Art & Human Ends

Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts by Daniel McInerny

reviewed by Louise McCray

“Art is imitation, the making of a picture of some feature of the world,” writes Daniel McInerny in Beauty and Imitation (13). His book retrieves an ancient account of what art does and why it matters, primarily from the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. At the heart of this account is the concept of mimēsis, an ancient Greek term with no exact equivalent in English and a complicated intellectual history. Whether it’s rendered “imitation,” “representation,” or simply left untranslated, mimesis has accumulated bad press over the past two centuries of art theory—it’s been mistaken for reproduction, confused with a commitment to realist style, and judged inadequate to describe the creative process. McInerny defends its original robustness and shows its explanatory power over a range of contemporary art forms.

Less obvious in his title, however, is a second sort of retrieval, and this to my mind is the book’s key strength. McInerny frames his account of the so-called “mimetic” arts with a clear understanding of human ends, patterned on Aquinas’s approach. He self-consciously distances himself from solipsistic theories of art, those that assume art is independent from and superior to other human activities (a trend he associates with the discipline of “aesthetics”). Instead, he fuses art to moral formation, and he does this without being reductionist or preachy. With clarity, precision, and resounding confidence, McInerny shows that the arts make sense when rooted in sound teleology. And this is something every student of the arts needs to hear.

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Louise McCray Ph.D., teaches English and Writing at Grove City College, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband and two children. She has researched the theory of the novel in Romantic-era Britain and is currently writing an introductory book for college students about the theory of fiction.

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