The Being of Fictions

¹Delivered at the Seminar on Cognitive Theory and the Arts, Harvard Humanities Center, November 1, 2000. It also appeared as Eva Brann, “The Being of Fictions,” Energeia, St. John's College, 2002.

Abstract

What kind of existence do fictional beings have? What are non-existent objects? Neither logic nor cognitive science gives complete answers, but theology might help.

Keyword:

• angels
• fictions
• Kosslyn
• Meinong
• non-beings
• Parsons
• Russell

Notes

¹ Delivered at the Seminar on Cognitive Theory and the Arts, Harvard Humanities Center, November 1, 2000. It also appeared as Eva Brann, “The Being of Fictions,” Energeia, St. John's College, 2002.

I am thinking not only of the reference poets have traditionally made to divine inspiration, but of something much more specific: the remarkable similarity that the being of angels, as set out by medieval theologians, has to the being of fictions. Angels have life but do not age; they begin as creations but have no end; they do not change, being each an intelligible species and yet are capable of crucial choices; to express their natures they assume bodies, which are, however, incorruptibly incorporeal; they do not live in passing time, yet they are compatible with its passage. They live instead in the aevum, a temporal mode between eternity and time, the temporality of Paradise. A short reflection will show that these features are exactly those of fictional beings, which also live without aging, which are made but not unmade, which are both once-and-for-all representations of their species and unique, autonomous individuals, which have visualizable but incorruptibly immaterial bodies, which live alongside us but not in passing time. They too have the aeviternity of an Edenic space parallel to our world but are exempt from the secular rule that the aspect of pain should not give pleasure. The question is now raised: Does this comparative account say to us that fictions are angels or that angels are fictions? If the latter, the theologians (above all, Thomas Aquinas in the Summa, Q. 10, 50 ff.) had an insight into the being of fictions, which was at once quite devoid of intention at the time and unmatched in depth thereafter.