Consider the problem for the simple theorists: she claims that what is salient in my response to the drama is a desire that Mrs Thatcher dies. But it turns out that this supposed desire would not be satisfied by the death of Mrs Thatcher--so it cannot be the desire the simple theorists thought it was. But no such problem arises if we think that the desire in question is the desire that Mrs Thatcher die according to the fiction. And now the change-of-content theorist can explain why I do not have a tragic response to the drama. To have one I would have to have contradictory desires concerning the drama: the desire that Mrs Thatcher die according to the drama, and the desire that she not die according to the drama. It’s because I lack the second of these desires that the drama is not, for me, a tragic one. All is explained, without resort to states with odd satisfaction conditions.

I reply in two parts: (a) the change-of-content theory is wrong for another reason; (b) (SC) does not ascribe odd satisfaction conditions to i-desires.

Take (a) first. The change-of-content theory is wrong because it requires the viewer of a tragedy to be ambivalent about the kind of fiction she wants. It is not possible, on this account, to experience the work as a tragedy and want wholeheartedly for it to be a work in which Desdemona dies; one must want it to be a work in which she dies, and want it not to be one. But many, probably most, people who find Othello tragic have no ambivalence about what shape they want for the play’s ending. They are not, for example, people who found it difficult to decide whether they wanted to see a play with a dead heroine at the end or to see a light comedy.

Now to (b).Take imagining, in the ordinary sense, that Bill Sykes is a kindly old gentleman. That’s the wrong thing to imagine, not because Sykes is something other than a kindly old gentleman; Sykes doesn’t exist. It is the wrong thing to imagine because that is not how things are representedin Oliver Twist. How things are represented makes it appropriate to imagine that Sykes is a violent criminal. Imagining that he is a violent criminal matches what is so according to the story, and matching is what we aim for when we engage with stories. One thing I don’t imagine while engaging with the story is that, in the story, Sykes is a violent criminal—that’s not so according to the story. That is something I believe, and rightly so, because the belief matches reality. So we have a belief and an imagining—the imaginative counterpart of the belief. They have distinct contents, but theyare made appropriate by the same state of affairs: that, according to the story, Sykes is a violent criminal. It is the same for desires and i-desires. One who prefers gentle narratives might have the genuine desire that, in Oliver Twist, Sykes is not a violent criminal, and one who, reading the book, is concerned for Nancy’s safety, might have the i-desire that Sykes is not a violent criminal. These two states, with their distinct contents, would be satisfied by the same state of affairs: that, In Oliver Twist, Sykes is not a violent criminal. They are satisfied together, or not at all. The satisfaction conditions for i-desires are just what we would expect for states which are imaginative counterparts.

Earlier I referred to the view that our attitudes are never, in fictional contexts, directed to real things like Mrs Thatcher, but always to their fictional counterparts. This view is false. What is true is that one’s attitude to a real thing in a fictional contexts is an attitude which, while directed at that thing, is not satisfiable in the way that one’s real desires would be. Its satisfaction does not depend on what the real thing does, but on what the real thing does according to the fiction. To say that one’s attitude is directed towards the fictionalised counterpart of the real thing is a garbledversion of what ought to be said: that one’s attitude is satisfied according to how that realthing is represented in the fiction.

5 For the change-of-attitude solution

The change of attitude theory tells us two things relevant to the Margaret Thatcher case: (i) what state I would have to be in for my response to the drama to be tragic; (ii) why my response is in fact not tragic. The answers go like this: (i) I would have to desire that Mrs Thatcher dies according to the drama, and i-desire that she not desire; (ii) While I have the relevant desire, I lack the relevant i-desire.

Most of the case for the change-of-attitude solution is now in place. We have seen why extant theories that don’t resort to i-desires fail. We have seen why the change-of-attitude theory is justified in resorting to them, not merely because doing so solves the problem of tragedy and accounts or the Mrs Thatcher case, but because the states in question manifestly don’t have the satisfaction conditions which would make them real desires; the charge that i-desires are ad hoc postulates is thereby answered. And we are able, finally, to respond to another objection to the change-of-attitude theory. Shaun Nichols argues that this solution can’t explain why there is a feeling of tension in responding to a tragedy.[10] Nichols points out that there is no conflict generated by believing something and imagining its negation. But the change-of-attitude solution asks us to account for our response to tragedy as a combination of a real desire—one concerning the play—and an i-desire concerning the character. How could this generate a tension?

It’s worth noting that the change-of-attitude theory does not postulate states which genuinely parallel the case of believing P and imagining not-P. That theory requires a desire that, in the play, P, and an i-desire that not-P. Still, we need to say why this combination of states—a desire and an i-desire—would lead to a sense of tension. And the reason is now available. Recall that there is a desire and an i-desire that are satisfied together or not at all: the desire that, in the play, Desdemona is saved, and the i-desire that Desdemona is saved. That being so, the desire that, in the play, Desdemona dies and the i-desire that she be saved are not mutually satisfiable.Those are exactly the two states definitive of a tragic response, according to the change-of-attitude theory. Our having those two states, and our awareness of their incompatibility, is what generates the tension to which Nichols points.[11]

University of Nottingham

NG7 2RD

UK

References

Carruthers, P. 2003. Review of Recreative Minds.Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Currie, G. and Ravenscroft, I. 2002.Recreative Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Egan, A. and Doggett, T. 2009. Wanting what you don’t want.Philosophers’ Imprint. 7: 1–17.

Doggett, T. and Egan, A.2010. Fiction, Emotion and Cognitive Architecture, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Friend, S. 2003. How I really feel about JFK.In eds. M. Kieran and D. M. Lopes,Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts. London:Routledge.

Hume, D. 1777/1985. On Tragedy, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.