At much insistence from my friends, I’ve started watching the NetflixhitseriesStranger Things. [Mild spoiler alert: a few basic facts about the show come out below, but nothing reveals a plot twist.]

One of the great things about the show is that it raises philosophical questions about emotions people experience when taking in frightening fictional events.

An important puzzle in aesthetics and philosophy of emotion is the Paradox of Tragedy (though it also applies to suspense, horror, and any genre designed around sad or scary feelings). Consider theseapparentlybasic facts:

1. The typical appreciator of fiction is neither a sadist nor a masochist, meaning she doesn’t (for the most part) enjoy pain or inflicting it on others.

2. Fear and sadness are painful—in the broad sense ofunpleasant-当他们代表自己时，当他们代表别人时。

3. Observing horror or tragedy involves either experiencing fear or sadness oneself, or it involves experiencing those emotions on behalf of, or through identifying with, the characters in the drama. (Or both.)

From these apparently simple facts it seems to follow that typical human viewers shouldnotenjoy works of drama—plays, novels, movies, etc.—that are tragic or horrible. 2 and 3 combine to imply that watching horror or tragedy should be painful/unpleasant, and 1 implies people don’t like pain either for themselves or others. So people shouldn’t like tragedy or horror. But the truth is quite the contrary. Tragedies, whether Sophocles’sOedipus The Kingor Coppola’sGodfather Part II, are some of the most popular works ever. For many, horror is addictive in a way that seems at odds with how much weavoidfear in regular life. AndStranger Things这部电影有许多恐怖元素，让人很难停止观看。

But consider the bizarre creature that terrorizes several people already in the first few episodes. Its shape is humanoid; it’s strong and grotesque; it is fast and lurks in dark lonely places, typically approaching people when they’re alone; and it’s associated with a disgusting, otherworldly organic residue.

You’d never want to encounter that creature in real life. So why do perfectly regular humans (neither sadists nor masochists) enjoy watching a drama withthat thing?

多年来，哲学家们对这个悖论提出了几项解决方案。也许人们还是有点虐待狂的;也许恐惧和悲伤本身并不是痛苦或不愉快的，等等。But the solution that’s become more attractive to me recently is that the ‘fear’ and ‘sadness’ that people experience in consuming tragedy and horror are significantlydifferentfrom those emotions in real life, and this difference makes a difference as to whether they can be enjoyable.

Several philosophers have argued for views like this. Kendall Walton, for example, argues that the ‘fear’ you experience in watching horror is aquasi-emotion, which is still a genuine emotion, but not the same as the real fear you experience in real life. Rather, youimagineit’s genuine fear, even though it’s not, as a way of engaging with the fiction (for Walton, engaging with fiction is a type of make-believe play). Walton has several arguments for that conclusions, but one of his main ones is to point out that when you watch horror, you’re not disposed to flee the theater when (say) the slime comes at you; but one of the consequences ofrealfear is being disposed to flee (or call the cops, which you also don’t do); hence the ‘fear’ you feel is not the same as real-life fear.

I’m not persuaded by that argument, however.Freezingis also a behavioral manifestation of real fear, especially when you sense that the fearsome entity hasn’t detected you. So whatever low-level systems modulate fear don’t register the scary thing on screen as having seen you, which makes your downstream behavioral responsefreezerather thanflee. And this comports with what happens when you see a monster on screen: you sit stone still.

But even if the action-disposition argument doesn’t work, the conclusion may still be right: the ‘fear’ one experiences from watching horror (or ‘sadness’ from tragedy) could have substantial differences from real-life fear (or sadness)—despite also having impressive similarities. And I now think this is the case, mainly due to a phenomenological comparison.

当我住在南非时，我花时间在克鲁格国家公园观察野生动物，有几次我接近鬣狗。有一次我在一个受保护的区域，但栅栏很薄——一只显然饥饿的鬣狗盯着我看。还有一次，我短暂地离开了保护区，来到公园的一个区域，我知道那里有鬣狗，但我看不到。(读者:不要这样做。)鬣狗，虽然它们主要是食腐动物，但也被野蛮的人类所熟知，它们经常成群工作。所以我在这些场合所经历的是真正的恐惧。

That fear, however,feltdifferent from the ‘fear’ I feel when seeing the creature onStranger Things. The fear of hyenas came as a stunning alertness—a heightened awareness—and readiness to act fast. The ‘fear’ of theStranger Thingscreature, however, can best be summed up asmake it go away, make it go away, make it go away!Some of my physiological responses were the same in both cases, as far as I can tell, but the overall character of the emotions was different: anticipatory action readiness versus helpless dread. (Sadness and ‘sadness,’ I think, also have phenomenological differences.) And it’s the latter ‘fear’ that has the enticingcome-backquality that will keep me watchingStranger Things, even though I’ll stay away from real hyenas.

Many questions are still open about this view. Whatexactlyare the similarities to and differences from real-life emotions? How do the differences help explain enjoyment of otherwise painful feelings? Why does a ‘fear’ that has thatmake-it-go-awayfeeling also have that enticingcome-backquality? That, perhaps, is a puzzle of its own, though different from the initial Paradox. And finally, why does fiction trigger emotional responses at all—even if emotional responses of a distinct sort? But we’ve already arrived at a fascinating fact about humans: we’re capable of entirely distinct forms of emotion—counterparts to but distinct from regular emotions—and we have those emotions in response to things we know aren’t real.

我们为什么会对小说产生这些情感，至少从柏拉图开始就一直抗拒哲学解释。在非人类的动物王国里，似乎也没有任何类似的现象。因此，综合考虑所有这些因素，我们所能说的是，我们人类有能力产生比我们目前最好的理论所能捕捉到的更奇怪的情感。