The whole reason why we tell stories. We imitate human action in stories and in art more generally, is because human life itself takes the form of a story. I don't want to say that a story is a completely artificial construct. It is artificial. It is a work of art, but it is imitating a narrative trajectory that's there in human life, in a much messier way, in a in a way that's much harder for us to get our heads around.
Welcome to the Habit podcast conversations with writers about writing. I'm Jonathan Rogers, your host, Daniel McInerney, is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at Christendom College in Virginia. He's also a novelist and a dramatist. His scholarship is directed toward reactivating Aristotle's understanding of art as imitation, an idea long out of favor among philosophers. His biggest step in that direction is his new book, Beauty and Imitation
A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts. Peter Kreeft wrote of it, this is literally the best book on beauty that I've ever read, the most convincing, clear and comprehensive, the most eye opening and satisfying, the most insightful and delightful. It is a masterpiece. In this episode, doctor McInerney and I talk about why human beings take so much pleasure in imitation. We talk about the odd fact that an imitation can often afford us a better insight into a thing than
does the direct experience of the thing itself. Also, we talk about Christopher Walken. Daniel McInerney. I'm so happy to have you on The Habit podcast. Thanks for being here.
Jonathan, it's it's an honor to join you today.
Yeah. Would you tell us. I just want to start where I often start. Give us the 92nd version of, uh. Of your book.
Well. Thank you. I like a verb that one of my reviewers used when writing his blurb for the back of the book, he referred to my book as a re-activation of an Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of what we typically call the fine arts. So what does that mean? It means that I am defending a notion of art as imitation. And that's a loaded word, because I think most of the times when we hear that word imitation, we think copying. Yeah. And it's not. It's a far
richer notion than that. Uh, far from copying. It's a way of attempting to freshen our understanding of the reality of things. And so my book is, is developing that understanding of, of the arts as imitative, as mimetic, and therefore as related to our human pursuit of the truth.
Ah, uh, truth also, uh, the human pursuit of happiness and pleasure. Uh, I think it's. Is that fair to say?
Yes, yes. I mean, the the central truth that I think any work of art attempts to, to, to capture is the truth about the human quest for fulfillment, what we commonly call happiness. So we're trying, in short, whether it's a novel, whether it's a painting, whether it's a piece of music, a sculpture, we're trying to understand what is it saying about how human beings achieve or perhaps fail to achieve their happiness. And that means that that a work of art is, as we say, is trying
to say something. It has a meaning. Or, as I say, perhaps more provocatively in the book, a work of art is trying to make an argument about what it means to live the happy life.
Yeah, yeah. I um, when I ran across that statement that Art is trying to make an argument, uh, I pulled up short. I have to say, um, and I we'll get back. We'll get back to that idea of art as an argument. Um, and but I do want to talk about why mimesis, that is, imitation is pleasurable. It's an odd thing that that we just enjoy imitation. And you spend some time talking about a Christopher Walken impression, which is more entertaining than Christopher Walken. Yeah.
Yeah. In his in his little book, The Poetics, Aristotle talks about imitation as absolutely fundamental to human nature. It's it's something that we do instinctively. We don't need to be taught us how to imitate. So I see my little grandson, who just turned three, but when he was still just two, when his father would work with tools around the house, he would sit down and start using his toys as tools. And I think I'll follow Aristotle here, too.
I think it's again, it's connected to our natural desire for truth. It's our it's it's our chief way, I would say, of trying to make sense out of our world, trying to understand what's going on around us. My little grandson doesn't really understand what his father is doing, but he sees him kind of hitting things with objects. That's the best sense he can make of it. So he's going to imitate it to see if he can, if he can get his head around it. And we're still
doing that as adults. When we read a novel, watch a film, or listen to a piece of music.
Um, can you draw that? Can you draw the connection? In what way does, um, imitation, um, help us to figure out the world or, uh, in what ways is my experience of reading a novel, watching a movie parallel to your grandson's experience?
Yeah. Good. It's it's certainly more complex. I think that's what you're noticing. But when I sit down to read a novel, I'll take, um, I'll take an example pretty much from random from my shelves here. A Jane Austen novel. I'm reading. Persuasion. What's being imitated in that work are human beings. Human beings doing stuff? They're acting. They're falling in love. They're falling out of love. As I said earlier,
it's it's depicting the human quest for happiness. And so as I read the novel, I, with Jane Austen's help, am thinking about what does it mean to fall in love? Um, what does it mean to fall in love with the wrong person? With the right person? What makes for the best kind of marriage? What is real friendship? Uh, what is family life? I am, whether I'm completely conscious of it or not. I'm mulling those things over as I read the novel and to connect with an earlier thought.
Jane Austen is making an argument about how we should answer the sorts of questions that I was just listing.
Yeah. You you talk about the idea that, um. Well, you say stories aren't just packaging, but rather, um, they're a way of contemplating the narrative structures that are inherent
to human life. And so, um, we don't, oddly enough. Um, a. A real, let's say, a realistic author who fails to, uh, imitate the way human beings actually act is less believable than a fantasy act, you know, fantasy author who's who's talking about orcs and elves, and yet those orcs and elves behave in ways that that that imitate the way people actually work in, in the real world. Um, and so, um, yeah.
Can you say a little more about that idea of narrative structures that are inherent to human life?
Yeah, there's there's at there's at least two big thoughts here. We should distinguish. First thing I would say is the whole reason why we tell stories. We imitate human action in stories and in art more generally, is because human life itself takes the form of a story. I don't want to say that a story is a completely artificial construct.
It is artificial. It is a work of art, but it is imitating a narrative trajectory that's there in human life, in a much messier way, in a in a way that's much harder for us to get our heads around. So again, what someone like Jane Austen does is it is she, uh, she puts the events, the characters together into a plot that is far more compressed than human life is and allows our minds and and our our delight to get around that story so we can contemplate
it better. The other big issue involved in your question is, is, and especially if we're talking about fiction, is an author's ability to be persuasive. Uh, the imitation needs to persuade. That doesn't mean that the imitation needs to be super realistic, as we see with fantasy literature. Uh, it can be realistic in certain ways, even when it's not portraying, uh, human beings. But nonetheless, if someone like Tolkien is going to give us a hobbits and orcs and even talking trees,
those characters have to be persuasive within that world. We're going to grant Tolkien that he's going to give us a fantasy world, but in that world it it has to have a certain logic that is compelling.
Yeah. You know, I always say the that question at the start of so many, you know, fantasy stories or stories at all is, you know what? If you know, what if there was a world where, you know, there are ants and orcs and elves, but there's always an unspoken, uh, preamble to the question of what if? And that is knowing what we know about human beings. What if they lived in a world that was covered in water, or that didn't have water, or where gravity didn't work or whatever?
Right, right. That's a nice way of putting it. I've never put it quite that way to myself before. But you're I think you're absolutely right. We always take our own knowledge of how human beings are into our enjoyment of the work. And I would even contend, even if the work does not contain any imitation of a human character.
They're all just pure fantasy creation creations. We're still taking our understanding of human beings and our human quest for happiness into our understanding and enjoyment of that story.
Sure, yeah, Peter Rabbit might look like a rabbit and he might go, but. But he's not a rabbit.
Exactly, exactly.
That's always the question of if you were in a position where you were that little and that vulnerable to a farmer. McGregor what would a person do? Not not really. What would a rabbit do?
That's nice. Yes, I agree.
Yeah. Um, you point out that a story pictures a human pursuit of some good, which is also, you know, Aquinas would say, and Aristotle would say that's what human beings are doing anyway. They're always in pursuit of some good. They may be wrong about what's good, and maybe they may be mistaken about what's going to make them happy, but. But that connection, the fact that we are always seeking what we think is going to be good for us. Um.
That's a direct connection to how story works. You you argue?
Absolutely. There's nothing that human beings do. That isn't in pursuit of some good. I hesitated there because you mentioned Aquinas. He does make some, uh, some exceptions to that. He talks about if someone scratches their beard, you know, or if you are, uh, jiggling your foot while you're watching television or something. Maybe you're not. If that's an action,
it's not clearly in pursuit of a good. But every most everything in life, from flossing your teeth to taking out the garbage, to recording a podcast, to studying philosophy to enjoying art, It's all in pursuit of good. But it's not a disorganized array of goods. It's an ordered set. And so it is ordered to a first and most perfect good. It's ultimately going to be God that is
going to fulfill our desire for happiness. And stories, in one way or another, are going to try to track a protagonist's pursuit of a good, and perhaps even explicitly, the highest good.
Yeah. Uh, you draw a distinction that I thought was so helpful between purposes and ends. Mhm. Um, can you draw that distinction here?
Yeah. It's good. I don't want to claim it's original to me. It's a wonderful philosopher. Francis Slade uh, introduced uh, that distinction in some writing of his. It's an it's a a crucial distinction for understanding how human action, the human pursuit of the good and happiness works and how that action is imitated in stories particularly. But I would still argue for any kind of art. So the distinction comes down to this. Ends are built into the very
beings of things. They are the fulfillment of things. So the end of the acorn is the oak tree. The end of the newborn human baby is the fully flourishing adult human being. Purposes are are choices that we make. They are our projects or plans that we pursue in a given set of circumstances. So I imagine a little later on today, I'll decide to have dinner with my family, or I may answer an email or go for a walk. Those are purposes. They may harmonize with my end. Or
they may diverge from my end. What stories do is they show us through the protagonist's adventure, the interplay of ends and purposes. We we watch the character's choices, and we're we're asking ourselves, is this character's or are the are this character's purposes aligning with the character's end? Uh, are these choices illuminating the end, or are his choices obscuring that end for for him? And that's a that's
kind of a philosophical contemplation. Um, we do it there on the couch on Saturday night, perhaps as we watch the movie. But it's it's a very serious attempt to again to understand the human adventure through art.
Yeah, I like your language of, um. Stories reveal meaning by showing us the purposes of a of a protagonist as being either adequate or inadequate to the human end.
Yes. That's right.
That's a really. You know, I think that's a really helpful way of talking about, um, the the moral weight of a story. Yeah.
Exactly.
That's that's works, I think, a lot better than what we typically think of as the moral of the story, you know.
Yeah. I mean, this distinction is talking about the moral of the story, but I think it's a fresh way that I find very helpful, too, so that, uh, when I get to the end spoiler warning of the Divine Comedy and I and I see Dante there in the highest of the heavens, looking upon the very face of God, I see his purposes perfectly now, adequate to his end. That's the most perfect literary picturing of purposes aligning with the end. But typically you don't have story, really, not
even the Divine Comedy. Unless, at least at the beginning, the protagonist's purposes are not aligned with with the end. And the whole story is about that character figuring out, oh my gosh, um, I'm not aligned with my end. What do I have to do, uh, to get there? Or sometimes you have a very dark tragedy where the character never really figures that out.
Yeah. I mean, probably an overgeneralization, but, uh, but it seems like maybe comedy is a is a function of the character gets more aligned, their purposes get more aligned with their ends, and tragedy is a story in which characters don't get more aligned.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. Um, and so to return to your idea that, um, a story tries to prove something, um, about the nature of happiness, I think maybe it was when I got to that part of the book about purposes and ends that I was able to say, okay, I can accept the possibility that that a story is making an argument.
Yeah. And and hopefully it shows that the kind of proving that stories or works of art in general do is not the kind we we, we do in logic 101. So when I teach my freshmen the most basic, uh, form of syllogism, you know, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. That's a proof. And it follows with that conclusion. Follows with absolute necessity. You
cannot deny it on pain of of being illogical. Uh, art doesn't work like that, Of course it's it's a kind of proving that works through through imagery, through imitation, through drawing us emotionally and also intellectually and through our will toward a pleasing resolution or even a lack of resolution in which purposes are not aligned with ends or purposes, are aligned with ends. But it's all put in the form of, of imagery. And so that makes it a
far looser kind of proof. I in, in the book, quote, quote, Aquinas is saying poetry. What we would think of as literature has a defect of truth. It's the least of doctrines because its way of proving is so loose. It's it's, you know, you can you can get to the end of, uh, of of persuasion again. Spoiler warning. You know, the the the two young people in love, um, are going to
get married at the end of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Jane Austen is arguing that that type of love, that type of friendship, is going to make for the best marriage. But there's there's no reason why a reader has to accept that in the way that they have to accept the syllogism. About Socrates, you can say, yeah, but I just don't believe these characters. I don't like these characters. You can imagine a young teenager, maybe a teenage boy, saying,
these characters are boring, right? So the proof just kind of falls apart.
Yeah. Well, I recently saw a show in which, uh, a husband left his wife of 25 years for a younger woman, blew up his family. Um, and his friends all said, hey, you're making a mistake. He found it inconvenient. Less convenient than he thought to be married to a woman who was 20 years his junior. Um, but you know what? At the end, more or less, he. He got happy. He. As it turns out, everybody. Everybody turned
out okay. And, um. And his, um. He pushed through the discomfort of being married to me or not even married, being together with somebody 20 years his junior. And then turns out he was happier than he than he'd ever been before. And I, I don't know what to make of that in terms of I mean, I was thinking about that story with regard to purposes and ends and, and the way that you that that story makes a moral argument.
Absolutely.
It's one that I can't accept in the end. I find it really hard to believe that he ultimately found his found meaning in life as a result of those choices.
Yeah, that's a great that's a great problem.
And it shows. I've been talking, perhaps too glibly about the way in which art imitates the human quest for happiness. But, but as as your question, uh, makes clear, not everybody agrees on what happiness is. Yeah. We have different understandings of of fulfillment. We can have one understanding at one point in our lives, and 25 years later, that understanding can change, uh, what we think we could never live with,
we can quite happily live with. So when we look at the broad array of works of art, we're really not just seeing one proof for the human end. We're seeing multiple and conflicting and sometimes quite tenaciously conflicting understandings of the human end. And this is one of the things I'm most interested in as a philosopher. As a philosopher of literature is thinking about how stories can argue with one another because they have different understandings of the
human end. How is it possible that, I mean, obviously, the story you just described, um, is in conflict with Jane Austen's persuasion. It's in conflict with Dante's comedy. Could those three stories get into a kind of platonic dialogue with one another? Can we sort out what the human end is not in in more abstract philosophical terms, but in the terms of images? Can one story sort of win an argument over a very different kind of story?
That's a really interesting question for me. But in any event, it's absolutely the case that artists as as mores change, as culture changes, they're going to give us depictions of ends and purposes that are going to conflict with rival understandings.
So you said you have the the question of whether or not one work of art can win an argument with another work of art. Do you have an answer to that question?
I took a.
Stab at an answer in an article I just published earlier this year. Uh, in in the journal logos. Logos. Um, and it's it's, uh, the title of it is literature is Tradition Constituted Inquiry, and it draws upon the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. It's, um, it's a complicated argument. I guess it all comes down to trying to show how certain images, in a sense, undermine mine, their own worldview, if that's if that's what I want to say or
certain stories that is undermine their own worldview. They kind of subvert themselves. That's a tough argument to make, and it would be a very tough argument to make in regard to the show you were just describing, because the protagonist ends apparently quite, quite content. So how is it possible to show that that that moral understanding, that understanding of the human ends subverts itself, that that would be the task I would have to take up?
Hmm. Daniel, I often, um, when I teach writing, I spend a lot of time talking about the importance of, um, staying on the surface, oddly enough, you know, and I got this from Flannery O'Connor, who points out that the the raw material for fiction, um, is not ideas, but but sensory images. Right. And so I'm always trying to to push writers to be a little bit more, um, to live in the world of the senses and resist the temptation to go off and, and, uh, and talk
about ideas. What I'm really doing is trying to, to move the needle in that direction, because I know that the ideas are appropriate as well. But, um, that seems like a way into the question of the sensible and the intelligible. Um, which is something you you talk about a good bit. There's, there's that which we receive with our senses. And Aristotle and Aquinas are both very clear that that's where knowledge starts, right? And yet it's not where it ends.
That's right. Yeah.
We we we human beings were embodied spirits. So, as you just said, we we first encounter the world through our five external senses, through through our bodies. Right. And our sense organs. But we're we're we're spirits in the sense that we have these intellectual powers. And there's actually two of them. Intellect and will. Mind and will. Art, interestingly enough, is also a kind of embodied spirit. It's it's made of matter, right? But it has intelligibility or
what we might say, meaning packed into it. Mhm. So what Flannery O'Connor is encouraging us. Yeah. She, she took this, this notion I think from Henry James I believe of, of too many writers have weak specification. That is as you were saying, they're not the writing isn't grounded in the senses in the particular. We're not getting enough of the material world, you know. So how people in Nashville speak as compared to people in Manhattan. We need to
get the particulars and our. When we first engage with any work of art, we're picking up the particulars. However, we're always searching through those particulars with our minds to understand the meaning. So what is being said about the human person in this story of O'Connor's, for example, what is being said about the human quest for fulfillment in this story? That's our mind at work. But our mind, sure, in in studying philosophy or in talking philosophy, likes to
think about those questions in a purely abstract way. One of the delights of art is that it suits our nature as embodied spirit so well by allowing us to think about meaning, the intelligibility of the human experience as it's embedded in particulars. That's as I tell my students, that's the perfect sandwich for us as human beings. You know, if I tell you, um, come on over Saturday night, we're going to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together.
You're going to be a little daunted and a little hesitant. But if I say, come on over, we're going to watch a movie, you're like, okay, I can handle it. That's that's like a warm bath for us as embodied spirits that, that because it's going to fill up our senses but still allow us to be rational animals, still allow us to think about how the predicament of that protagonist shows us, that interplay between ends and purposes that we were talking about earlier.
Yeah, yeah. Uh, I love it when you say I don't want to contemplate a universal. I want to contemplate a sensible particular, but the contemplation of the sensible particular, like a work of mimetic art, is possible because the intellect is able to take the essential knowledge of a thing and apply it back to the sensible particular.
Yeah. Yeah.
Don't tell my philosophy, colleagues I said that. But I mean, that's what philosophers do. We contemplate universals more or less in the abstract. We're happy to talk about justice and happiness and virtue and all the good things, uh, without with only sort of a very loose reference to particular people. We kind of fly away with the abstraction very quickly.
But what art does. Perhaps storytelling most vividly is it is it puts that, that desire to think about human life, um, in the context of this, you know, character, say, a character of Flannery O'Connor. Um, you know, living on this farm, uh, with this economic status Us being visited by this Bible salesman on a day, and we see what happens from that. We just can't we just can't get enough of that as human beings.
Yeah. Because it's what every day of every minute of every day.
That's right.
Our life.
Is. That's right. Absolutely.
It's meaning making its way out through the particulars of our existence.
Yeah. I mean, we live in the particular and and abstraction is great, but but to kind of even philosophers, they're going to run into trouble unless they bring their abstractions back and ground them in particulars. And I think that's one of the great, um, the great benefits of, of our enjoyment of art. Is it it keeps us grounded, um, in the particular.
Yeah.
So you have used the word contemplation a few times in this discussion. Action. Um. What do you mean by contemplation?
Yeah, I don't. It's certainly connected to sort of a, um, the religious sense of contemplation. You know, a monk or a nun might practice. It certainly connected with that. But I'm also using it in a more flexible, more everyday way so that, you know, we're on vacation and we're on the beach and we're looking at the sunset and just soaking it up. That's a form of contemplation. Uh, I would call watching a movie enjoying any kind of work of art contemplation. So what it is, um, it's
it's the mind at work searching for meaning. Right? Inquiring. Inquiring into truth. That's what contemplation is. And and even at its best, it's the mind soaking up truth that it has achieved. But again.
The mind has achieved.
Yeah. That the mind is achieved. Now, of course, with the help of the senses and the imagination and the emotion. But ultimately the, the main contemplative act is, is going to be that of the mind. Uh, when the mind achieves meaning. But again, when it comes to art, we don't achieve that meaning apart from the particular. So another great phrase of Flannery O'Connor's from one of her essays,
she says art or stories give us experienced meaning. So not abstract meaning, but but meaning in the experience of a character in a story. Um, but gazing at the action portrayed in that story is is the contemplative act and and simply soaking it up for the meaning that it has again, for the way in which it shows
us the interplay of, of ends and purposes. And I tell my students, one way we can see contemplation at work in the and the enjoyment of art is in the fact that we read certain books and see certain movies again and again and again and again. We know the ending. We may have large swatches of the dialogue memorized. It's not about the initial surprise of what happens. It's simply about mulling over, uh, the argument, uh, that the author is putting before us.
Yeah.
You have been using the verb achieve, achieve truth. Are you using that in some technical philosophical sense or.
No.
What does achieving truth mean?
No, I certainly no special technical sense. I think I, I, I gravitate toward that verb, um, because of my sense that it's difficult. Truth is an achievement. It doesn't come easily, not even when you're watching a movie or enjoying a painting. You can miss the point of the movie, especially if it's kind of challenging. Um, I know I've walked out of a movie theater thinking, what was that all about? Right.
I didn't achieve. Um, the argument that the that the screenwriter, the director was trying to put before me, I certainly felt that way in front of certain modern paintings. Uh, what is the meaning? I miss it so. Truth is, is an achievement. It's hard won. Uh, and so I think that's that's the reason I use that word.
Yeah, I.
I'm a little bit surprised, insofar as, you know, Aquinas talks about the importance of receptivity of of receiving and beholding, um, and so that beholding doesn't, doesn't seem like an achievement.
But that's the end of the process. I kind of slipped in a minute ago in my earlier answer about contemplation. Inflation. It's it's at its best when all the hard work of inquiry is over and you've got it and you can just soak up the truth. That's the beholding. Um, but you've got to there has to be some inquiry, uh, in order to achieve that state. We don't, uh, we don't get our minds around hardly anything in life or in art. Um. Right away. So we have to mull
it over. We have to, uh, inquire at least a little bit. Uh, we at very least have to go through the experience of watching the film or reading the novel or or gazing at the painting in the museum. But when we get the point, the experienced meaning, then we behold. Then we simply take it in, as you rightly say.
Listen. Yeah.
Okay. Daniel, earlier on, very early in our conversation, I alluded to Christopher Walken impersonation, which I thought was a funny, a funny way of talking about mimesis. Um, can you kind of walk us through that? Sounds like I'm trying to make a lame pun, but, uh, walk us.
Through the walking.
Example.
Right. And I'll spare the audience my own Christopher Walken.
Thank you.
But I start, I start, uh, the opening chapter of the book with the scenario of of a celebrity going on a late night talk show. And as they often like to do, the celebrity will do voice impressions of other celebrities. And I at least have often noticed they like to do Christopher Walken because he has.
A very.
Distinctive voice that's a very simple and homey and but delightful example of imitation. Um, and and what it shows us is that we delight in the form of something being put before us in a different medium.
Yeah.
So we we don't have Christopher Walken himself sitting there in the television suit. I mean, that's fun too. And you can kind of listen to his voice, but there's no doubt it's even a little more delightful to see some other actor sitting there doing his walk in impression. It freshens Walken's voice for us even more and allows us what to contemplate it. It's not the deepest contemplation. It's. It's not like reading, uh, The Brothers Karamazov, but it's
nonetheless his voice is so distinctive. Its form is so unusual. The impersonation, the imitation gives us a chance to contemplate it because it's exaggerated. If Walken is sitting there, he's he's probably more prone to not sound like he does in the movies. You know, he's going to probably be a little more subdued than he ordinarily would be. He's not going to get into character. Not certainly not one of his own characters, celebrities, movie stars typically don't like
to do that, but the other actor will. So he'll exaggerate the voice. And that's like, uh, that's like putting it, as I say in the book. It's like putting it on a on a slide that we can then put under a microscope. We can really examine that voice and delight in that voice. It's not all purely with the mind. Uh, we're able to delight in that voice even more.
Well.
You you alluded to this a minute ago, and, um, but you didn't use the actual the actual phrase, which I'm, which is from your book. You speak of the alien matter of a particular artistic medium? Yeah, I love that language of alien matter. We we take great pleasure in seeing the form of a thing.
Right?
Rendered in alien matter, you know.
Yeah.
I mean, like.
What was it that Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the guy was making the Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes, you know?
Yeah.
Alien matter. That's. He's making a little.
Sculpture.
And it was an imitation we figured out. We didn't know at first what she was doing when she was doing that. But as the story goes on, we see that. Oh, that's an imitation.
Yeah.
Um, or to switch to another example, I can look at a painted portrait of Winston Churchill. It's not Churchill, but yet it is, in a way, Churchill. It's his, his sensible forms. You know how he looked, his girth, his expression. Uh, it's there, uh, depicted on that canvas and and even something of his, of his character is depicted. Uh, I'm thinking of Graham Sutherland's famous portrait of Churchill. It's
depicted in that portrait. Um, Churchill is there. His form, both sensible and intelligible, is there on that two dimensional painted canvas. But in an alien medium. And again, that's that's like the voice impression of Christopher Walken. We just delight in that. It freshens the world for us.
Yeah.
So alien matter. Um, can we talk about form for just a minute?
Yeah.
Um, because form does not mean the external form.
It can. There are two senses of it. Let's go back to what we were saying earlier about art. I called it just like human beings. It's an embodied spirit. That is to say, any work of art has both a sensible material dimension, and it has a non-sensible intelligible dimension. There are forms on both levels. So when I'm watching, uh, someone do a voice impersonation of Christopher Walken. Uh, first
of all, there's a sensible form being imitated. Simply kind of the timbre, the rhythm, the New York ease of his voice. Those are sensible forms.
Yeah.
You could also say, though, even with the voice impression, there is some intelligibility, there's an intelligible form that is something about that voice tells us something about a character, and I'm not sure I could say exactly what that is. Um, but there's something about being human that's also in that voice. Now, certainly, you go to a more complicated kind of imitation, like
a portrait of Churchill. There are sensible forms on the canvas. So, I mean, the painter chose to use certain dark colours to depict Churchill's three piece suit. Right. So those browns or even blacks, those are sensible forms. And I pick those up through my sense of sight. But then there are intelligible forms. Forms of meaning. And that has to do with what I mentioned a moment ago. I, I
discern Churchill's character as kind of coming through. The intelligible forms are embedded in the sensible forms, but they kind of come through them to my mind.
Yeah.
So what is the relationship to, uh, to form on the one hand and. Those aspects of a of a person or a thing that are necessary to its being, that person or thing. In other words, I can picture, you know, elephants are all the elephants I've ever seen are gray, but I can picture a pink elephant.
Yeah.
Um, and so that that grayness is not the essence of the the elephant. But there's something about the elephant that is an essence. I mean, once we start envisioning an elephant without a trunk, it feels like we're not talking about an elephant anymore.
Exactly. So form is one of its synonyms is essence. So when so when my mind understands, in looking at this portrait of Churchill, something about his character. I don't know everything about Churchill's character. But one thing I know, if I look at Graham Sutherland's portrait, is this is a man. Even if I didn't know who it was, I would still pick up. This is not a man to be trifled with. Right. This is a this is this is a man with a commanding personality. Right? That's
that's part of Churchill's essence as a person. If you don't get that, you don't get Churchill.
Yeah.
He might have worn a different suit that day. He might have been painted five years earlier. Those are accidents. Those come and go. But what's essential to his character endures. And so what I'm trying to pick up in terms of intelligible form when I enjoy a work of art is is what is the essence here. And that's another way of talking about what is, um, how are the purposes aligning with the end? Because that dynamic reveals what's essential and what's accidental.
Yeah.
Well, I feel like we could talk about this for hours, but, um, but I have I have standards, Daniel.
We we try.
To keep these things to, to relatively short. So I'm going to I'm going to, uh, not ask you any more, uh, philosophical questions. But I do want to ask you, who are the writers who make you want to write?
Oh, I love that question. Well, uh, I'm a novelist myself. Uh, I get yeah, it's a great question because there's a lot of novelists I admire, but there's really only one who I read. And after a sentence or two, I'm itching to write myself. And that's Evelyn Waugh.
Uh.
And I, I don't say that I, I'm, I'm a Catholic. I'm not just saying that because while I was a Catholic novelist and their Catholic themes in his novels, that's that's great. That's that's that's a part of my attraction to him. But know what I mean? Are his sentences. I think he wrote the most beautiful sentences in 20th century English. Um, they are remarkable. I find them infectious to read. Um, I think one of his reviewers, who blurbed one of his books I saw recently, just said
he never wrote a bad sentence. And I think the appreciation of war has to. It's not just, you know, the deathbed conversion in Brideshead. It's it's the sentences that I think are so beautiful.
Yeah.
Do you know about Evelyn Wall's, um, blurb he wrote for, uh, wiseblood Flannery O'Connor's book?
I think I have heard that, but go ahead.
He said something like, uh, if this is the unaided work of a young woman, it is indeed remarkable.
Yes, yes.
They didn't put it.
On the back of.
The. They didn't put it on the back of the book.
And it sounds so incredibly condescending.
Oh.
He meant it as a compliment.
That's a pretty Evelyn Wall uh.
Thing there.
Yes. Yeah. Don't. Yeah. You don't get more from him than that. So I appreciate that. And I think she did.
All right. Well, Daniel McInerney, thank you so much for being here.
Jonathan. Thank you. It's been been delightful.
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