Crying for people who do not exist
We are genuinely moved by characters we know perfectly well never existed. The problem has a name, and it is not solved.
Three propositions, one too many
In 1975, the philosopher Colin Radford published an article whose title poses the question: how can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina? The problem fits in three equally plausible and incompatible assertions.
We are genuinely moved by characters. We know perfectly well that they do not exist. And an emotion ordinarily presupposes believing in the existence of its object. Every solution consists in sacrificing one of the three, and none has prevailed.
The ways out proposed
Kendall Walton proposed in 1978 to deny the first: we would not feel real fear before a horror film, but quasi-emotions generated by a game of make-believe. His argument is behavioural: the viewer does not flee the cinema and does not call anyone.
Another family of solutions denies the third: vividly representing a content would be enough to be moved, without believing in it. This position agrees with the fact that we are also moved by hypotheses, memories and anticipations, all lacking a present object.
The neighbouring paradox
A second question has been raised for longer: why do we choose works that make us feel what we flee in life? David Hume devoted an essay to it in 1757 and attributed the pleasure to eloquence and to the beauty of imitation, which would convert pain into satisfaction.
Contemporary research studies it mainly in relation to music. Surveys show that a significant share of listeners actively seek out sad pieces and draw from them a state distinct from sadness, often described as being moved.
What psychology measures
The notion of narrative transportation designates the state of a reader absorbed in a story, who partly loses access to the real context. Work published in the early 2000s shows that the stronger this transportation, the closer the reader's beliefs move to those conveyed by the story, including when it is presented as fiction.
The result does not settle the philosophical debate, but it shifts a presupposition: knowing that a content is false does not stop it acting. That is a finding that reaches well beyond literature.
Why this review compares with characters
This site's comparison pages situate your profile relative to well-known figures, and those figures are always fictional characters. That choice is not decorative.
Attributing an emotional way of functioning to a real, identifiable person amounts to asserting something about their inner life that no test allows, and it belongs to their private life. A character has no private life: their functioning is entirely contained in the text, and therefore open to everyone's discussion, and describing it wrongs nobody.
Key points
The paradox of fiction sets three plausible assertions against each other, one of which must fall; no solution has prevailed.
The paradox of tragedy, posed by Hume in 1757, is today studied mainly in relation to sad music.
Knowing that a story is false does not stop it acting on the beliefs of whoever is absorbed in it.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
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