RECLAIMING IMITATION

There's so much more to imitation than bad "mimetic desire."

The Boy Imitates His Father (the toy is his power drill)

I hope everyone enjoyed a glorious beginning to the Easter Season. Before I get to work reclaiming imitation, here’s what I’ve been listening to…

McINERNY’S MUSINGS

• Lately I came upon Peter Kreeft’s 1993 talk to the C.S. Lewis Institute, “Lost in the Cosmos.” The talk is about Kreeft’s two favorite books, which are also two of my favorites: C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. Kreeft’s talk is highly recommended. One of the best talks I’ve heard, and available for free on his website (the link is just above).

• If you like podcasts, one of my and my wife’s favorites is The Rest Is History. Last weekend I used a fair amount of time in the car to take in the seven-part series on the Titanic. Riveting!

• And if you haven’t heard it yet, check out my interview with Tod Worner on the Evangelization & Culture Podcast.

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RECLAIMING IMITATION

As early as forty-five minutes into post-delivery existence, a baby can imitate adult facial gestures.

Think of that.

The neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist contends that the imitative ability of human beings “is fundamental and hard-wired,” and is “how we get to know what we know, but also how we become who we are.”¹

In declaring this McGilchrist is only echoing Aristotle, who in his Poetics famously declares that imitation is natural to human beings from childhood.²

Yet McGilchrist’s further point that imitation is “how we get to know what we know and become who we are” also echoes Aristotle, who contends that human beings “make their first learnings” through imitation, the most important of which, it is surely implied, shape identity and character.[3]

Ted Gioia, however, recently called imitation “a childish motivation.” In light of Aristotle, we may retort to Gioia, “Not childish, but childlike.”

Imitation is how all children—as well as adults, when they are wise enough to act like children—discover and learn about the world.

When Aristotle makes his remark about the naturalness of imitation, he is trying to explain the origin of what he calls “poetry.” But his point applies to all of what we call “the arts.”

Art is a mimetic activity.

Without imitation, there wouldn’t be art.

Gioia says, “It’s embarrassing to admit, but most of what we do is based on imitating others.”

Now, Gioia takes imitation to be “embarrassing” because he’s speaking about imitation in the context of René Girard’s notion of “mimetic desire,” which has to do with imitation distorted by unruly, even violent, human appetite. We exercise “mimetic desire” when we allow our desires to be shaped by “what the other guy is doing.”

All well and good. Girard—and by extension Gioia—are correct to point out the dangers of “mimetic desire” defined in this way.

But we should be careful not to conflate “mimetic desire” with “imitation” in the positive, Aristotelian sense.

Late in his piece, Gioia makes a brief, positive connection between imitation and art, but more than this needs to be done to distinguish the positive notion of imitation from “mimetic desire.”

The attention currently being given to Girard’s work—see especially Luke Burgis’s Substack—should be tempered with reflection on what human life would be without the natural imitative impulse. Along with Aristotle’s Poetics, chapter 7 of McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (“Imitation and the Evolution of Culture”) would be a grand place to start.

Imitation is such a natural and good human activity, that to criticize it without substantial qualification is like criticizing “thinking” because certain human beings have misused the capability.

In the Renaissance, poets learned their craft by deliberative practice in the form of imitation exercises. (On this theme, see chapter 8 of Scott Newstok’s marvelous How to Think Like Shakespeare (“Imitation”)).

A century or so earlier, a certain book caught the attention of the thoughtful reading public and sold quite a few copies.

It was called The Imitation of Christ.

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** For more on the importance of the Aristotelian notion of imitation, look out for my forthcoming book, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (Word on Fire Academic, June 2024). Early reviews of the book have said the following:

“This is literally the best book on beauty that I have ever read: the most convincing, clear, and comprehensive; the most eye-opening and satisfying; the most insightful and delightful. It is a masterpiece. I do not use that word lightly, but there is no other word for it.”

–Dr. Peter Kreeft, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College, and author of Socrates’ Children (Word on Fire 2023)

“Daniel McInerny’s book clarifies why we enjoy works of art—pictures, music, drama and movies, poetry and novels—and it also shows why we revere such works: not as ends in themselves, but because they place us in the truthful presence of what they depict. The book reactivates Aristotle’s understanding of mimesis and Aquinas’s enhancement of it. It shows how art elevates what it displays as well as the community that experiences it. It is a metaphysical and theological reflection on the arts, written in the style and spirit of C. S. Lewis: limpid prose, abundant citations, colorful examples. A book to study and learn from, then to browse in and enjoy.”

—Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America

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The Good Death of Kate Montclair

1. Iain McGlichrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Expanded Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 249. On this same page McGilchrist cites the study that concludes that babies can imitate facial gestures as early as forty-five minutes-old: A.N. Meltzoff and M.K. Moore, “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures,” Child Development, 1983, vol. 54, no. 3, 702-09.

2. Poetics 4. 1448b5-8: “For to imitate is natural to human beings from childhood (and in this human beings differ from the lower animals, in that they are the most imitative, and they make their first learnings/lessons [τάς μαθήσεις] through imitation).” Translation my own.