Beauty At Work
Beauty at Work expands our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. Sociologist Brandon Vaidyanathan interviews scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders across diverse fields to reveal new insights into how beauty shapes our brains, behaviors, organizations, and societies--for good and for ill. Learn how to harness the power of beauty in your life and work, while avoiding its pitfalls.
Beauty At Work
Art and Yearning with Dr. Daniel McInerny (Part 2 of 2)
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Daniel McInerny is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. He is also a novelist and dramatist. As a scholar, Daniel is foremost interested in reactivating an Aristotelian understanding of mimetic art, long out of favor among philosophers. His latest book is Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. At Christendom College Daniel teaches courses on the Philosophy of Art & Beauty, the Philosophy of Technology, the Philosophy of Culture, and Poetic Experience & Truth. In March 2023 Chrism Press published his novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair. Daniel is also the author of a play, The Actor, which will premiere in November 2024. Daniel also writes the Substack newsletter, The Comic Muse, where he shares stories and sketches from his studio.
In this second part of our conversation, we talk about:
- The importance of choice over chance in compelling narratives
- The moral dimension of storytelling
- The relationship between subjective and objective beauty in art
- The significance of context in art appreciation
To learn more about Daniel and his work:
Newsletter: https://danielmcinerny.substack.com/
Beauty and Imitation: https://a.co/d/cNquN03
The Good Death of Kate Montclair: https://a.co/d/0KKy0PS
Podcast: https://danielmcinerny.substack.com/podcast
This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)
He says beauty has three characteristics. It has integrity or wholeness, right? So there's a unity to the beautiful. There is proportion or harmony. And 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.
SPEAKER_01I'm Brandon Vigunathen, and this is Beauty at Work, the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. Hey everyone, this is the second half of my conversation with philosopher, novelist, and playwright Dan McInerney. Please check out the first half if you haven't already. In the first part of our conversation, we talked about Dan's argument for mimetic art as a representation of some aspect of reality. In this episode, we'll hear more about the moral nature of art, whether beauty is objective, and how art relates to our yearning for fulfillment. Let's get started. 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 uh pushed around by fate, not work, as an expression of the human condition.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a good question. Let's go back to the very beginning. Imitation is always trying to represence, 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. And 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 we find them pushed around by fate or by chance in any number of different ways. I mean, take to take one of the archetypal stories in the West, um, 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 do how at least do you react to that when you discover in horror? So there's there's in the middle of it not just 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 what is interesting. Now, of course, we can we can think and we can talk about writers who have tried to subvert our under the understanding of human action and of art and of imitating human action that I've just been developing. I I often bring up the the Irish novelist and dramatist Samuel Beckett as a case in point thing, especially of his play Waiting for Godot. There you have two characters that are 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. But they're not, um they they don't believe in happiness. They kind of they think 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 to subvert the understanding I'm developing. And one interesting thing to think about is like, how do we compare different kinds of stories and different kinds of artwork? Can they 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 uh written a little bit about, not so much in the book, but uh in other writings. It's interesting. If there is a debate, it doesn't go on in typical philosophical ways.
SPEAKER_01Could you say a little bit more about that? I I don't want to derail us too much from this conversation. I'm curious to know what what how do you resolve a debate like that? How do you address that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's a big question. I think um, oof, 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 Goodot, and you see that it really doesn't come to any kind of resolution, and and the characters are in the same sad plight that they were on page one. People often quip, it's it has two acts in it, and people say it's it's the play where nothing happens twice. Um and so uh 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 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 but I think it's enormously clever and it captures sort of a call it a postmodern mentality better than than uh many, many works of art. I 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? And then the answer is definitely no. And so I look for other candidates. So I look at, you know, I look at a Jane Austen novel or Dickens or what have you, and 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's gonna 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 gonna fulfill them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Well, that's that's very helpful. Yeah. Yeah, almost you're looking for a correspondence with how does this account resonate with what it is that I yearn for most, right? And um you say that stories are moral arguments, but not not in not in the sense of a philosophical argument. And then you have concepts of uh the poetic syllogism, the mimetic universal, the controlling idea. Could you say a little bit about this? Like in in what sense is a story a moral argument?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I think it's helpful to begin by saying the moral dimension of a story is not something tacked on, and 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 at any rate, 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 ballgame. Because morality is not just a set of rules that we follow in special circumstances of life. So there are certain policies at my college, uh, 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, 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. And what you do is you crack some 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. That it's trying to sh 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.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I recall when I was, I think in at some point in my undergrad when the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and that was the first time I'd actually started reading the books. I took a course on Tolkien and uh 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. And the way he put it was something like this it was, when all hope is lost, clinging to duty will save you from despair. And 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, you know, whether it was Eowyn or even, you know, to some degree Frodo. And and and that for me was, I mean, it spoke to something in my life at the time when I was, I think I was, you know, finishing undergrad, didn't know what was ahead of me, etc. And 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? And was it provided in some way an implicit argument without ever stating it? And I wonder, is that is that the kind of thing you mean by the poetic syllogism or the controlling idea? Could you say a little bit, give maybe maybe give us some other examples of what those might be like? Yeah, that's wonderful.
SPEAKER_02I love that one. Or, you know, I'm a great lover of the fiction of Jan Jane Austen, so I always kind of go to Austin. So Austin's novels, spoiler warning, they end happily. They're comedies, uh, they're romantic comedies, all of her great novels end with a marriage. She is very briefly and 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, um 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, um an argument leading or a premise leading up to the conclusion that a certain kind of marriage is integral to human fulfillment. And 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.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. And it seems like a lot of works of art that try to push an explicit message fail, at least on on certain grounds. There's some people who prefer those with more explicit arguments, but I don't think they w they succeed as good art. And maybe that's perhaps we could we could talk about the question then of beauty. And so what what is beauty in relation to to this argument of mimetic art, right? And and do you see beauty as as subjective? Because that means certainly involves delight, it involves the subjective contemplation, certainly is something that varies across contexts and the things that people in certain times and places find beautiful. So in what sense is mimetic art beautiful? Is is that related to some notion of objectivity? Could you say a bit more about that?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's great. 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, an artist, we want an artist to put himself or herself into it. So in that sense, there's a kind of expression, might even say personal expression. And we want the audience to, you know, 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. Right. And 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 what 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. Uh that's that's something it's 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 there's more than one kind of art. Not every kind of art is mimetic, and sometimes we just want design, sometimes we just want color, and that 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 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, uh 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, right? So there's a unity to the beautiful, there is a proportion or harmony, and 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 cap, 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. Um, beauty is not something you can just uh, it's not just a label that's on uh in 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, and 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 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, but but the conversation can just seem hopelessly abstract.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I had uh, you know, early when I started the podcast a couple of years ago, a psychiatrist contacted me and 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. Um and she'd never thought of it that way, but she was she felt like she was burning out just with you know, a lot of physicians have an immense bureaucratic burden 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 the importance of proportion, and but all of that sort of helps make sense of beauty, you know, and even in that position client relationship. Yeah, I was really struck by that. Yeah, yeah. Um let's talk about yearning. You have a really great quotation from Baudelaire uh that I'd like to read out here, and I'd love to know what what your so this is within the section of your book where you're building on Tolkien's uh Leaf by Nigel, and uh and and you imagine this conversation between two people looking at a painting. And so this is Baudelaire who's being quoted, and he 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 a test an irritation of melancholy, some peremptory need of the nerves, and nature exiled in the imperfect, which would fain possess immediately even on this earth a paradise revealed. And you know, Budler is a a great exemplar of the sort of romantic movement in poetry, and and maybe that that yearning for deep connection to nature and to to oneself and to others and even to the transcendent. How is all of that related to mimetic art and to our quest for beauty? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02It's a little tricky here too, because I actually argue against at least certain readings of that passage from from Baudelaire in that dialogue in the book. I guess what I want to say, I 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. Is a portal and you're looking at it and the doors slide open and there you are looking at the face of God. We have at the at the church where we attend, there's a beautiful choir. And my my wife, I'm sure I've said it too, but I I think of my wife, you know, coming out and saying, Oh, I just felt like I was in the presence of God, right? Now I get that. And in a sense, I 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, you know, there there may be theological distinctions to make there. What I think, again, the work of art does is it imitates human action. Uh, 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 in under different understandings throughout the course of human history. So we're gonna have lots of works of art that are gonna 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 that's one part of what I want to say. But here's where 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, it's in a sense there's a signature there, I would argue, of the divine action. There is a trace of the divine beauty with a capital B. 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 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 that art can be that direct portal. It can give us direct contact. Yes, that's a very romantic notion. Um there's something in me that's sympathetic to that, but I I don't I don't want to make art metaphysics or mysticism, though there is a place for metaphysics and mysticism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that does seem to be a thread that goes through a lot of romantic art, right? Which is the the attempt to try to make accessible that experience of connection, right, that one has, whether in front of nature or or you know, to be able to convey through a poem that almost direct access to that experience, and whether that's possible, whether whether that's too tall an art or demand for art, right, to to be able to convey that. Right, right. Yeah. Let me ask you one more question. This is um going back a little bit to the objectivity question, and this is the philosopher of aesthetics, Crispin Sartwell, who tries to come up with uh a way of sorting through whether beauty is subjective or objective or cultural or what have you. And 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. Um, then the cultural or conceptual or linguistic equipment that the experiencers have available, which may be perhaps imprinted in their neurology, and then the environing conditions that make the experience possible, the atmosphere, light, quiet, or noise, the desert around the tree of life, etc. 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 it's more of a situationist account. Um I'm curious to know what you think of that and in its attempt to get at beauty as this sort of complex emergent phenomenon. I could you what was the very first element of his four again? He called it the object and its form, that is the arrangement of its materials. And that's that's the way in which he wants to talk about objectivity.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Uh what's the object there? Is the object the painting, the sculpture, or is the object what might be being imitated?
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell Right. Yeah. I think in this case it might be just say if it's a sculpture, it's the arrangement of the materials, right? And so it's simply the maybe the proportion of you know the body parts or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I feel I appreciate to some degree what he's trying to do there because what he's doing, I think it's it's a good move, is he's trying to give us the context for our appreciation of art. And 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 the high school sophomore is going to be bored out of his mind. So we have to, uh, and that can be because the way it's being taught. It can be with his uh hormonal activity, it can be about the room is hot and he's getting sleepy during class. All these uh 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 an is 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 he doesn't understand that painting as a represencing of the human reality. He doesn't talk about what is being pictured by the picture, he sees it as this kind of inert uh thing that we kind of encounter, but it's not uh has no connection to anything beyond itself. My whole account is trying to connect the work of art beyond itself, and that is the anchor to meaning and to and to real delight uh in in art.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So the the the yeah, the connection to the real that it is representing, right? Right, right. Dan, that's uh I want to be mindful of your time. I know we've gone a little over an hour. Um I don't have more questions, other than I'm curious to know whether you've, you know, 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?
SPEAKER_02Oh many, so many. Um one thing I say in the introduction to the book that I decided, uh, even the book, the book is is not exactly a short one, I decided to not get into really the 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 uh 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, you know, 20th, 21st century theories of art. It was just too much to do in one book. So what I have just started to work on now is what does it mean to make a work of art? In other words, what's creativity within a mimetic 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? Right, right, right. So what do it really mean to be an artist making things along the lines that we've been discussing here and really take on, take on opposing views. That that work needs to be done, and that's a huge task. It's probably more a lot more than one book, but I'm gonna try to go after that in this next project.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, wow. That sounds incredibly ambitious. And and I think uh yeah, a lot of reigning conceptions of art and of beauty are grounded in expression, right? And um the yeah, the authenticity of one's self-expression and um and now increasingly, I suppose, towards even conveying some sort of message, right? So which is which is an interesting kind of like art as a pursuit of social justice, or you know, that sort of becomes the criterion for good art in a lot of places. So it'd be interesting to see how your work evolves here.
SPEAKER_02Thank you. I'm interested too.
SPEAKER_01Well, Dan, it's been such a delight. Uh, thanks so much for taking the time. And and and I 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 of art, but also I think it can help us to appreciate beauty in a new way and art in a new way, and especially thinking about story as so central to all of our experience of art. And I especially loved your, you know, you've talked about some of the literary works and works of music, but even your analysis of film, I think, is is really incisive and uh really helpful. So thanks again for for this excellent work. And where can we direct our listeners to, our our viewers to, so they can learn more about your work?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, they can find the book itself, you know, wherever online books are sold. It came out from Word on Fire Academic here in 2024. My novel, The Good Death of Kate Monclair, again, you can find it online, published by Chris and Press 23. I have a substack called The Comic News, where I publish some fiction and uh have a newsletter, so you can find me there. So, yes, thank you. Wonderful. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for joining us. Bran, it was a great conversation. I I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
SPEAKER_01All right, folks, that's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks and see you next time.