MÓDULO PROFESIONAL Nº 7 : FORMACIÓN Y ORIENTACIÓN LABORAL

Imagine there is a robust institution of career guidance counselling. Perhaps in the past these counsellors created detailed narratives of a ‘day in the life’ of particular careers in which their clients imaginatively immersed themselves. Perhaps they have upgraded to first-person perspective films or even virtual reality simulations, involving a great deal of skill and planning in their construction. Those who need career guidance have read and viewed these day-in-the-life guidance-works for generations - imagining their contents, discussing them with one another, debating, and considering. There are online forums dedicated to them. Vintage guidance-works are revisited and compared to contemporary ones; trends in their construction come and go, and people debate whether or not black- and-white guidance-films were better for counselling than newer ones with distracting color and effects. In this scenario, there is an established social practice of shared imaginings that maintain agreement, most likely through implicit principles. Yet, the career counselling practice is not fiction, it is counselling. This is why imagination and agreement are not enough. It is the fixed external aim that makes the career counselling what it is, and that makes the artifacts it creates guidance-works rather than fictional works. What, then, is the aim of fiction?

In the last section, I mentioned that Walton refers to the function of fictional works as their role within the practice, and that an assessment of how they fulfill this function is part of criticism. While this thought is very similar to the view I’m developing, I should be very clear about the differences. As discussed in the first chapter, one of Walton’s definitions of ‘fiction’ is functional – something is fictional if it functions as a prop in games of make- believe. This indicates that ‘fiction’ is a social kind rather than a social practice,

specifically a species of representation. Understanding social kinds in terms of their functions is a well-established view in social ontology and is perhaps most famously argued for by Ruth Millikan in her 1984 book Language, Thought, and Other Biological

Categories. Without getting too far into the minutiae of the view, the basic idea is that

kinds are created via the copying or reproduction of objects because they perform a certain function. In this view, historical factors, individual tokens of a kind, and the function of the

tokens all play an ontological role. It could also be that, because the copying has to be the right kind of copying, principles that determine what counts as appropriate copying could also be ontologically important.

Functional views like Millikan’s are typically focused on instances of a kind, meaning that historical factors and what makes an act of copying appropriate will sometimes involve the individual actions and intentions of the creator of the object, at least in the case of artifacts. However, there are views according to which the functions of artifacts are not traceable to the intentions of creators but rather to their use in the present.204 _{This bears a greater} similarity to Walton’s view. All this is to say that Walton’s view of fiction as a species of representational artifact understood in terms of its function is well-supported. It is also not the view I’m advocating.

More accurately, it’s not the whole view I’m advocating. I think Walton is correct in that playing the appropriate role in a particular practice is what makes an artifact fictional (or literary, or lawful, or linguistic, etc.). But playing the role of a prop in games of make- believe only makes an artifact fictional if those games are played in fictional practice. A doll that plays the role of prop in a child’s make-believe game is not a fiction, it is a toy. In children’s pretend games, props in their make-believe are toys: the practice of play gives the prop its toy-ness just as the practice of fiction gives artifacts like works their

fictionality. This is why simply defining the role of a representation within a practice does not define fiction.

Thus, the fixed external aim of the practice as a whole is part of the essential definition of fiction. This is the sort of functional view that’s needed, not a view of the functions of individual representations, utterances, or artifacts. Making explicit the roles of kinds defined by the practice, such as works, is not enough. I think this point is emphasized if we look to the actual intentions of individual authors and artists, as indicated by a view more like Milikan’s. There are a huge number of ends pursued by fiction-makers via their creative acts. They may want to move people to tears, to teach them, to make a few bucks. 204 _{See Beth Preston, “Philosophical Theories of Artifact Function,” Philosophy of Technology and}

But these are not part of what makes fictional works what they are, and no fictional work can be excluded as a genuine fictional work because it was created to make the author money. As for how the community at large in fact uses fictional works, it is similarly varied. Readers and viewers often aim to escape reality, to be thrilled, to learn about fashion in the Regency, and to avoid talking to their date in the course of consuming fictional works. Surely none of these are the function that individuates fictional works from other social kinds. This is similar to the chess example used in the previous section: if we identify the aim as belonging to the practice rather than to any individual acts or

objects, we don’t have to disqualify a game of chess from really being chess when a player pursues an errant aim.

Having argued that aims belong to whole practices, what exactly is the aim of fictional practice? Earlier, we saw that Prado considers fiction to simply be the ‘natural’ act of world-building done for its own sake, something often said of art.205 This is similar in a sense to the view I expressed in the previous chapter, in which fictional imagining was built out of more typical goal-oriented acts of imagining, but was not itself clearly an instance of goal-oriented imagining. Perhaps what characterizes fictional imaginative practice is that it’s done for its own sake – that what makes fiction distinct from other imaginative practices is that it doesn’t have an aim. I think the reason this suggestion seems so plausible is that it lends to fiction the kind of goal-free purity that we’ve

attributed to aesthetic practices ever since the influence of Kant’s ideas of disinterestedness and autonomy.

I think this is tantamount to acknowledging that there is something essentially aesthetic about the practice of fiction. As Walton notes, make-believe is not “centrally or

paradigmatically or primarily a feature of the arts or an ingredient of ‘aesthetic’

205 _{This is typically attributed to Kant’s Critique of Judgement but is also evident in the views of other} influential thinkers, such as Theodor Adorno and Paul Valéry. It’s also evident in many contemporary views of aesthetic experience, according to which having an aesthetic experience involves valuing an experience for its own sake. For example, Gary Iseminger, “The Aesthetic State of Mind,” in Contemporary Debates in

experience.”206 _{The aesthetic is not in the imagining or in the agreement – it’s in the aim.} This is why it’s no coincidence that a practice of critical, aesthetic evaluation of works has grown up alongside fiction; fictional works strike us as appropriate objects for aesthetic evaluation because the aim of the practice to which they contribute is aesthetic. The aesthetic element of fiction is easily overlooked, perhaps in part because of the colloquial tendency to call everything that’s false or made-up ‘fiction,’ and many false or made-up things are not particularly aesthetically valuable.

Recall what Walton said about the use of props in social imaginings: they reduce the need for explicit agreements (of the type “Let’s imagine this … now let’s imagine that…”) for the purpose of regaining vivacity.207 That is, fictional works do not just function as props to prescribe imaginings; they are vehicles of an aesthetically heightened experience. We can socially imagine just fine with explicit agreements, and to any level of completeness that we desire. We can make as many fine-grained, detailed explicit agreements as we like, but our imaginings will nevertheless lack vivacity. This shows that mere completeness, or merely being fully fleshed, is not all that’s required for an imagining to be vivid. Vivacity is an aesthetic quality and an aesthetic merit; a focus on vivacity indicates a focus on aesthetic value or experience. If vivacity is indeed of primary value in fictional make- believe – so primary that fictional works exist in order to achieve it – this indicates that the aim of the practice is aesthetic.

But to say that an aim is aesthetic is vague. We would not say that the aim of law is justice- y or order-y in some unspecified way. However, there can be, and in fact are, disputes as to what the specific aim of a practice is or what it ought to be. For example, perhaps the aim that law actually achieves in a given society is to suppress the populace, and those in power reinforce a ‘might makes right’ ideology to this end. A philosopher comes along to argue that the real aim of law is justice or protection for the people. The arguments he makes are not that we should change the aim of law or make an entirely new practice, but that the ‘might makes right’ crowd is wrong about what the aim is. This disagreement 206 _{Walton, Mimesis, 7.}

reinforces the idea that there is an aim of the practice rather than refutes it; otherwise, our philosopher and his interlocutors would be having a merely verbal disagreement.

As with law and other social practices, it’s possible to have meaningful disputes about how to precisely characterize the aesthetic aim of fiction, but we can survey a few promising options. One is to characterize it as providing aesthetic experiences. However, how well this answer holds up depends on one’s view of aesthetic experience. Some views ask very much of the concept and would mean that much of the ‘low brow’ material that is

nevertheless properly fictional, such as the infamously bad 50 Shades of Grey, fails to achieve the aim of fiction. Jesse Prinz, for example, understands aesthetic experience as an emotional state of wonder.208 This aim seems too high for fictional practice. While some fictions certainly do create wonderment in their audiences, most do not. This would not be a refutation on its own, since most works could indeed fail to achieve the aim of the practice. However, it’s telling that we don’t seem to notice this failure. Presumably, if indeed aesthetic experience was to be identified with (or akin to) wonder, and aesthetic experience was the aim of fictional practice, it would be common knowledge that most fictional works are failures. We might agree that 50 Shades of Grey is not a great work of literature, but it doesn’t seem to be a failed fiction.

This only rules out aesthetic experience as the aim on that view, though. Suppose you have a view like Matthew Kieran’s, who says that “[w]hen we truly appreciate a work, we appreciate […] the ways in which the artistry shapes and guides our responses.”209 _{That is,} aesthetic experience involves a particular kind of aesthetic attention that almost has the form of a judgement, making a connection between what the creator of the work has done and what our responses are. This standard seems too high for the community rather than for the work. Any fictional work can be attended to in this way, but it seems unreasonable to think that the majority of people bring this level of attention to the aesthetic qualities of works in their everyday consumption of fiction. This sounds much more like critical attention. If this kind of attention were the aesthetic aim of fiction, then we would expect 208 _{See Jesse Prinz, “Emotion and Aesthetic Value,” in The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, eds.} Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71-88.

that the community of fiction makers and appreciators would be much smaller than it is, perhaps displaying the exclusivity of the world of high art.

Similar discussions could be had for other proposals as well. Perhaps the aim of the practice is to provide aesthetic value to the community via their imaginative experiences, even if they don’t qualify as properly aesthetic experiences according to some views. That is, perhaps practitioners can have an aesthetically valuable experience without needing to be in a state of wonder and without necessarily paying any special attention to the aesthetic properties of works or the imaginative experience itself. Again, depending on one’s view of aesthetic value, it could be objected that much of what’s considered good by fictional standards fails to count as genuinely aesthetically valuable. Maybe the kind of aesthetic value provided by fiction could be more correctly characterized as entertainment.

Frustratingly, this seems to set the bar too low. We could reasonably classify the aim of a practice like slapstick comedy as entertainment, though there could plausibly be outliers – examples of slapstick routines that deeply move us. But those fictions that deeply move and even upset us don’t seem to be outliers in fictional practice, nor are they examples of failed fictions. It’s hard to argue with Aristotle’s assessment that the ‘pity and fear’ elicited by tragedies is a reason to watch them, whether you agree that it is for catharsis or

something else. Entertainment has the connotation of ‘fun’ or ‘light-hearted,’ and as such I suspect that many would struggle to characterize their response to works like Schindler’s

List as ‘being entertained.’

Despite these disputes, fiction does have some aesthetic aim. This is not to say that fiction does not or cannot achieve other things, either externally or internally. Individual fictional works often have many actual uses and relatedly have many types of value, from the cognitive to the moral.210 However, these other aims are fluid rather than fixed. In virtue of being created by a practice which has the aesthetic as its fixed external aim, fictional works

210 _{For discussion on the many uses of works, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, (Oxford:} Clarendon Press, 1980): 1-29. See also Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and

Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Eileen John, “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge:

Philosophical Thought in Literary Context,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 4 (Autumn 1998): 331-348.

have a primarily aesthetic aim. What individuates the practice of fiction is that it consists in acts of social imagining for an aesthetic purpose. Social imagining without an aesthetic aim can be, as we saw in the previous section, any number of other practices, from therapy to philosophy to history. An aesthetic aim without social imagining can be any number of non-fictional art practices, or even ritual or ceremonial practices. It is the imaginative activities, agreement, and an aesthetic fixed external aim that makes fiction what it is.