Pathos ex Cogito

Jacob (who will undoubtedly take issue with the title of this post)brought forth in class the idea that emotion could arise from a concept. Thus, when reading about a particular character in a fictional story who elicits some type of emotional response from us, the readers, we are in fact reacting to the concept portrayed as opposed to the character itself. For instance, those who read The Scarlet Letter may feel anger towards Hester Prynne for her many betrayals, but in fact it is the concept of betrayal which we are truly reacting to. This notion of conceptual stimuli prompting emotional response seems to solve many of the issues which Walton and Radford articulate towards "real" emotional responses to fiction.

I think that people respond emotionally to conceptual stimuli on a regular basis, and the occurrence is evidenced in a spectrum of scenarios. One may feel sad at the death of a family member, one may feel sad for the death of someone they read about in the news yet never met before, and one may feel sad for the death of a character in a book or movie. These emotional responses, though they may very well vary by degree and severity, are essentially the same in nature. Our emotions in each case respond to the concept of loss (or death) and not one of them can me credibly discerned as being real in relation to the others.