Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts
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Daniel McInerny, Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, Word on Fire Academic, 2024.
Reviewed by Aaron James Weisel.
It is not uncommon to dichotomize philosophy and the arts. On the one hand, we have pure reason, logical argumentation; on the other, feeling, preference, some amorphous set of aesthetic guidelines that, rightly or wrongly, are supposed to help us recognize beauty when we see it. Often we (perhaps subconsciously) merely appreciate a work of art for its emotional value—that is, we recognize that a great work makes us feel deeply and, in so doing, provides a needed catharsis.
In Beauty and Imitation, Daniel McInerny offers a thoroughly Aristotelian-Thomistic case against this simplistic dichotomy. McInerny contends that the “arts … are forms of inquiry” (xi)—and, more expansively, that “all the mimetic arts, in their different media … present moral arguments” (xv–xvi). By “moral argument,” McInerny means that it is the “function of art to … incline the sensible and rational appetites of its audience to moral transformation” (xvii). In other words, art—like philosophy—makes arguments which attempt to induce a transformation in the one who views, listens, and/or feels.
A right understanding of the arts, then, does not separate the head and the heart. It is not that philosophy speaks only to the mind and that the arts speak only to the heart. Rather, we must think about the arts holistically. They move the heart by making arguments to the mind—and, by extension, the whole person. The arts speak to the integrated, blood-and-soul human being.
Still, despite this integral unity, we must introduce some distinctions and limitations on and within the ways the arts speak to human beings. Poetry does not make arguments in the same way philosophy does because, by its very nature, it cannot do so. Where philosophy demonstrates, literature seeks to persuade with deliberately arranged images. “Poetic arguments … do not produce anything close to logical certitude. Their structure might be formally valid, but their content is not as necessarily true as,” say, a scholastic syllogism (72). In other words: while the arts argue, they do so in a specific way—that is, they present certain intentionally assembled images as “reasons” for a particular argument (73).
To fully understand this, we have to get very clear about how McInerny understands the arts as “mimetic” and what he means by “image.” When we are talking about mimetic art, “we are talking about an activity in which some feature of the world is made present in another medium” (5). A work of art, then, in any number of ways will imitate its res, and the judicious artist will be able to discern the most compelling ways. “Mimetic art makes its source or exemplar present-in-its-absence through the manifestation of form” (10). An image does not simply “picture” something else; images are not mere instrumental signs (11). Nor does an image offer mere similarity, i.e., a (lesser kind of) copy; sometimes, in fact, “a picture that closely resembles its object leaves us cold” (19–20).[1]
While an image may do both of these things, its function is richer. Rather, the function of the image is to re-present the essence of a thing. When we realize this, we will see that “imitation is not foremost about resemblance but about re-presentation of form, [and] we can welcome artistic experiments that sacrifice close resemblance” (20). Indeed, when artists venture beyond mere likeness in their re-presentation of reality, such differences may “often afford us a better insight into the formal quality of something,” or what McInerny, borrowing from Sokolowski, calls “‘a deeper intelligibility’ … of what a thing essentially is” (24).
This is, implicitly, to acknowledge an essentially spiritual nature of created things that lies underneath mere appearances: a keenly rendered portrait of a man might reveal more about him than we would know if we only ever read about him or talked to him. By intentionally re-presenting a given object differently from how it appears (materially), an artist makes a claim about that thing; he may even reveal something about that thing which could not have been gleaned by observing a mere copy of it.
Moreover, the arts make their arguments narratively: McInerny believes that all the mimetic arts make their arguments by telling a kind of story. This is not limited to, e.g., novels, as (especially) Part III of this book makes abundantly clear. Even paintings make arguments by offering a particular narrative, a unique re-presentation, of reality. Here McInerny leans heavily upon Robert Sokolowski, who contends that artists and their audience may (and must) learn a certain artistic grammar; by learning to read and speak by way of this grammar, we may discern the argument the artist and the art itself are trying to make. “Pictures,” Sokolowski asserts, “have to be structurally composed by their makers and syntactically ‘read’ by their viewers” (189).[2] (The audience/viewer may also construct a compelling case that the artist did not have in mind [cf. 176]). In the arts that do not (primarily) employ words, the “way of arguing is not linguistic but it is analogous to language” (292).
But let us now return to mimetic art’s narrative argumentation: McInerny offers us a comprehensive definition of story:
“A story is an ordered sequence of events with a beginning, middle, and end that pictures the human pursuit of some goal or good. In this pursuit, the protagonist encounters conflict keeping him from the goal, conflict that the protagonist resolves or fails to resolve by his own choices, not by chance. These choices ultimately reverse the protagonist’s fortunes in a way that is both probable and marvelous and so offer the reader or audience and understanding of the meaning of the protagonist’s adventure—and understanding that manifests the adequacy or inadequacy of the protagonist’s purpose to the human end. (53)”
In Sokolowski’s words, a story as mimetic art offers an “essay at beatitude. It presents, poetically, someone’s shot at happiness and self-identity.”[3] It is, moreover, according to Flannery O’Connor, “a way of saying something that can’t be said in any other way … because a statement would be inadequate.”[4] Stories, then, for McInerny, ‘tell’—i.e., make their argument—by showing: they argue by presenting images in an intentional sequence. This sequence involves the artistic syntax and grammar already mentioned above by Sokolowski. McInerny turns to cinematographer Blain Brown to hammer home this point: “the images must stand on their own” (318).[5]
The true artist attempts to “manifest the end of human nature” (61)—we see this in all the arts. It perhaps more obvious in novels, movies, plays, and songs—but in paintings? This is harder to see. In Chapter 10, though, McInerny maintains that even in, e.g., landscape and abstract paintings, we may discern an inner intentionality of the artist: what the artist depicts, however implicitly, reveals particular presuppositions about what characterizes the good life for man. McInerny offers a particularly close reading of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko to make his case here. Both are radically abstract painters, and both—in and through their art—present a particular vision of human life within the cosmos we inhabit. In Pollock’s chaotic work, we see a rather straightforward nihilism (298); in Rothko, something a bit more nuanced: a recognition of man’s religious and transcendent impulse which, nonetheless, seems immanentized (299).
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This is to have covered, incompletely, Part I of this book, which, as I’ve detailed, is concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of mimetic art. It is, I believe, the heart of the book, its core argument. Everything that follows flows from it.
In Part II, McInerny turns his attention to the existential and ethical import of what he has laid out in Part I. We are invited to consider whether the arts—if they are to be actually good—must also be concerned with what McInerny calls “moral transformation” (161). “Do works of mimetic art,” he wonders, “have the power to change us? Do we finish the novel, the movie, the new album, a different person than we were before” (194)?
In Thomistic parlance, McInerny avers that “when we enjoy a work of art, the compositional form of the work is re-presented in our senses and intellect, and our affections—our sense appetites, as well as the will—are moved by the re-presentation” (184). What we see—or hear, or taste, or touch—affects us, moves us, vis-à-vis a phantasm, holistically. Art, when it is compelling, has an effect upon our whole person, intellect and passions together. How it affects us may reveal the (dis-)order of our passions and intellect. For “it is by the cogitative sense’s particular discriminations that emotion is activated” (187): what we see and understand dictates, to a large degree, our emotions. But it may help train—and/or educate—these same passions when we reflect, in our minds, upon the truth or falsity of the art we encounter.
When a person ‘gets’ a work of art—or at the very least begins to understand, perhaps, part of it—“the reader grasps a moral judgment” (192). When the art is true—and the person who takes in the work recognizes it as such—then our passions, says Stephen Halliwell, “become better attuned to the perception of reality, and, consequently, as Aristotle believes, better disposed towards virtue” (197).[6] Great art, then, for McInerny, is “analogous to philosophical dialogue; it is a mode of charming persuasion intended to bring just order into the soul” (198). There is a kind of therapy that goes on here: a piece might bring healing to a disordered soul by making us see some particular truth of some part of reality in a way only it could. Beauty, Anne Carpenter notes, has the power to seduce and belittle because it can be used to attract men to the not-good under the guise of beauty.[7] But then this means the converse is also true: if beauty can seduce, it can also exhort: it has the power to attract men toward the truly good.
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Before we move from Part II to III we are treated to a lovely “Interlude,” which takes the form of a playful dialogue, reminiscent of Plato. It situates what McInerny has discussed in Parts I and II in conversation form. Tolkien fans will especially appreciate this fictive dialogue, which takes place within the same ‘universe’ as “Leaf by Niggle.” It features the schoolmaster Atkins and a Miss Parish, granddaughter of Niggle’s neighbor, teasing out, dialectically, a vision of the mimetic arts. If I had to teach a philosophy of the arts, I believe I would start here.
* * *
Part III is what McInerny calls a “guided tour” of the various mimetic arts (229), a tour which includes music, poetry, painting, movies, and the theater. It is fitting that the book ends with this tour: if Parts I and II provide the speculative content, Part III provides the practical. It begins to answer the question, ‘So how do I see, appreciate, and practice the mimetic arts in real life?’
In each of these mediums, McInerny accessibly applies, for and with us, the principles laid out in the earliest chapters of the book. Briefly, if we encounter art with real intentionality behind it, it is up to us, the audience, to learn to ‘read’ the work we are gifted. Each medium is unique: each exists because there is something to be said about the human person and his place in the cosmos that can only be said in and through a particular kind of art. There is something about man that can only be sung; another thing that can only be gleaned through a movie; another thing which we might only glimpse in a fantastical fiction; and so on.
While different, though, all possess their own kind of grammar. In poetry, when we understand meter, stress, imagery, metaphor, etc., we can learn to read the ‘argument’ a poem, however obliquely, offers. In music, it is when we understand rhythm, melody, pitch, etc., and their interplay. In painting, it is when we understand color, line, form, and their interplay. In cinema, it is when we understand the way a scene is framed, the narrative’s pacing, the cuts that take place in the editing bay, and their interplay. As with paintings, in the movies, all “visual elements always function as ingredients in, or enhancements of, the dialectical argument that makes up the story” (319).
Each medium has its own task: poetry is “the effort of capturing in highly condensed musical language the marvelous inevitability of a protagonist’s recognition and reversal, as well as the simultaneous actualization of self-knowledge” (260). For a musician, the task is “to articulate, in the ‘language’ of structured sound, the dynamism of the interior life, and especially our emotional life, as we strain after, and perhaps even achieve, acts of intelligence” (237). A painter paints because what he wants to say cannot be said with words: “The beauty of this art consists,” Gilson says, “in the things that the language is not able to explain” (281).[8] For cinema, what “is distinctive … is not narrated action such as we found in a novel,” but rather “enacted mimesis, the showing, captured in photography, of human beings doing things” (308).
There is one profound implication that comes with all this. Each medium has the capacity to convey some truth(s). It is precisely because one medium cannot say what another can that there is a non-competitive relationship between these different forms of artistic expression. We need all of these mediums because together, as a symphonic whole, they all help us get at Truth more and more.[9]
I would like to suggest something further. As noted above, McInerny marks the distinction between demonstrative and poetic argumentation (70–77). There is a similarly non-competitive relationship between philosophy—which argues demonstratively—and the arts, which argue poetically. If both argue at particular truths, both aim to argue something that the other cannot say because some truths can only be expressed in particular ways. We need both philosophy (and, we should add, theology) with the arts to get nearer the fulness of Truth (cf. 333).
* * *
I have, till now, neglected one key aspect of McInerny’s book: though, as the subtitle tells us, this book is primarily a philosophical reflection on the arts, for McInerny, there is also always a theological dimension to the arts. Because man is created for a super-natural end, he is not just a rational animal: he is a theo-logical animal and, as such, is part of the grand theo-drama of creation. Because we inhabit this theo-drama, the art we produce either does or does not illustrate two central insights of what McInerny calls the Catholic Imagination: “(1) to depict how the supernatural end of human beings, through the gift of grace delivered through … Catholic culture … helps us to distinguish ends (supernatural and natural) from purposes [i.e., means]; and (2) to show how the natural end is insufficient without the supernatural end—that is, how grace perfects nature” (105).
McInerny generously acknowledges the goodness and truth latent in art produced outside the Church—and so not consciously within the boundaries of the Catholic Imagination—which, nonetheless, reflect these two truths. He also notes, however, how the artists who consciously produce their work outside (and inside!) the Catholic Imagination can and in fact have gone wrong. He lays out two examples, both of which have arisen in the Modern age. In what McInerny calls the “angelic imagination,” the artist attempts to bypass or overcome the small, concrete reality of man so as to “go straight to the essences of things” (122).[10] In the “homeless imagination,” by contrast, the post-modern man lost in the cosmos has “no clue what story [he is] in” (128).[11] This angelism and this nihilism prevent the artist from expressing the fullness of reality: angelism because it is anti-incarnational and so inhuman, nihilism because there is nothing ‘true’ for art to express.
Neither can art be entirely immanentized and appreciated solely for its technical value, its purely aesthetic worth. Rather, because the human artist is a theo-logical animal, we must learn to let art “speak to us in a way that integrates, not compartmentalizes, the various goods that we human beings pursue—religious, moral, familial, artistic—while still respecting the intrinsic value and dignity of each” (287).
Finally, I feel compelled to register my thanks that McInerny pays due attention to, and lays timely emphasis on, popular culture. Pop culture has the potential to speak and show, in beautiful ways, important truths man needs to hear today. Those who keep a finger on the popular pulse hold great evangelistic power. It is “as Mortimer Adler affirms: ‘only popular poetry is important’” (374).[12]
In a post-modern, information-flooded world where we are amusing ourselves to death[13] and in which self-conscious irony is entertainment king (because we are afraid to be sincere),[14] it is more important now than ever to articulate accessibly and compellingly the purpose of the arts (and entertainment more broadly). They are meant as a gift to suggest to and orient man towards something definitively true: that he is made for a transcendental end. McInerny has certainly done so in this book, and for this we owe him a round of applause.
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 25, a. 3, wonders whether latria is owed to images of Christ. Though Thomas does not make use of the categories of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ when discussing images here, we can apply such terminology to Thomas’s conclusion. Thomas believes that latria is in fact owed to images of Christ, but only “insofar as it is an image.” We might say, in other words, that latria is owed to images of Christ not because they are images but because they make Christ—who certainly is, simpliciter, worthy of latria—present. Such images make Christ present not in the same way He is made present in the process of transubstantiation, it is true; but we still may say that, while Christ is substantially absent, in such an image, He is still made present in His absence.
[2] Robert Sokolowski, The Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 139.
[3] Robert Sokolowski, “Visual Intelligence in Painting,” The Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 2 (2005): 344.
[4] Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 96.
[5] Blain Brown, Cinematography: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2016), 14.
[6] Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 199.
[7] See Anne M. Carpenter, Theo-Poetics: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Risk of Art and Being (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 175.
[8] Étienne Gilson, Painting and Reality (Pantheon, 1957), 208. McInerny also hypothesizes what a painter might tell us here: “If I wanted to express myself in words, I would have become a poet. I became a painter precisely because painted images can express things that words cannot” (281). There is a certain apophaticism at work in the arts, and especially in music, “because its subject matter is that which is ‘before and beyond’ all speech” (237). That whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must show.
[9] This is taken in the sense of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (Ignatius, 1987).
[10] McInerny borrows this moniker from Allen Tate, “The Symbolic Imagination,” in Essays of Four Decades (ISI Books, 1999), 429.
[11] And this moniker is borrowed from Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). McInerny appeals to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (University of Delaware Press, 1995) to illustrate this homeless imagination: two semi-amnesiacs talking simultaneously at, against, and over each other, confusedly.
[12] Mortimer Adler, Art and Prudence: A Study in Practical Philosophy (Longmans, Green, 1937), 35.
[13] See Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985).
[14] By irony, I mean something like what David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 151–194, means by it: “All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I say.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say?” (183–184). Wallace goes on to suggest that the “next real literary rebels in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (192–193).