It’s a good point about realism to remember that people aren’t 2d, nor made of words. So it’s hard to say what makes fantastical content less realistic once one accounts for the anthropic principle. It can only be in misleading us further, since we already think in terms of stories. But it should only mislead if it presents itself as realistic, if there are any unicorns in it at all it becomes a more realistic novel.
The equivalent of this meeting could have been an email is this blog post could have been an aphorism, applies here.
For unicorn realism read tolkeins on fairy stories
Inspired by Christina Faraday BBC Essay
-
Tudor art is often criticised as unrealistic, e.g. lacking perspective. But murals that read left to right, without perspective, merging multiple instants in time, (stations of the cross might be good example) are in one sense more realistic, (since time is real), and in another, less, (since the instants didn’t have such a relation in space). You can have spatial realism or temporal realism, (i.e. realism in the sequence in which someone experiences the artwork, as in sequential murals). For some reason, we now mostly care about spatial realism in visual art, but did we used to care about temporal realism more?
-
experience of the art vs objective reality of the art distinction seems important
-
In passing, I would have you note that no man writes a song of despair who is really plunged in despair. If you are desperate you don’t bother to make a song about it. At the moment when Cowper wrote that beautiful Castraway we know that he was not unhappy, for he was exercising an art, which is one of the intensest joys known to man. When he sat down to make an interesting experiment with an unrhymed classical metre, as in the stanzas I have quoted, he was, I make no doubt, enjoying himself. (Walter murdoch)
- Put another way, it’s worth noting that no-one would read a poem that actually made them grieve, or actually made them think/fear the monster on the screen. This falsifies simply expressivist and sentimentalist accounts of aesthetics. These accounts can be saved by that philosophy of horror stuff about pseudo-emotions that Nguyen and others talk about
The stuff on Cowper relates to the paradox of tragedy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/imagination/puzzles.html#TragHorr and through there to Alexander’s ideas about set points/trapped priors: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/singing-the-blues as per Kenny easwarans comment on the post. This stuff really belongs in Aesthetics and disinterested liking
Re set points, note the opening of Johnson’s on sorrow about the uniqueness of sorrow/depression in that lack of it’s own extinguishment.
Read A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic
can naturalistic art be a kind of illusion? See SEP on depiction. This seeing-as, not seeing-that, how do these fit into what deception involves? When I see paint as a face, can I be deceived. Seems only if I believe that it is a face. Then can I only be deceived about propositional content? Seems quite narrow, and how does it fit in with things like exaggeration, vagueness, implicature, etc.