ABSTRACT
In the visual arts the capacity for response is arguably most connected not to one's capacity for human sympathy, nor to one's ability to animate pictures with a feeling-tone, but rather to one's capacity to respond to what is depicted as if it were a real object. This is the position defended by Michael Stephan in A Transformational Theory of Aesthetics, where he argues that the 'level' at which we do not disbelieve in paintings is, in fact, the right hemisphere of the brain which handles the non-discursive pictorially presented information content of figurative paintings, and saves us from even the possibility of disbelief. But the drama-in-education story cannot be the whole story of the relationship between imagination and sympathy. There are clear cases where imagination is not the same thing as sympathy.
