Art and Yearning

Many of us are accustomed to thinking about art as primarily subjective—a means of self-expression which is unique to each artist. This view of art feels intuitive to many of us today, but it’s a relatively new perspective.

An older tradition, which goes back more than two millennia to Aristotle, understands art differently. It sees art not primarily as a personal outlet but as a form of mimesis: a re-presentation of reality that reveals something important about our shared human journey. Art becomes, therefore, an invitation to explore the good, the true, and the beautiful together.

In my latest podcast episode, I explore this tradition with philosopher, artist, novelist, and playwright Daniel McInerny, whose new book argues that all mimetic art—whether a novel, a still-life painting, or even a piece of instrumental music— re-presents the human yearning for fulfillment and flourishing.

Dan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Christendom College in Virginia. He's also a novelist and dramatist. His latest novel, published in 2023, is The Good Death of Kate Montclair, and his play The Actor premieres in November 2024. As a scholar, Dan wants to reactivate an Aristotelian understanding of mimetic art long out of favor among philosophers. This is the subject of his latest book, Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts.

In our conversation, we talk about:

• How mimetic art is not mere copying but a deeper re-presentation of reality
• How mimetic art is fundamentally narrative in nature, and has to do with the human quest for meaning and fulfillment
• What it means to say that mimetic art has a moral dimension
• Why beauty is not purely subjective
• Why art can direct us towards transcendent realities, but does not provide direct access to them

You can listen to our conversation (Part 1 here and Part 2 here) or watch the full video below. An unedited transcript follows, along with short video clips from our conversation.

Unedited transcript

Brandon: All right. Dan, fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Daniel: Brandon, it's a real pleasure to be with you today. Thanks so much for having me on.

Brandon: Yeah, I think your new book, which we'll talk about in a little bit, is a perfect fit for this season of the podcast. Congratulations. It's such a fantastic work, and I've really enjoyed reading it. Before we start though, I want to ask you if you could share with us a memory of an encounter with beauty that you had in your childhood that remains with you till today.

Daniel: That's a great question. I love that question, a very creative question. When I think of my childhood, and I think of anybody, say, in my family, who would think of me as a little boy, they would think of me drawing. That's what I was. The artist in me came out very, very early. I still have some of the little notebooks with my cartoons that I was drawing when I was four years old, five years old. My family and I were living in a pivotal year of my childhood. Again, year spanning my four or five years old. We were living in Rome, and here were some exciting world events going on: the first moon landing. And so these notebooks are filled with drawings of the lunar module on the surface of the moon, and Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts walking on the moon. So when I think of the art that first inspired me as a kid — even though I was living in Rome, I don't go to the Pieta or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — I think of cartoons. Because that's what I did. That's what first drew me. The claim is not that this is the most beautiful art, but there was sufficient beauty there to draw me in. I saw very few, in fact, I might even say no Disney cartoons as a kid that is no feature length films. This was before video recordings were available, before DVDs, and certainly before streaming. So it was very hard to see a Disney film, for example, after its first run, after it was out of the theaters. Every so often, they would rerun one of their classics like Peter Pan. But it was very hard to get to. And again, I don't think I saw any of them as a little kid. But there was a show on Sunday nights, The Wonderful World of Disney. It was mostly live action, but there was just enough animation in it to fire my imagination. Like many kids, Walt Disney became a hero of mine, not just because the amusement parks but because he was an animator, because he drew cartoons. And that's what I thought I would do as a kid. I would tell my mom I'm going to go live in California. I'm going to be an animator for Walt Disney.

I think all this is important for me even today. There is, I think, a very strong connection between those first forays into the world of art through cartoons and what fascinates me today. Because what you have in a cartoon is you have a kind of comedy, typically. You have an exaggeration, but you're still trying to say something true through it. I'm still fascinated by that today. As a philosopher, my art today is not so much drawing, but it's the writing of fiction and drama. Even in all those areas, I still think about the comic nature of human life or how to tell a comic narrative in a way that will manifest some deeper truths about the human condition. In a way, it's still a kind of fascination with the cartoon, if I can exaggerate them.

Brandon: Yeah, wow. Yeah, this resonates with my own experience as a kid. I was initially drawn to cartooning quite a lot. Of course, it was comic strips, right? It was Spider Man and Superman. Those were the sources of my imagination. We had this series, which is very popular in India, of Hindu mythology in comic book form. That was my religious education as a kid. It was these comics. And so I would do these elaborate sketches of scenes from Hindu epics and then I got into movie posters. That's what I was known for as a kid, the guy who would do — the latest Bollywood movie would come out, and I would sketch the poster. I would be asked to make copies for my friends at school.

Daniel: Oh, my goodness.

Brandon: But I got to a point where I found myself, like, because I didn't have any formal training, we didn't have a private tutor or anything, I got to a point where I couldn't express what was in my head. I couldn't fix the problems. The nose wasn't showing up as it ought to, and I couldn't make the grimace just right. I didn't know how to do it, and I got so frustrated that I gave it up altogether. I moved on to other forms of art like music. But it's an interesting thing as we want to, when we encounter the beautiful, when we encounter something that strikes us, we want to reproduce it, right? Represent it in some way.

Daniel: Yes.

Brandon: Almost that we're forced to do it. We want to share it. I think that's one of the interesting themes about the concept of imitation in your book. But before we go there, I just want to ask you a little bit more if you could talk about your journey into philosophy and into your creative writing. Could you say a little bit about what led you in those directions as opposed to, say, becoming an artist or a cartoonist?

Daniel: Yes, I still today think of myself as an artist first, for the reasons we've already begun to talk about. That's the nature that began to manifest itself first. But I think the philosophical always came along with it long before I was ever aware of it. It was the fascination with art and making art, even cartoons. By the way, I drew, if not movie posters, I, in college, made a little money drawing posters for the events. So if there was a band who came to campus, or some big campus event, I would often do the posters for those.

Brandon: Oh, nice.

Daniel: So we have a lot in common along those lines. But the philosophical and the creative were always bound up together, I think, with me. So when I was an undergraduate, I studied English literature. So my artistic interests were going toward poetry, towards storytelling. But then I took a course. I was at the University of Notre Dame as an undergraduate. I took a course in the philosophy of art. And that, more than any course, inspired me to start thinking about how I might make my living after graduation, and maybe, maybe the academic life might be the life for me. Because in studying the philosophy of art, I saw that, hey, my interest in the pursuit of truth and my interest in art and the beautiful, they can come together. I don't have to give either one of them up. So I think that was one of the key thoughts that got me thinking about graduate school in an academic life. I was always writing at the time, very badly of course, and have always written fiction, drama screenplays throughout my adult life. I see that now it's just the flip side of the coin. I can pursue philosophy and still pursue my interest in art, and I can pursue my writing and still inquire into the truth. So just in 2023, I published my novel The Good Death of Kate Montclair with Chrism Press. I'm very happy about that. I have a play called The Actor. That's going to premier here at Christendom College in Virginia in November 24. So I'm enjoying what I'm writing, and I'm enjoying the philosophy I'm doing.

Brandon: Amazing. You grew up in a household where both philosophy and novels were being written, right? Your dad was a really prominent philosopher novelist. When you were growing up, did you see his work as an inspiration for you or something that you maybe wanted to distance yourself from? I know sometimes kids don't want to be like their parents in terms of what they're doing for a career. What was that relationship like for you?

Daniel: Yeah, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about my father as an influence too. So, my father, the late Ralph McInerny, was a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame for over 50 years. He was a renowned scholar of thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. And so, yeah, I grew up in a household where I saw my father doing philosophy at a very high level, but also publishing fiction at a very high level without a lot of fanfare. I think that's what kind of struck me. He just did it. There seemed to be, at least from the point of view of a child, it's just kind of no fuss about it. It was all integrated in who he was and his pursuit of the truth. There was no dichotomy. There was no double life. It was just, it was all one. And so, yes, I was imitating my own father from a very young age. In those days, he had a basement office in our home in South Bend, Indiana. It was not a finished basement. It was a pretty rough camp down there. But he loved it. It was his own private, more of a man hovel than a man cave. But he would type on a typewriter. These are the days before computers. He gave me to use an old Royal typewriter, which is this big, heavy contraption. He taught me how to roll the paper in, and I would type with one finger. And I was writing stories because that's what my father was doing. So imitation was huge. Again, it took me a while to think that I would follow him into the academic life. I've already described that happened very late in my undergraduate years. I certainly surprised him when I took the idea to him. But yes, he had an incredibly formative influence upon me.

Brandon: Let me ask one more question before we jump into your book. What is your writing practice like, both in terms of your philosophical work and your creative work? I mean, do you find that you're in the same state of mind when you're doing both those kinds of activities? Do you need different stimulants for different kinds of writing? How do you integrate both of those very different — I don't know. Maybe from the outside, they look like very different kinds of writing.

Daniel: They are very different kinds of writing. I don't know if I think about it too much. What I think about most of all is having at least a tolerable amount of uninterrupted time. I think if I have time to focus, that's kind of enough. I don't have to do special mental gymnastics to write fiction or to write philosophy. It's more having that space in which to focus, then I can do work. I typically don't do in one session. Let's say I have a three-hour opening in a morning. I typically won't write both fiction and philosophy in that period. I'll usually just focus on one. There are trade offs that happen because of a busy schedule all the time, but I'm typically looking for morning hours. I've never been, even as a young man, I was never a night person. My father was. My father wouldn't begin writing until 10 o'clock at night, and would often go till two in the morning. I just have never, I've never had those biorhythms or whatever you need for that. To me, it's more like, where can I find the hours of focus? But I always have a fiction project and a philosophy project on the stove at the same time, even if I'm not pursuing them in the same session.

Brandon: Amazing. Good. Well, let's jump right into your book. This is Beauty and Imitation. I really loved your book. I love the argument. Very provocative. Your book is an articulation of a particular account of art, right? The Aristotelian domestic approach to mimetic art that originates with Aristotle and is developed further by Thomas Aquinas. You say here that art is imitation, the making of a picture of some feature of the world. Art does images or represents, for our delighted contemplation, one or more formal aspects of its source of origin. So mimesis is typically understood as imitation in the sense of copying, but that's not what you're arguing here. Could you say a little bit about this, this account of mimetic art? What is this Aristotelian domestic account, and how does mimesis differ from copying?

Daniel: Yes, that's a great question. I think we have the whole movement of Modern Art, even beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, to thank for taking this concept of imitation and really distorting it and then passing it off as mere copying. That is certainly not the case. I don't think it's ever really been the case. There are certain artists who aim for literal exactitude or photorealism. Sure. That's one approach. But that's certainly not the only approach when it comes to imitation. So let's get to the heart of it. What does it mean for an artist to imitate?

As you said, as you were reading from that passage in the book, it's a representation. So, literally, you're taking the presence of something in the world, and you're representing it in another medium. What you're representing is, as I say, one or more formal aspects. On one level, you're going to be representing something sensible. So take the example of a still life painter. He's going to paint a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine. He's going to try to represent on a canvas, in oil paint, the sensible qualities of the bowl, the fruit, the bottle of wine, the light, the table, et cetera. But he's also going to try to capture what we can call the intelligible reality, the meaning, in other words. And there is a meaning even to a bowl of fruit and a bottle of wine on a table. It means something. It says something about human beings. It says something about how human beings arrange and beautify their domestic spaces. We don't just leave them bare. We don't leave just wine bottles in a cupboard. We like to display our fruit and the fruits of the vine. That's really interesting about human beings. I think that's a big part of what a still life painter is trying to capture.

Okay. In that re-presencing, it's not at all necessary, again, that the artist aim for a literal rendering of the sensible qualities of the thing. Again, so aiming after photorealism. If that were the case, then I think photography would be the highest art, and a certain kind of photography would be the highest art. But there's more than one way to represent these realities. What the artist really wants to do is make a representation that freshens our perceptions, that allows us to see the bowl of fruit and the bottle of wine with new eyes so that its sensible beauty and its intelligible beauty show up to us in a way that is marvelous again and opens itself up to our contemplation. So imitation is compatible with myriad number of different artistic styles. It's not just about copying nature.

Brandon: That's really fascinating. I'd be curious to know if you think that the rejection of what was perceived as just copying was, in part, a function of artists who did see their work. I think of Renaissance painters perhaps, and sculptors, who seem to be very invested in sort of very faithful copying and really wanting to portray the human face or the body, almost to have a photographic representation.

Daniel: Yes, I mean, certainly, say, in Western painting, especially in the time period you point to, a certain rigidity set in. We became enamored with kind of a scientific approach to art in a way — the rules of perspective, for example, and proportion. And so yes, in the excitement of all that, trying to render things as faithful as you possibly can to how they really look in the real world became, I think, too much of an ideology rather than just one approach. And so, yeah, that certainly helped to give imitation something of a bad name. Perhaps there's not too much wonder that artists who always want to freshen their perception started to resist that and look for ways to approach their work other than imitation. But I'm hoping to reactivate this notion in a way that freshens imitation itself, so people don't see it as stale, old school kind of approach.

Brandon: You also used the phrase delighted contemplation, right? It's representation for a particular purpose, or at least it has with a particular consequence in mind. Could you talk about the role of delighted contemplation in this idea of a mimetic art?

Daniel: Yeah, I think that's the whole goal of art. It's our contemplation of it. We want to see reality with those fresh eyes. I mean that literally. We want to see it with our eyesight or hear the music with our ears. Our sensibility is certainly engaged. But also, our intellect, we want to chew that reality over in our mind. And we're made for that as human beings. And because we're made of it, that chewing over of the beauties of reality in our mind — that's a messy metaphor. But that chewing over is a delight. It's a joy to us. Those words, delight and joy, they're not just emotions. They're not emotions primarily. They are rational expressions of reactions to the beauty that we're imitating in reality. So, yes, that's what we want when we go to the arts. We want that joy. More than anything, that's what we look for. If someone recommends a book, or you have to go see this exhibition, or you have to see this, what we're hoping for, more than anything else, is not an art lesson. We want delight.

Brandon: And it seems like it's delight in knowing, right? There's an understanding, an insight. There's a lot of resonance that really surprised me with accounts I'm hearing from scientists over the last five years I've been studying the role of beauty in science. We've been asking scientists around the world what beauty means to them, where they encounter it, and so forth. We hear a lot on their accounts that sounds very much like this sense of delight in being able to represent reality in an equation. There are many scientists who call certain equations works of art, or even experiments as works of art, because of the sort of ingenuity that goes into designing it and then the immense clarity it gives you about the essence of some particular phenomenon, and the way in which something really is in the sense of oh, this is how things are. This is the hidden order of things, the inner logic of things. Some go so far as to say that this is access into the mind of God. There's the Nobel Prize winner, Frank Wilczek, who talks about nature as embodying beautiful ideas and mathematics giving us that access to the mind of the artist. I'm curious to know what you think about that ability of science to represent reality, whether through models or equations, and the way in which some people call those works of art. Does that fit into a conception of mimetic art, or is that just maybe metaphorical?

Daniel: Oh, that's a great question. It puts me in mind of an author that I have been delighting in the past couple years or so, and I bet many of those in your audience will know. This is the neuroscientist and philosopher and literary critic, Iain McGilchrist.

Brandon: Yeah.

Daniel: He wrote a big book, I think in 2009, The Master and His Emissary and then a few years ago, an even bigger book, actually, in two enormous volumes, The Matter with Things. There's a chapter in The Matter with Things where he collects quotations from scientists, mathematicians gushing in short about the beauty of their scientific or their mathematical work. And it's a wonderful chapter. Einstein, for example, a classic example in that chapter. I have no problem. In fact, I delight. I'm enthusiastic about hearing scientists and mathematicians talking about the beauty of their work. It's an interesting question. Is an equation, for example, imitation? Not in any straightforward sense. Not in the way in which we talk about it in the arts, at least. Because, again, in a painting, in a novel, what we're doing is we're representing really the human reality. The human quest for fulfillment is being represented on the canvas or in language, in a narrative. In an equation, it's not so clear that that's what we're doing. We're not trying to picture a human quest for fulfillment. Now, I'm not denying the equation is beautiful. Certainly not. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to be imitation. If we want to get really metaphysical, I think though we might talk about it as an imitation of transcendent, even divine beauty, so that every beautiful thing in reality, in whatever sphere, is going to imitate the beauty of transcendent reality. There, I think you can kind of bring in a metaphysical sense of imitation but not, I don't think, an artistic sense of imitation.

Brandon: Yeah, that sounds fascinating. In the creation of scientific models, perhaps there's a lot of judgment that has to go into criteria of elegance and parsimony, and ways in which you have to structure things, to convey the maximal amount of insight with a minimal amount of information. Or even in the ways in which the models from the James Webb Telescope have been colored. There's some sort of choices that have to go into artistic scheme of choosing what colors to present them. Those are, I think, maybe a bit fuzzier. I don't know whether those are quasi-artistic works, because there is almost a kind of aesthetic practice there. But I want to double click on this, this point about the human story. This is one of the things that I found surprising about your book and really quite provocative. You argued that the mimetic arts are all storytelling arts, right?

Daniel: Yes.

Brandon: And even something like instrumental music is fundamentally about the human story. You have a particular definition of story, which I'd like to read. You say that a story is an ordered sequence of events — the beginning, middle and end — that pictures the human pursuit of some goal or good. And in this pursuit, the protagonist encounters conflict keeping him from the goal. Conflict 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. So offer the reader or audience an understanding of the meaning of the protagonist's adventure and understanding that manifests the adequacy or inadequacy of the protagonist's purposes to the human end. So there are a lot of things you've built into this argument.

Daniel: A lot of moving art.

Brandon: It's really very provocative. And so could you talk a little bit about how is all mimetic art about the human story? So even instrumental music.

Daniel: Maybe just for our conversations purposes, I will use a simpler definition of a short story. There are reasons why I have such a tightly-packed definition. Because it is so integral to my argument. And you're absolutely right. I think it's certainly the most controversial thesis in my book, of what I prefer to call the mimetic arts rather than the fine arts, are storytelling art. So what do I mean by that? Well, yes, a story is some protagonist on a quest for some goal. The claim is, though, that a human story, a story that we write, a story that we make, is an imitation of our own story as human beings. So that human life takes the form of a story. It certainly doesn't feel like that all the time, I grant you. Our days sometimes seem very haphazard. There are interruptions, unscheduled meetings. You're just bopping along, trying to keep your head above water some days, that you don't feel like the protagonist of a novel or of a film. But if we zoom out, I think what we see in all human beings, as I mentioned earlier, is this deep desire for fulfillment. I don't think you're going to find a human being who doesn't want, in some way, total and complete satisfaction. We're going to define that in many different ways, and we can have fun arguments about who's got the best conception. But at least, we have that common denominator, that we are seeking fulfillment. So what I want to say is that all of the mimetic arts are, in some way, trying to represent that human endeavor, that attempt to find fulfillment — an attempt which sometimes fails, or sometimes succeeds only partially, or sometimes succeeds quite well. And so we can name kinds of stories that show us failure. We call them tragedies. We can name stories that show us a mix of both. Often, those are what we call dramas of one kind or another. Stories that give us success in finding fulfillment, we call comedies. So we have these kind of super genres or archetypal stories that try to capture that basic trajectory toward fulfillment. So that's at least the beginning of a reply to your question.

Brandon: So how does that quest may manifest in forms of art that are not obviously stories? So you gave the example of the bottle of wine or the bowl of fruit. There, at least, you can see an artifact that you might imagine a social context, in which that's lived out a person's life, in which those things played a role. But there are other forms that seem a bit more abstract and is hard to sort of picture, I suppose.

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, take maybe the next most difficult kind of example, a painter who paints a landscape, and you don't even find a house in it, or a farm, or a barn, not even animals. It's just the earth. It's beautiful. But how is such a painting trying to imitate the human quest? I would say because it's showing us our habitat. This earth is our habitat. This is where we live. And so the landscape is going to show this is the kind of place where we can flourish and find fulfillment. This is the kind of place where we find rest. This is a hostile place, and this is not a place where we're going to build a home. But in some way, shape or form, it's going to be related to us if it has anything to do with this planet.

The argument gets harder though, I admit, especially when we get to music, as you said, when you get to instrumental music. I think that's the hardest objection for me to meet. In a thumbnail sketch, I would say that even instrumental music is trying to imitate the movement, the psychic movement. In other words, how it feels experientially to seek after the good or fulfillment in a given context. It doesn't mean that you have a named protagonist in a piece of music, in Mozart's 40th symphony or Beethoven's sixth. You have no named protagonist. You don't know exactly what the goal is. Actually, Beethoven gets us some subtitles that might help. That's a rather narrative piece of work. Let's stay with Mozart's 40th. There's nothing you can hang on to that's explicitly narrative. What's narrative, again, is the flow of the sound. That is trying to capture the emotional and intellectual flow of what it feels like to fall in love, or be frustrated, or feel lonely in life. It gets tricky, though. I'm not saying the composer has always exactly, literally named the emotion he's trying to imitate. But nonetheless, I think we can describe instrumental music in that way.

Brandon: Yeah, there's certainly the desire to capture, to represent a feeling, or an emotion, or a sentiment, or even over the arc of a piece of, you know, a range of emotions, of elation, and conflict, and resolution, right?

Daniel: Yeah, exactly.

Brandon: I recall the Italian theologian Luigi Giussani has this reflection on Chopin's Raindrop Prelude, which has the single note recurring over and over again as the hammering of this incessant desire for fulfillment. So there's ways in which you can interpret works of music as fundamentally having to do with our quest. You might read an interpretation like that and go, "Yeah, that's a good way to read it. That resonates with me." Right?

Daniel: Yes, I love that.

Brandon: Who knows if the composer would agree? But there's a sense in which one might say, that sounds like an adequate way to understand how this work of art represents an aspect of the human quest.

Daniel: Yeah, and I love that example. And I'm going to steal that from you. In talking about this, I always come back to the fact that I haven't met many people in my life who don't describe their reaction to music in emotional terms. That, to me, is where you start. We describe music as eliciting emotions, as feelings, in us. Okay. That's where we get started. That's interesting how can mere sound do that. I think it's trying to do that through imitation.

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You're listening to Beauty at Work. This podcast is made possible through support from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Brandon: Could you talk a little bit about the role of choice versus chance? That seemed to be, for me, an interesting question as to whether a story requires choice. And would an account of somebody who is simply pushed around by fate not work as an expression of the human condition?

Daniel: Yeah, that's a good question. Let's go back to the very beginning. Imitation is always trying to represent, at least in part, an intelligibility, the intelligibility of human action, the intelligibility, ultimately, of that human quest for fulfillment. Which means, if we're going to write a story, if we're going to write a narrative, it should be intelligible. Action for us is intelligible when it's ordered to an end, when there is some goal involved. And for human beings, when there's choice of the goal. Now, characters throughout the history of literature, we find them pushed around by fate or by chance in any number of different ways. I mean, take one of the archetypal stories in the West, Sophocles' Oedipus the King. So much of his predicament in that story is completely and utterly out of his hands. He killed his father and married his mother unbeknownst to him. That's a tough fate. That has nothing to do with his choice. But I think what Sophocles was interested in most of all was, okay, but what do you do in the face of that? How, at least, do you react to that when you discover in horror? So there's, in the middle of it, it's not just a leaf being blown in the wind, so to speak, the protagonist of a story. It's a protagonist usually in circumstances beyond his control but still having to act, still having to try to get to that fulfillment that he's yearning for. That, I think, is what is interesting.

Now, of course, we can think and we can talk about writers who have tried to subvert the understanding of human action, and of art, and of imitating human action that I've just been developing. I often bring up the Irish novelist and dramatist Samuel Beckett as a case in point. I'm thinking especially of his play Waiting for Godot. There, you have two characters that just seem to be being pushed around by fate, doesn't seem to be much choice, only in the most minimal sense, right? So when his pants fall down, he pulls his pants up. So there's minimal choice. They don't believe in happiness. They think the quest for happiness is something of a cruel joke. They're in a meaningless universe, kind of living a meaningless life. So, yes, there are artistic attempts to subvert the understanding I'm developing. One interesting thing to think about is, like, how do we compare different kinds of stories and different kinds of artwork? Does it constitute a debate of some sort like Sophocles debating with Beckett, debating with Shakespeare? Can we decide who wins? That's a question I'm really fascinated by and have written a little bit about not so much in the book but in other writings. It's interesting. If there is a debate, it doesn't go on in typical philosophical ways.

Brandon: Could you say a little bit more about that? I don't want to derail us too much from this. But I'm curious to know how do you resolve a debate like that? How do you address that?

Daniel: That's a big question. I don't know if I can put it in very brief terms. But I guess I would say, you have to ask yourself. If you're watching or reading Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and you see that it really doesn't come to any kind of resolution and the characters are in the same sad plight that they were on page one, people often quip it has two acts in it. People say it's the play where nothing happens twice. And so nothing happens in the play. So you come to the end of that, and I think you sort of compare it to your own desire fulfillment. Is this capturing? I mean, it might be. I actually enjoy the play from a certain perspective. I teach it. I think it's enormously clever. I don't think it's true in the deepest sense, but I think it's enormously clever. It captures sort of a, I call it a postmodern mentality, better than many, many works of art. I enjoy it in that way. But does it answer to my deepest desires for fulfillment? Is it a candidate for fulfillment? Is it giving me an image of a life I want to live? Then the answer is definitely no. And so I look for other candidates. I look at a Jane Austen novel, or Dickens, or what have you. I think, okay, if they're giving me another kind of image, another kind of picture of human fulfillment, how does that answer to my deepest desires and needs? That's rough, but I think the debate would be carried on that way. No one is going to come in and sort of declare an artist definitively the winner like in a boxing match. The criterion, I think, is provided by our own deepest desires and our own understanding of what's going to fulfill them.

Brandon: Yeah, that's very helpful. Almost you're looking for a correspondence with, how does this account resonate with what it is that I yearn for most, right?

Daniel: Yes.

Brandon: You say the stories are moral arguments but not in the sense of a philosophical argument. Then you have concepts of the poetic syllogism, the mimetic universal, the controlling idea. Could you say a little bit about this? In what sense is a story a moral argument?

Daniel: Yeah, I think it's helpful to begin by saying, the moral dimension of a story is not something tacked on. It's not something that's so literal as, say, the moral of an Aesop fable, which always kind of strikes me as two dimensional. But anyway, whenever you imitate human beings — in a painting, in a novel, in a play, I would say, in a piece of music — you are in the moral ball game. Because morality is not just a set of rules that we follow in special circumstances of life. There are certain policies at my college. There are traffic laws. There are laws of the state of Virginia, et cetera. And morality comes into play when I bump up against one of those laws, which doesn't happen all the time. That's okay. That might be sort of the defining chalk line of morality. But the moral life, or what I might prefer to call the ethical life, is really what we've been talking about all along. It's that desire for ultimate fulfillment. Because the moral life is about that quest for happiness. And so, when we imitate that in art, we are imitating the moral. It's not something tacked on. It's not something two dimensional. It's integral to human action, and therefore to the imitation of human action.

Now, when we imitate that action, we are always commenting upon it. We are always saying something about it. I'll put it more strongly. We're always trying to persuade our audience of a certain way of regarding human fulfillment. So, again, Samuel Beckett in his play Waiting for Godot, he's certainly trying to persuade us that life is meaningless. It's kind of a cruel joke. What you do is you crack some stale jokes and pass the time and just try to endure it. He's trying to convince me of something, and I'm not convinced. I'm entertained perhaps, but I'm not convinced. Every work of art is trying to do that. Not, again, as you said, not philosophically. Not by giving us statements or abstract arguments, but in an experiential way, in a way that draws upon our emotional life and our delight. Trying to show us, not tell us, this is the way fulfillment ought to be or ought not to be. It's best that the artist doesn't make an explicit claim, but just let the imitation do the work.

Brandon: I recall when I was, I think, at some point in my undergrad when the Lord of the Rings movies came out. That was the first time I had actually started reading the books. I took a course on Tolkien. I was surprised by something that our professor said about the sort of the key theme of the third book in the trilogy, The Return of the King. The way he put it was something like this. It was, when all hope is lost, clinging to duty will save you from despair. It was an interesting thing. Once he started to say that, I could see that throughout all of these characters who, in the seeming absence of hope, would stay faithful to their duty. Whether it was Eowyn or even, to some degree, Frodo. That, for me was, I mean, it spoke to something in my life at the time when I was finishing undergrad and didn't know what's ahead of me, et cetera. It was a really helpful insight into what it means to live a flourishing life in the absence of the optimal conditions for it, right? It was provided in some way, an implicit argument, without ever stating it. I wonder, is that the kind of thing you mean by the poetic syllogism or the controlling idea? Could you say a little bit, maybe give us some other examples of what those might be like?

Daniel: Yeah, that's wonderful. I love that one. I'm a great lover of the fiction of Jane Austen, so I always kind of go to Austen. So Austen's novel — spoiler warning — they end happily. They're comedies. They're romantic comedies. All of her great novels end with a marriage. Very briefly and unsatisfyingly, she is trying to persuade us, at least for many women and men, that a certain kind of marriage understood as a lifetime commitment in virtuous friendship, that that kind of marriage leads to the fulfillment that we have been talking about. That is what I mean, though I borrowed the term from a screenwriting teacher, Robert McKee. That is what I mean by the controlling idea, the thesis as it were of the story. That's what drives the action from the very first page. It's the conclusion of the argument, in other words. So every episode in Pride and Prejudice, for example, is, so to speak, an argument or a premise leading up to the conclusion that a certain kind of marriage is integral to human fulfillment. Again, in being wrapped up in those characters, our emotions being elicited, our mind chewing on the meaning of the events, we come to be persuaded at least in the moment that, yeah, I think Jane Austen is right. I think there's something true here. So in a chapter in the book, I try to show how there is, loosely speaking, a kind of logic to narrative in particular that is kind of premises leading to a conclusion. You can push that too hard. I hope I don't push it too hard in the chapter, because I don't mean it in a literal way. We don't want Jane Austen or any artist giving us statements. We don't want preachiness. We don't want too much explicitness. We want the meaning, the argument, to be implicit. That is far more satisfying to us as human beings.

Brandon: Yeah, and it seems like a lot of works of art that try to push an explicit message fail, at least on certain grounds. There's some people who prefer those more explicit arguments, but I don't think they succeed as good art. Maybe perhaps we could talk about the question, then, of beauty. And so what is beauty in relation to this argument of mimetic art? Do you see beauty as subjective? Because it certainly involves delight. It involves the subjective contemplation. Certainly, it's something that varies across context, the things that people in certain times and places find beautiful. So in what sense is mimetic art beautiful? Is that related to some notion of objectivity? Just say a bit more about that.

Daniel: Yeah, that's great, a great, great, complicated question. Let me put it this way. I don't want to deny that there is an important subjective element to the making of art and to the enjoyment of art. Certainly, we want an artist to put himself or herself into it. So in that sense, there's a kind of expression. I might even say personal expression. We want the audience to kind of bring the work inside of themselves and test it. As we were just saying, test it against their own desires, their own experience. So if art wasn't touching us on the inside as it were, it wouldn't be the art that we love. Okay. But all that being said, if art is imitation, what is essentially in play is that you're trying to capture the human experience. That is always something that is not simply a matter of anyone's subjective responses or subjective experience. There's something there that goes beyond the subject. There's something there that transcends any one individual. So, again, what we're trying to capture most of all in art is that desire for fulfillment. That has a subjective element, but it's leading to something that transcends us, right? And so there is an objectivity to art, and there is an objectivity to beauty. Beauty, of course, doesn't just have to do with art. That's something, it's always good to be reminded of. We have beauty in nature. We have beauty in people. We have beauty in just design. I mean, human beings just — I mean there's more than one kind of art. Not every kind of art is mimetic. Sometimes we just want design. Sometimes we just want color. That can be very beautiful. So there's lots of different kinds of beauty. But when we're trying to capture the beautiful in art, we're trying to capture beautiful, again, in the sensible characteristics of a thing, that we were talking about at the very beginning, or the intelligible characteristics of a thing. Okay. That's very abstract.

So what is the beautiful? Well, St. Thomas Aquinas, 13th century Dominican theologian saint of the Catholic Church, I follow him on this. He says beauty has three characteristics. It has integrity or wholeness. There's a unity to the beautiful. There is proportion or harmony. Then finally, there is clarity or radiance. Okay. We're still on a very abstract level. What's really fun is to try to identify those three characteristics in different works of art, and then in nature, and in people, and in furniture, and everywhere. That is the work of the real art lover, or the art critic, or maybe even the art theorist, maybe the philosopher of art. They help us see how a given work — whether it's Tolkien, or Jane Austen, or the Still Life by Cézanne — is whole, has harmony, is radiating both on the sensory level and on the intelligible level.

To really make a discussion of the beautiful, I think, satisfying, I think you have to have a particular work of art in front of you, and you have to be spending time with it. Beauty is not something you can just — it's not just a label that's on the corner of a painting, that you can just sort of identify and then move on to the next painting. It can be a lifetime's work to really understand what is beautiful about a work of art. In the book, what I try to do to not make the job so unwieldy is, I just take two lines from Shakespeare, a couplet, and from his late play Cymbeline. I try to say, okay, let's just take these two lines and see if we can identify its wholeness, its proportion, its radiance. So let's start on a very, very small canvas. We can talk about the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or what have you. We can talk about that later, but let's kind of build our muscles on something small. But you have to get into the particular, or else the conversation — I hope this one is not so — the conversation can just seem hopelessly abstract.

Brandon: I had, when I started the podcast a couple of years ago, a psychiatrist contacted me. She had come across this tripartite categorization of St. Thomas and said she found that immensely helpful in recognizing what it was about her work she found beautiful.

Daniel: Wonderful.

Brandon: Then she'd never thought of it that way. But she felt like she was burning out, just with a lot of physicians have an immense bureaucratic burden of these days. And just those three concepts for her immediately helped her recognize what is beautiful about the person that she's engaging with, the radiance when the person's true personality shines through, and then the importance of proportion. All of that sort of helps make sense of beauty, even in that physician-client relationship.

Daniel: That's very encouraging.

Brandon: Yeah.

Daniel: I'm very glad to hear that.

Brandon: Let's talk about yearning. You have a really great quotation from Baudelaire that I'd like to read out here, and I'd love to know what your — so this is within the section of your book where you're building on Tolkien's Leaf by Niggle. You imagine this conversation between two people looking at a painting. And so this is Baudelaire who's being quoted. He says, "It is that immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the world and its pageants as a glimpse of a correspondence with heaven. The insatiable thirst for everything beyond which life reveals is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is at once by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul perceives what splendors shine behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, such tears do not argue an excessive enjoyment but rather it's just an irritation of melancholy, some peremptory need of the nerves, and nature, exiled in imperfect, which would fain possess immediately, even on this earth, a paradise revealed." Baudelaire is a great exemplar of the sort of Romantic movement in poetry and maybe that yearning for deep connection to nature and to ones self and to others and even to the transcendent. How is all of that related to mimetic art and to our quest for beauty?

Daniel: Yeah, it's a little tricky here, too. Because I actually argue against at least certain readings of that passage from Baudelaire in that dialog in the book. I guess what I want to say, I think people sometimes, when they talk about art, they get a little too mystical too quickly. It's not that I don't think that a beautiful work of art can in some way direct us and even put us in — well, this is what I want to be careful in saying. I'll just stick with, I'm not denying that a work of art can direct us to transcendent realities. What I'm suspicious of is that it can put us in direct contact with those realities, as if looking at the gorgeous work of art is a portal. You're looking at it, and the door is slide open, and there you are looking at the face of God. We have, at the church where we attend, there's a beautiful choir. And my wife, I'm sure I've said it too. But I think of my wife coming out and saying, "Oh, I just felt like I was in the presence of God." Now I get that. In a sense, I probably said it. I agree with it but not in the sense that I — well, it's a little tricky being in church. But I don't think the work of art just puts me right there literally in the divine presence, though there may be theological distinctions to make there.

What I think, again, the work of art does is it imitates human action. That's what it does. Human action, we've said it, is seeking fulfillment. It's seeking happiness, total complete satisfaction. Now it so happens that I believe we find that complete satisfaction in God, and many human beings have under different understandings throughout the course of human history. So we're going to have lots of works of art that are going to depict the human quest for God and even God Himself in certain ways. Okay. So it's not that art doesn't depict the supernatural or the divine transcendent beauty, but it depicts it as an imitation of the human story not in terms of giving us this direct contact with the divine. It's a picture of our quest for divine, not the thing itself. Okay. That's one part of what I want to say. But here's where we might shift gears a bit and move away from art into metaphysics. Now, insofar as anything — a work of art, or a tree, or a person's face — is beautiful, well, in a sense, there's a signature there, I would argue, of the divine action. There is a trace of the Divine Beauty. Again, I don't think that gives us a direct portal to the divine, because it's a signature of the divine. So take the analogy. It's like finding a signature. So you're getting something there that the divine has sort of left there for us to to enjoy and maybe see as a path. But it's not the reality itself. Baudelaire, in the passage you began with, seems to be saying that art can be that direct portal. It can give us direct contact. Yes, that's a very romantic notion. There's something in me that's sympathetic to that. But I don't want to make art metaphysics or mysticism, though there is a place for metaphysics and mysticism.

Brandon: Yeah, and that does seem to be a thread that goes through a lot of romantic art, which is the attempt to try to make accessible, that experience of connection, right? That one has, whether in front of nature, to be able to convey through a poem that almost direct access to that experience, whether that's too tall of an art or there's a demand for art to be able to convey that.

Daniel: Right. Right.

Brandon: Let me ask you one more question. This is going back a little bit to the objectivity question. This is the philosopher of aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell, who tries to come up with a way of sorting through whether beauty is subjective, or objective, or cultural, or what have you. Here's what he argues. He says what is beautiful can be conceived as the whole, consisting of four elements. The object and its form, that is the arrangement of its materials. The subjective response. And here, pleasure, he thinks, is awfully simplistic. He prefers longing. Then the cultural, or conceptual, or linguistic equipment that the experiencers have available, which maybe perhaps imprinted in their neurology. Then the environing conditions that make the experience possible: the atmosphere, light, quiet or noise, the desert around the tree of life, et cetera. Now, any given situation consisting of these four elements is bristlingly or even infinitely complex. But it's also an entirely real thing in the world, embedding objects, experiencers and concepts in beautiful situations. So it's more of a situationist account. I'm curious to know what you think of that in its attempt to get at beauty as this sort of complex emergent phenomenon.

Daniel: What was the very first element of this four again?

Brandon: He called it the object and its form. That is the arrangement of its materials. That's the way in which he wants to talk about objectivity.

Daniel: What's the object there? Is the object the painting, the sculpture? Or is the object what might be being imitated?

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I think in this case, it might be just, say, if it's a sculpture, it's the arrangement of the materials. And so it's simply maybe the proportion of the body parts or whatever.

Daniel: I appreciate, to some degree, what he's trying to do there. Because what he's doing, I think it's a good move. He's trying to give us the context for our appreciation of art. I don't think we've talked about that yet today. So, for example, someone might encounter Shakespeare and just be overpowered by it. But a high school sophomore is going to be bored out of his mind. And that can be because the way it's being taught. It can be with his hormonal activity. It can be about, the room is hot and he's getting sleepy during class. All of these, the context does come into play. More significantly, we often need to educate ourselves and demand something of ourselves to see the beauty in something. So I'm all for remembering that art always shows up to someone who's in a context, in a situation. That all seems, to me, right and good. But what that fourfold analysis seems to lack is basically an understanding of art as imitation or a kind of picturing of reality. Because he talks about the object. Say, it's the painting. But he doesn't understand that painting as a re-presencing of the human reality. He doesn't talk about what is being pictured by the picture. He sees it as this kind of inert thing that we kind of encounter but has no connection to anything beyond itself. My whole account is trying to connect the work of art beyond itself. That is the anchor to meaning and to real delight in art.

Brandon: Yeah, the connection to the real that it is representing, right?

Daniel: Right. Right.

Brandon: Dan, I want to be mindful of your time. I know we've done a little over an hour. I don't have more questions, other than I'm curious to know whether you've, after having written this book, wished that you'd added something that you left out or had new questions that have emerged for you in your conversations with others about the book. Anything else you'd like to add?

Daniel: Oh, so many. So many. One thing I say in the introduction of the book, that I decided — even the book is not exactly a short one. I decided to not get into really a conversation, a dialectic, with more modern, indeed perhaps, especially, romantic conceptions of art. I do it a little bit in the book. I couldn't hold back everywhere. But I simply wanted in the book to just lay out what I thought an understanding of art would be as inspired by the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. I didn't try to go head-to-head with the Romantics or 21st century theories of art. It was just too much to do in one work. So what I have started to work on now is, what does it mean to make a work of art? In other words, what's creativity within a memetic framework? And how does that differ, how might it be more coherent than I think the reigning kind of predominantly romantic conception of artistic creativity that informs pretty much everything right now? So what do we really mean to be an artist making things along the lines that we've been discussing here and really take on opposing views? That work needs to be done, and that's a huge task. It's probably a lot more than one book, but I'm going to try to go after that in this next project.

Brandon: Wow. That sounds incredibly ambitious. I think a lot of reigning conceptions of art and of beauty are grounded in expression, right?

Daniel: Yes.

Brandon: The authenticity of one’s self expression. And now, increasingly, I suppose, towards even conveying some sort of message, which is an interesting kind of art as a pursuit of social justice. That sort of becomes the criterion for good art in a lot of places. So it would be interesting to see how your work evolves here.

Daniel: Thank you. I'm interested, too.

Brandon: Well, Dan, it's been such a delight. Thanks so much for taking the time. Again, I highly recommend this book. It's a really compelling argument, and I think it needs to be out there along with other theories or art. But also, I think you can help us to appreciate beauty in a new way and art in a new way, especially thinking about story as so central to all of our experience of art. I especially loved your — you've talked about some of the literary works and works of music. But even your analysis of film, I think, is really incisive and really helpful. So thanks again for this excellent work. Where can we direct our listeners to, our viewers to, so they can learn more about your work?

Daniel: Well, they can find the book itself wherever online books are sold. It came out from Word on Fire Academic here in 2024. My novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair, again, you can find it online, published by Chrism Press 23. I have a Substack called The Comic Muse, where I publish some fiction and have a newsletter. So you can find me there. So, yeah, thank you.

Brandon: Wonderful. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for joining us.

Daniel: Brandon, it was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.

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