If you look at the ‘art world’ in a superficial way, you have two camps which generally accord with the left-right distinction in politics. On the one hand, there are the shitlib prozac brains enamoured by weird objet trouvé pieces about climate change and statues of obese women. On the other side, there are the retvrners who yearn for ‘traditional’ art, whether it be a second-rate landscape painting hanging in their grandmother’s hallway or an actual painting, they wouldn’t be able to see the difference. They say modernity was a mistake, and so every breath of fresh air that invites a future is outlawed in favour of a past they can not possibly know.
Schizophrenia or boredom is the choice we are presented with. Every artist and every thinker has had the same question; we are fucked, impotent, so how to begin again? Winckelmann was very clear on this; imitate the ancient Greeks. We are ugly and can only seem to create ugly things. They were beautiful and couldn’t even create ugliness if they wanted to. So, imitate the Greek form. The advice is of course marked by what is considered a great sin in contemporary art ‘theory’ —imitation. For who imitates? The unskilled imposter, incapable of coming up with anything of interest himself. Of course, we should not be naive, imitation and reproduction are allowed, as long as what is imitated is sanctified by the regime. You can copy soup cans as in pop art, or you can imitate traditional African art. You can’t imitate Europe’s ancient examples of greatness.
To mock ‘imitation’, one points to Greek thought, particularly Plato. Here we can find this idea that the artist is the one who imitates. And if the artist only imitates, how can he ever do something great? How can he ever do something ‘original’? And so, contemporary thought is anti-Platonist, and anti-Greek. Because by ‘original’ we mean the new, and not that which points to the origin of things, and in this way can serve, by imitation, as an origin for us.
Now, perhaps there is no ‘out’ of imitation. Man is a mimetic being. We are merely men, and so are artists. And as such, we imitate. The question is only, what is imitated? And so we see what is already too familiar; mocking the idea of imitating or representing anything higher, the contemporary artist imitates the opinions of the day. You can’t outlaw man’s natural inclinations, you can only pretend they don’t exist and let them do their work outside of our conscious attention.
As such, no one can seriously hold that art no longer follows the ancient model of imitation. It is merely that we imitate different things.
In a way, a strong message of the importance of ‘imitation’ is precisely what keeps the artist focused on what is most worth expressing and prevents him from imitating what is insignificant.
Concerning Plato, there is this idea that he supposedly saw art as an “imitation of an imitation”, a copy of a copy, a simulacrum. There are these Ideas, the world is an image of them, and the artwork is an image of this worldy image. Twice false, twice removed from reality. If this should be true, it stands in stark contrast to the contemporary artist’s arrogance when proclaiming art has some privileged access to the truth, even going so far as saying that art will save the world or is the solution to politics. Still, this idea gives a false image of the role of imitation and art in the Platonic universe. In Xenophon, Socrates clearly says that art truly expresses soul. Not because the painter’s brush or the sculptor’s marble have some magical properties that the rest of the material world wouldn’t have, or because the artist possesses a unique genius. No, merely because everything expresses soul. A certain look in the eyes betrays a certain disposition of the soul, and the same goes for a certain posture or a certain action. There is no ‘dualism’ here, but an expressionism. All things, of both nature and art, sing the praise of the One. What makes the artist’s work so unique is that he can consciously choose to express certain dispositions of soul through the manipulation of matter. He can study what it looks like when a body expresses courage, sadness, beauty, and so on. And he can use this knowledge to express said dispositions in a concentrated manner. The artistic activity thus gives us a vision of what life could be like, it shows possibilities. We can create a world in accordance with our will, we can give form to ourselves. The artist shows that this process in which Nature gives form to matter, the original ‘imitation’ wherein the world reflects soul, we can “imitate” this process. Not in the sense of a blind copying, but in the sense of participating in it, repeating it, yet this time under the tutelage of our own will.
In this vein, you can understand Nietzsche’s remarks that art should “replace” philosophy.
“Our religion, morality, and philosophy are decadent forms of man. The countermovement: art.” (Nietzsche)
Nature as such is a perpetual movement of expression, and in his activity, the artist gets closest to this. Compare the philosopher or the theologian who can only grasp dead concepts. Heidegger says that, for Nietzsche, reality is a continuous ‘shining forth’ in which nothing is stable or hidden behind this movement of shining. Appearances appear, and behind this appearing there is only more appearing. There is no higher or deeper ‘real world’ behind the apparent world.
“Both art and truth are modes of perspectival shining. But the value of the real is measured according to how it satisfies the essence of reality, how it accomplishes the shining and enhances reality.” (Heidegger, Nietzsche I)
The essence of reality is this creative movement, “will to power”, and the artist expresses this most forcefully. The philosopher, traditionally, always seeks for something stable and eternal behind this continuous movement. But this eternal reality behind the appearing, it doesn’t exist for Nietzsche. And this is the power of art; it shows us that appearance is not of a lower quality, a mere ‘imitation’ of something else. It shows us that it is precisely in appearing that the full depth of reality is revealed. It does away with the devaluing of life in favour of something ‘beyond’ enacted by philosophy.
Socrates says the artist consciously manipulates matter to express certain dispositions of soul. This is important, and it is key to understanding why Nietzsche thought so highly of art. Nietzsche, obsessed with the question of “discipline and breeding”, of creating a higher type of man, life in ascent, says that until now these types of men have only been created unconsciously by nature. At certain periods in history they emerge by chance or nature, like comets, distanced from their contemporaries like Gods are from men. The future, Nietzsche suggests, will see the first time these higher types of life will be consciously created. After all, we have seen what life in decline looks like, we arguably have a more intimate knowledge of it than anyone has ever had before. And as contrary is known by contrary, we can will the better into existence. Techno-science plays a role here, not in the way that some fantasize about bio-technologically altering man to create some ‘trans-human’ superhuman species, but in the sense that science gives us accurate knowledge of the psycho-physiological conditions required for certain types of life. The way towards them is entirely human and natural. Mountain air, a bit of discipline, and, breeding. After all, when it comes to life, the more science advances the more it shows that the natural way is best. “Stay true to the earth.”
For Socrates, the artist expresses invisible soul through the careful manipulation of visible matter. In this way, the invisible shines through in the visible. It is still invisible, but it can be sensed, intuited, felt, and known in a direct manner that goes beyond the limits of what we commonly call the understanding. This is the Platonic understanding of how ideas manifest themselves. Say the Idea of Beauty; the beautiful can not be defined by perfect symmetry, because there are a-symmetrical things that appear to us as beautiful. It can not be defined by certain mixtures of colour, or the presence of a certain type of narrative meaning. No, because there are simple colours and things without narrative that appear as beautiful too. In this way, we can keep searching for beauty in all sorts of things, but we can never entirely capture beauty in this way. Beauty appears, this is a fact. But how and when it appears, this is highly contingent. Which does not mean that beauty has nothing to do with symmetry or perfect form and harmony. These things often express beauty, but they are not the same as beauty. And so beauty shines through them, it uses them in a way, and our task is to create the conditions under which beauty will shine through in our acts and creations. The same goes for other Ideas. Do read closely, and see that the notion of the Idea is in many ways nothing but the absolute affirmation of the phenomenological reality of beauty, courage, and so on. Something to keep in mind when you see Platonism being discarded for its apparent rejection of phenomenal reality.
We do see clearly the type of doubling which Nietzsche rejects, that there is this appearing of the material world behind which there lies something else, an Idea, a soul, whatever. But then again, even for Socrates, the appearance is not as worthless as we might think. In this expression of soul, that which is expressed is fully present in the visible work of art.
Still, we should not kid ourselves, it is still a painting or a sculpture. A sculpture expressing courage, beauty, and justice will not save the world. Courage, beauty, justice, and so on might. That is, the dispositions of soul that are expressed in the work of art are more important than the work of art. However, because the work of art is consciously created, it can offer us a purified vision of what we are striving towards. Take the beautiful, for many the object of all artistic activity. In Platonism, the Idea of Beauty, it expresses itself when certain conditions are present in certain circumstances, conditions and circumstances which constantly change. Sometimes in symmetry, sometimes in a type of colour, a type of story, the possibilities are perhaps quite endless. But the artist, consciously manipulating matter, he can actively search for the conditions in which beauty appears.
In this way the artist is an educator that can show us the conditions needed for higher life. And this artwork can simultaneously give us an affective vision of what is possible, it can show us an ideal. Before we are able to give birth in ourselves to those qualities most valuable, we can display them in the artwork. In this way, the artwork can serve as an attractor of sorts, and it can even show us the conditions needed to attain what we are yearning for. Maybe you are surrounded by fat dysgenic people, and maybe you are like this yourself. But seeing a sculpture of a hardened body with eyes that speak truth, you gain vision of a possible world in which you too could be better. Granted, it is an idealized form, and it is only made of dead stone. But you yourself are living matter, so you are already closer than you think. If this is too idealistic of an idea, it is still how the world works. We ‘imitate’, and in doing so give birth to something new. Eugen Sandow, the man responsible for the creation of modern physical culture, bodybuilding, and strength sports; one of the last areas of refuge in these times, was inspired to transform his body into a modern-day Hercules when his father took him to a museum displaying Greek sculpture. Simple. And so, physical culture saved at least some youth from industrial society. From a certain perspective, everything great comes about through imitation. But of course, there are lower forms of imitation, and there is the blind copying of others. This latter type of imitation, it produces nothing, and it conserves nothing. If I was a painter, and I was totally intoxicated by Rembrandt, I would not only make a fool of myself by trying to copy him, I would also dishonour the master’s name. I would only end up making second-hand clichés. More sensible would be to study, to learn, to see what it is precisely that is expressed in Rembrandt, and to see how I can express this anew, necessarily with a difference. Not to do a Rembrandt, but to do like Rembrandt. What is the essence of this intoxication I feel upon seeing his work? This essence, this is the object of ‘imitation’ in which something not seen as such but definitely real is brought again into visibility in a new way.
Again, in imitation, we do not seek to copy. Rather, we seek to repeat that which is expressed in the original we are imitating. The Greek world is the world of difference and repetition.
In Homeric Greece, aristocratic paideia consisted in large part of ‘imitating’ past heroes. But only in so far as in doing so, one is able to repeat that which the heroes expressed— beauty, courage, whatever. “Do like me”, say the best teachers. Imitation is merely the most trustworthy method of ensuring that what is of worth is effectively preserved and repeated, be it necessarily with a difference. This is the genius of the Platonic paideia; it gets to the core of the purpose of imitation, the repeating of what is worth imitating, and tries to make the ontological process underlying the method of imitation into the method itself. We do not become beautiful by imitating beautiful men, but by seeking direct vision of Beauty and in this way directly imitating that which we sought to imitate by imitating particular men. In this way, the creative process in which we become beautiful is enacted directly and not through the intermediary of the imitated. Even the physical culturist Sandow; he did not imitate the statues he saw in that he copied their bodies, this is impossible. You can not imitate muscles into existence. Rather, he ‘imitated’ those ways of life and those dispositions of soul that would allow the physical qualities he sought to be born in him. And these qualities were necessarily different, as the physiology through which strength and beauty expressed themselves this time in Sandow was different than the physiology of the Greeks he adored. It is the same with the artist; he does not copy his masters, rather, he works so that in him too mastery can be born. The result will necessarily be something new, ‘original’, but in the best case in the sense of ‘originary’; in that the invisible essence which is the real object of imitation is displayed once again, preserved, repeated, but in a new mode. In the original, the origin is preserved, and as such it can serve as an origin for the future.
In all, the Idea is always an invisible essence the task of which it is to express or make visible. The method of doing so is in imitating those in whom these ideas have already found expression.
Plotinus writes:
“If anyone despises the arts because they produce their works by imitating nature, we must tell him, that natural things are imitations too. Then he must know that the arts do not simply imitate what they see, but they run back up to the forming principles from which nature derives; then also that they do a great deal by themselves, and, since they possess beauty, they make up what is defective in things. For Phidias too did not make his Zeus from any model perceived by the senses, but understood what Zeus would look like if he wanted to make himself visible.” (Plotinus, V.8.1.)
There is nothing negative about ‘imitation’, it is only a matter of what is being imitated. The best artists do not copy those who came before them, but are able to ‘imitate’ that which all great artists have tried to express. They don’t just imitate, they run up to the principles. And from here, they create. The Nietzschean critique of “a world beyond”, how he suggests it is born out of a devaluing of ‘this world’ and eventually leads to nihilism, this is really quite foreign to Platonism, for which all things sing the praise of the One; both nature and art.
And so ideals work, but only so long as we work for them. The ideal, in a Platonic sense, is abstract. The beautiful is not this or that, it is the beautiful. This abstract and self-referential character constitutes both its strength and weakness in relation to pre-platonic ideals of imitation. We go from “imitate this beautiful man, this courageous hero”, to “imitate courage, imitate beauty.” Strength, in that one is focused on what is essential, which preserves the uniqueness of individual expression, preventing oneself from becoming merely a bad copy. Weakness; in that the connection between this world and the higher world starts to crumble, until there is no higher world and this world is void of value. But perhaps this is only a weakness for those who lack nuance. What matters is what works, and one of the strengths of an Idea to imitate—as distinct from its particular expressions— is that one can keep one’s eyes on the prize, even if beauty or courage or what have you are nowhere to be seen in the flesh. The Platonic argumentation towards Beauty is precisely this; nowhere where we look can we find beauty entirely on itself, it is always mixed with other things, and so the safest thing to say is that beauty = beauty, which is what it means to be an Idea: entirely itself, known only through itself. This is something to keep in mind, for those who are so passionate about bringing back a “classical conception” of art and lock beauty in its place by referring to the presence of definite formal principles. The classical conception is much more open, much more abstract, than any of these people realize. It has little to do with representation, and if anything, it is a critique of representation in favour of purified forms and forces.
The Platonic conception of imitating Ideas would then also attempt to escape from the problem Winckelmann describes:
“Truth springs from the feelings of the heart. What shadow of it therefore can the modern artist hope for, by relying upon a vile model, whose soul is either too base to feel, or too stupid to express the passions, the sentiment his object claims? unhappy he! if experience and fancy fail him.” (Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of The Greeks)
The Greeks, living in a better and healthier climate, taking meticulous care of both the breeding and disciplining of their youth, were more beautiful. We, having grown ugly and deformed through generations, how can we hope to express beauty, if we do not even know what beauty looks like? This is Winckelmann’s question, and his answer is simple: imitate the Greeks.
“There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients.” (Johann Joachim Winckelmann)
Whether we want to or not, we imitate. And if we are surrounded by ugliness, we will imitate ugliness. If we are surrounded by beauty, we will imitate beauty. And so Winckelmann recommends filling our minds with everything ancient, and closing our eyes to the modern filth that surrounds us.
Here we see clearly how hard it is to escape from Platonism. Say a uniquely skilled artist were to follow Winckelmann’s advice and he was able to create a painting or a sculpture of a man in the classical style that doesn’t come over as a bland reproduction or cliché (like these AI-generated sculptures you see produced today). Say he was to succeed, and spectators were to comment on the work. How would they describe it? They might say it expresses beauty, courage, power, and so on. And so again, Ideas are imitated. If it is of worth, it succeeds in an imitation of Ideas. If it is worthless, it is an imitation of the matter, mere reproduction. Some today have tried to create sculpture in the classical style through AI and such, these things appear very skilled in creating the works. But anyone with eyes to see understands immediately that there is no power here, no beauty. The matter is imitated, but the Ideas are not.
Even in the absence of beautiful things, beauty can still exist as an Idea(l). Whether this Ideal really exists as an Idea, or whether there are only particulars that can serve as ideals for imitation, it is irrelevant to a degree. What matters is that one imitates what is essential. For this end, there are many roads.
From a certain “Nietzschean” perspective, man’s loss of belief in Ideas does not make what they refer to irrelevant. Before anything else, the Idea is like a lens that focuses vision on something. Man can live in many ways, but the Ideal of courage keeps him focussed on living courageously. And even if he lives like a pig, when he has the Idea in his mind’s eye, he still has something to pull him out of his wretched existence, or at least to hold on to. But if we no longer collectively believe in Ideals, of course, this does not make courage non-existent. The only thing that happens is that it only survives as a particular, and if it is nowhere to be found concretely, it simply isn’t there. The Idea is a solution to this situation; even if courage is nowhere to be found, the Idea in our mind can serve as a lens that gives us a vision of a less cowardly existence, something to strive for. And so, following Nietzsche, if there are no Idea(l)s to believe in, the weak will have no way of saving themselves, and only those who are innately disposed to courage, beauty, and so on will be able to reap their benefits. This ‘death’ of thought’s ability to be focussed on anything that isn’t present at hand, this is a much greater tragedy than the so-called ‘death of God’, which, for Nietzsche, is only a placeholder for the death of an entire way of thinking in which the Idea plays a particularly important role. Nietzsche describes how there is a certain weakness in needing idea(l)s to be given to you to strive for, are you not capable of coming up with them yourselves, of setting and attaining your own goals? The future has two types of people; those who need ideals to be given but can not find them and thus succumb to a great weariness, and those who are able to will even if nothing is given to will for. This is the ‘natural’ way; Homer for some, Hesiod for the rest. This natural hierarchy has only been obscured by the belief in commonly held ideals that made us the common possessors of certain qualities deemed valuable. Here, slowly, equality enters thought.
Concerning imitation in creative activity; if there are no commonly held ‘ideals’ that direct our attention and creative powers, this does not stop man from imitating. Rather, he returns to imitation of the particular and immediately present. In which case, artists are differentiated no longer by their ability to express an already given ideal. As in Christian times painters were judged by the degree to which they were able to express the same religious themes. When such universal themes or ideas are no longer given, the task returns to the particular, and it seems like we are free; “we can express anything we want.” What happens, is a mere expression of the opinions of the artist, usually no different from the opinions of the day. All masks are off, and the true will of the artist is on display. And the difference now is not to what degree one approaches an Idea given to all, but the degree to which one is able to express something that can serve as an Ideal as such. Something so powerful that it can crush this entire “culture” and offer a vision of something more exciting in its place.
This is the humble achievement one can hope for today, to be able to give a little hope, a perspective, a vision. To show that it is still possible to strive, to will, even if nothing is given to strive for. The problem is not that we no longer have anything to imitate, but that all there is to imitate is base, barbaric, and of a mere material nature. Furthermore, our instinct for imitation is unconscious. The task is then to offer something better to imitate, which is perhaps only possible by first imitating some power that has already left us and bringing it back into effect.
The grand notion of the Idea has been critiqued from all sides. But it is necessary to remind of the simple solution it provides to the problem of environment. If man is a mimetic being through and through, and a mere product of his environment, how could he ever escape from a degenerative environment? He evidently can. Because even if he is surrounded by filth and what is offered for imitation is impotent through and through, man can cease imitating the order of the day and resort to a higher imitation. A more original imitation wherein a power that is hidden from the world is brought back into effect. But one must look for signs. If not in the here and now, then in the past, when soul was expressed through form. As Plotinus writes, one should not seek to express “a courageous deed”, or a “beautiful man”, one should seek to express what courage or beauty would look life if they were to express themselves anew in man and his deeds. In this way, by starting from the principle, something new is possible. Starting from the visible representation, only ugly copies are produced. What is sure is that you can not start from what is given.