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Suspension of Disbelief

Suspension of disbelief, sometimes willing suspension of disbelief, is the intentional avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something surreal, such as a work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theater; the audience ignores the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis.

The poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduced the term "suspension of disbelief" in 1817 and suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Coleridge sought to revive the use of fantastic elements in poetry and developed a concept to support how a modern enlightened audience might continue to enjoy such types of literature. The term resulted from a philosophical experiment which Coleridge conducted with William Wordsworth within the context of the creation and reading of poetry. It involved an attempt to explain the supernatural persons or characters so that these creatures of imagination constitute some semblance of truth. In Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, Chapter XIV describes this collaboration called Lyrical Ballads (first edition 1798), for which Coleridge had contributed the more romantic, Gothic pieces including The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Here, Coleridge also referred to his concept as "poetic faith", citing the concept as a feeling analogous to the supernatural, which awakens the mind.


Coleridge recalled:
It was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and character supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that is willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitute poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakenening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

The notion of such an action by an audience was, however, recognized in antiquity, as seen particularly in the Roman theoretical concerns of Horace, who also lived in an age of increasing skepticism about the supernatural, in his Ars Poetica (with the quotation Ut pictura poesis). According to David Chandler, Coleridge drew his notion from Marcus Tullius Cicero's Historia Critica Philosophiae, which cited the phrase "assensus susepensione" or suspension of assent.

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