Menninghaus et al. deserve plaudits for attempting to interweave rhetorical, literary, philosophical, and scientific issues that are of consequence in the art process. A multidisciplinary approach is indeed what addressing the nexus of creation, production, and reception of art requires. However, the project largely fails, not because it is too ambitious, but because of its choice and treatment of the main connective tissue – something called “negative emotions.”
The principal purpose of the commentary is a critique of the authors' treatment of this concept, exemplified already in their opening sentence: “Enjoyment associated with negative emotions in art reception has been a central issue in poetics and aesthetics ever since Aristotle's theory of tragedy” (sect. 1). If already the first sentence manages to conflate a prototypical story's themes that involve the characters' anger, fear, and sadness with the readers' allegedly analogous “negative” emotional states (and even an empathetic one, pity), that is because the article continually confounds such key issues.
Two preliminary remarks: Aristotle's catharsis (mentioned prominently in the article) is arguably not about the spectators' enjoyment of their negative emotions, but rather about the satisfaction that they experience because they have safely “purged themselves” of the hostility that had gradually built up because of adverse life events (Konečni Reference Konečni1991). Also, much classical rhetoric (also mentioned prominently) has actually very little to say about “negative emotions” with regard to either the orator's/poet's motives and themes or the recipients' emotional states. A well-known example is Longinus (or pseudo-Longinus, first or third century CE), whose text On the Sublime was influential in eighteenth-century Europe and continues to be widely discussed in American classicists' circles (see, for example, the translation and commentary by Arieti & Crossett [ Reference Arieti and Crossett1985]). One can safely claim that only with Edmund Burke (Reference Burke1759/1971, Pt V, sect. I) is the effect of “words” on “affections,” if any, argued in depth and influentially.
Turning to the key issues: Much of the article obliquely revolves around what is known as the Paradox of Fiction (the Anna Karenina Paradox), first discussed in modern, post-Humean times by Colin Radford and Michael Weston (1975). Briefly, it refers to the readers' feeling sad about, or moved by, the sad fate of a nonexistent person, a literary character. Almost all of the many philosophers who have addressed this problem have invoked terms such as quasi-emotion and as-if emotion, and even denied it the status of a genuine paradox – based on their belief that the readers' state is only the real-life emotion's very pale analogue. However, here is the Menninghaus et al. position: “These terms [as-if, quasi-, pseudo-] evoke the notion (which we consider misleading) that art-elicited emotions may be somehow a species of inauthentic emotions” (sect. 1, point C, para. 2). (Significantly, the authors fail to return to this issue.)
But of course they are inauthentic – certainly so from the following viewpoint, which challenges some other key aspects of the article. Emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and joy are subjective states that are caused by significant events involving threat to survival, struggle for limited resources, and bonding with, or loss of, a cherished mate or progeny. These events are predominantly social, involving real people. It is not surprising that the oral and written descriptions of such events have always been enjoyable, interesting, and, frequently, instructive to readers. Many accounts have described the emotions allegedly experienced by mythical or real-life characters, most of which have indeed been “negative,” which explains my choice of emotion terms above – terms that reflect existential and adaptive concerns. Precisely for this reason, because of the massive cognitive, metabolic, and physiological investment required to sustain the major basic emotions, it follows that it would not be desirable for readers and listeners to experience the genuine emotions themselves. Wisely, they usually do not.
A related problematic issue is that Menninghaus et al., presumably striving to be inclusive with regard to the temporal arts, discuss music in the analogous vein. But here, again, many major philosophers (Noël Carroll, Peter Kivy, Nick Zangwill) are in agreement that the so-called “sad music” does not make listeners genuinely sad – in line, generally, with the views of people as otherwise diverse as Eduard Hanslick and Igor Stravinsky (Konečni Reference Konečni2008; Reference Konečni2013; Konečni et al. Reference Konečni, Brown and Wanic2008).
Then, there is the authors' recruitment into their model of the concept of distancing as something of a conceptual novelty. In fact, it was probably first introduced into English-language aesthetics in the 1950s by the commentators of Bertolt Brecht's “epic theater” (Konečni Reference Konečni1991). But the authors' dilemma should be this: If the story-induced readers' state is a genuine, real life–like sadness, then distancing would be next to impossible to accomplish; and if it is a quasi-sadness, then there is no need for distancing. No one has seriously challenged the Radford and Weston (Reference Radford and Weston1975) view that our “sadness” about Anna's (or Mercutio's or Duchess of Malfi's) sad fate does not have any of the goal-directed or coping attributes characteristic of genuine emotions.
Finally, only three studies (Gerger et al. Reference Gerger, Leder and Kremer2014, involving “affectively negative pictures”; Lundqvist et al. Reference Lundqvist, Carlsson, Hilmersson and Juslin2009, using “sad music”; and Wagner et al. Reference Wagner, Klein, Hanich, Shah, Menninghaus and Jacobsen2016, with “anger-inducing performances”) are cited by Menninghaus et al. to the effect that they report autonomic and electromyographic (EMG) changes in viewers and listeners. However, a close examination reveals that in all three studies there are major methodological shortcomings (see also Konečni Reference Konečni2015). The autonomic results are weak and hardly indicative of genuine emotions. As for the EMG findings, they seem to demonstrate the participants' “facial commentary,” rather than genuine emotional experience. Such absence of links to solid and pertinent empirical work would seem to reveal the authors' analysis for what it actually is – a mostly literary handling of emotions. This is by no means intended as a condescending description, but rather as a warning that a predominantly literary analysis of the role of emotion in art runs into serious problems when it reaches beyond metaphor to handle psychological states with clear biological underpinnings.
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Menninghaus et al. deserve plaudits for attempting to interweave rhetorical, literary, philosophical, and scientific issues that are of consequence in the art process. A multidisciplinary approach is indeed what addressing the nexus of creation, production, and reception of art requires. However, the project largely fails, not because it is too ambitious, but because of its choice and treatment of the main connective tissue – something called “negative emotions.”
The principal purpose of the commentary is a critique of the authors' treatment of this concept, exemplified already in their opening sentence: “Enjoyment associated with negative emotions in art reception has been a central issue in poetics and aesthetics ever since Aristotle's theory of tragedy” (sect. 1). If already the first sentence manages to conflate a prototypical story's themes that involve the characters' anger, fear, and sadness with the readers' allegedly analogous “negative” emotional states (and even an empathetic one, pity), that is because the article continually confounds such key issues.
Two preliminary remarks: Aristotle's catharsis (mentioned prominently in the article) is arguably not about the spectators' enjoyment of their negative emotions, but rather about the satisfaction that they experience because they have safely “purged themselves” of the hostility that had gradually built up because of adverse life events (Konečni Reference Konečni1991). Also, much classical rhetoric (also mentioned prominently) has actually very little to say about “negative emotions” with regard to either the orator's/poet's motives and themes or the recipients' emotional states. A well-known example is Longinus (or pseudo-Longinus, first or third century CE), whose text On the Sublime was influential in eighteenth-century Europe and continues to be widely discussed in American classicists' circles (see, for example, the translation and commentary by Arieti & Crossett [ Reference Arieti and Crossett1985]). One can safely claim that only with Edmund Burke (Reference Burke1759/1971, Pt V, sect. I) is the effect of “words” on “affections,” if any, argued in depth and influentially.
Turning to the key issues: Much of the article obliquely revolves around what is known as the Paradox of Fiction (the Anna Karenina Paradox), first discussed in modern, post-Humean times by Colin Radford and Michael Weston (1975). Briefly, it refers to the readers' feeling sad about, or moved by, the sad fate of a nonexistent person, a literary character. Almost all of the many philosophers who have addressed this problem have invoked terms such as quasi-emotion and as-if emotion, and even denied it the status of a genuine paradox – based on their belief that the readers' state is only the real-life emotion's very pale analogue. However, here is the Menninghaus et al. position: “These terms [as-if, quasi-, pseudo-] evoke the notion (which we consider misleading) that art-elicited emotions may be somehow a species of inauthentic emotions” (sect. 1, point C, para. 2). (Significantly, the authors fail to return to this issue.)
But of course they are inauthentic – certainly so from the following viewpoint, which challenges some other key aspects of the article. Emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and joy are subjective states that are caused by significant events involving threat to survival, struggle for limited resources, and bonding with, or loss of, a cherished mate or progeny. These events are predominantly social, involving real people. It is not surprising that the oral and written descriptions of such events have always been enjoyable, interesting, and, frequently, instructive to readers. Many accounts have described the emotions allegedly experienced by mythical or real-life characters, most of which have indeed been “negative,” which explains my choice of emotion terms above – terms that reflect existential and adaptive concerns. Precisely for this reason, because of the massive cognitive, metabolic, and physiological investment required to sustain the major basic emotions, it follows that it would not be desirable for readers and listeners to experience the genuine emotions themselves. Wisely, they usually do not.
A related problematic issue is that Menninghaus et al., presumably striving to be inclusive with regard to the temporal arts, discuss music in the analogous vein. But here, again, many major philosophers (Noël Carroll, Peter Kivy, Nick Zangwill) are in agreement that the so-called “sad music” does not make listeners genuinely sad – in line, generally, with the views of people as otherwise diverse as Eduard Hanslick and Igor Stravinsky (Konečni Reference Konečni2008; Reference Konečni2013; Konečni et al. Reference Konečni, Brown and Wanic2008).
Then, there is the authors' recruitment into their model of the concept of distancing as something of a conceptual novelty. In fact, it was probably first introduced into English-language aesthetics in the 1950s by the commentators of Bertolt Brecht's “epic theater” (Konečni Reference Konečni1991). But the authors' dilemma should be this: If the story-induced readers' state is a genuine, real life–like sadness, then distancing would be next to impossible to accomplish; and if it is a quasi-sadness, then there is no need for distancing. No one has seriously challenged the Radford and Weston (Reference Radford and Weston1975) view that our “sadness” about Anna's (or Mercutio's or Duchess of Malfi's) sad fate does not have any of the goal-directed or coping attributes characteristic of genuine emotions.
Finally, only three studies (Gerger et al. Reference Gerger, Leder and Kremer2014, involving “affectively negative pictures”; Lundqvist et al. Reference Lundqvist, Carlsson, Hilmersson and Juslin2009, using “sad music”; and Wagner et al. Reference Wagner, Klein, Hanich, Shah, Menninghaus and Jacobsen2016, with “anger-inducing performances”) are cited by Menninghaus et al. to the effect that they report autonomic and electromyographic (EMG) changes in viewers and listeners. However, a close examination reveals that in all three studies there are major methodological shortcomings (see also Konečni Reference Konečni2015). The autonomic results are weak and hardly indicative of genuine emotions. As for the EMG findings, they seem to demonstrate the participants' “facial commentary,” rather than genuine emotional experience. Such absence of links to solid and pertinent empirical work would seem to reveal the authors' analysis for what it actually is – a mostly literary handling of emotions. This is by no means intended as a condescending description, but rather as a warning that a predominantly literary analysis of the role of emotion in art runs into serious problems when it reaches beyond metaphor to handle psychological states with clear biological underpinnings.