The contrast between real and fictional characters in our thinking needs further elaboration. In this commentary on Eco’s look at the ontology of the semiotic object, I suggest that human semiotic construction entails constant modulation of the relationship between the states of the real and fictional characters in irreversible time. Literary characters are examples of crystallized fictions which function as semiotic anchors in the fluid construction — by the readers — of their understandings of the world. Literary characters are thus (...) fictions that are real in their functions — while the actual reality of meaningmaking consists of ever new fictions of fluid (transitory) nature. Eco’s ontological look at the contrast of the semiotic object with perceptual objects (Gegenstände) in Alexius Meinong’s theorizing needs to be complemented by the semiotic subject. Cultural mythologies of human societies set the stage for such invention and maintenance of such dynamic unity of fictionally real and realistically fictional characters. (shrink)

Vygotsky was a brilliant literary scholar whose role in psychology borrows substantially from his interests in and fascination with literature and theatre. The central question for Vygotsky’s theory was aesthetic synthesis – the emergence of generalized feelings in human life-experiences. The critical empirical example for the emergence of affective synthesis for Vygotsky was the short story by Ivan Bunin, ‘Legkoe dykhanie’. My task in this article is to analyse Vygotsky’s way of conceptualizing dialectical synthesis as a general psychological process. I (...) demonstrate that Vygotsky succeeded in locating the empirical phenomena where such syntheses can be observed, and proceeded halfway towards creating a general model of affective synthesis. Yet he failed to complete the task due to the limitations of the analogical transfer of the notion of short circuit into the psychological realm. The problem of synthesis remains unsolved up to the present day. Possible ways of solving it require formalization of the notion of double negation that has been used in dialectical philosophies, but has not been encoded into psychology’s research methodologies. (shrink)

What are fictional emotions and what has phenomenology to say about them? This paper argues that the experience of fictional emotions entails a splitting of the subject between a real and a phantasy ego. The real ego is the ego that imagines something; the phantasy ego is the ego that is necessarily co-posited by any experience of imagining something. Fictional emotions are phantasy emotions of the phantasy ego. The intentional structure of fictional emotions, the nature of their fictional object, as (...) well as the process of constituting the phantasy ego in representificational acts of consciousness are further elaborated to provide the groundwork for a phenomenological analysis of fictional emotions. (shrink)