How emotionally involved should artists be in their work? And what level of emotional involvement is ideal? Denis Diderot, a well-known French philosopher who wrote extensively on aesthetics, attempted to answer these questions.
Recently, I had the opportunity to read two of his pieces regarding the fusion of aesthetics and emotion. In his 1758 piece, “On Dramatic Poetry,” he argued that poets (and other creative artists) must produce their work while in the throes of emotion. Otherwise, he believed that they’d have little interesting material to work with, and would have to resort to adding fictitious material to works, or at least exaggerating the real material within them. Later, he seemed to have changed his tune. Within one of his dialogue pieces, “Paradox on Acting,” which he completed between 1773 and 1778, he claimed that actors and other creative artists must remain unemotional about their presentations and performances. They must only represent the great human emotions within them, without becoming emotionally involved in them themselves. He asserted the belief that becoming emotionally involved in one’s artistic work leads to performance inconsistency, and therefore, less success in general.
Diderot’s later theories make sense when applied to actors. After thinking about the different types of aesthetic works that exist in the world, I’ve arrived at the view that the actor is just a medium that a playwright is using. The playwright uses the actor as the visual artist uses a paintbrush or clay or as the novelist uses a pen or a computer. Just as the artist wouldn’t want their paintbrush to take on a life of its own, and the novelist wouldn’t want their computer to start adding words to one of their pages, the playwright would not want an actor to let their own emotions come to life during a performance. This would make the actor less able to control their technical delivery. The actor’s job is not to add their own emotional touches to this delivery, but simply to accurately imitate the emotions that the playwright put forth while writing his or her play. Similarly, when someone hires a freelance writer for a ghostwriting task, the ghostwriter must express the opinions and views of their boss. Even if they don’t agree with those opinions and views, like the actor, they must not let their own thoughts and feelings get in the way of their accurate and clear presentation of them.
Diderot’s same theories don’t apply well to those artists who don’t act as mediums but as creators, such as playwrights, novelists, poets and visual artists. In order to produce excellent works, creators must have recently been overcome by emotion, as per early Diderot. One worry about artists producing while gripped by emotions is that the art produced may contain exaggerated, unrealistic details due to the influences of the emotions. For example, a visual artist may draw certain objects as larger or smaller than they really are, reproduce objects in slightly different colours than they are in reality, or make certain people look more threatening than they actually are. However, a piece containing these kinds of inaccuracies may actually inspire public interest and won’t be as problematic as the alternative. Alternatively, if artists produce works long after they’ve passed through certain emotional states, their memories of the original emotions are likely to have faded, and therefore, the emotions won’t be strongly expressed throughout the works. Instead, the artists are likely to focus too much on technical principles, such as proportion and balance. If a work of art is technically good, but has no emotional meaning behind it, what’s the public really able to appreciate about it, over and above the qualities of other works? Yes, they can appreciate the technical aspects, but if those are the only things of significance that a piece of work contains, they might as well look at basic geometrical lines and shapes instead of the work. Even the great Cubist paintings express certain degrees of emotional meaning.
To refer to a practical example, if I encounter a significant person and want to write a piece about the encounter, it’s better for me to write the piece an hour or two afterwards, rather than two months later. An hour or two later, traces of the emotions I felt while I was meeting the person will still be present, and therefore, I’ll naturally infuse my piece with some of those feelings. If I leave writing the piece until two months later, those feelings will have vanished. Instead, I’ll likely describe empirical features of my meeting, such as what the person looked like and what he or she said, but it will seem like something important is missing from my piece. To attempt to fix this, I’ll likely embellish my descriptions, in hopes of making my piece more interesting, but the embellishments will have an artificial sound to them. Generally, the public is more responsive to things that are real as opposed to those that are artificial; hence, many people can watch movies and read novels about horrible tragedies, while remaining emotionally unmoved, but they’re often moved when real-life tragedies occur. People will also more likely be moved by artworks based on real events, rather than those that are not (one need only look at the selection of paintings from centuries past that are still popular now for proof of this). This phenomenon is consistent with another of Diderot’s beliefs that works of art must be true to nature, and therefore, the best time to create a work of art is when you’re in an intense emotional state, since this state gives you more real material to work with creatively.
My endorsement of Diderot’s ideas from “On Dramatic Poetry” is in no way an attempt to devalue his later conclusions from “Paradox on Acting.” As discussed, when applied to certain situations, these also have value. Actors, being mediums, not creators, are part of a distinct group of artists separate from that of creator artists (such as musicians who perform original works, playwrights, poets and novelists). While it’s essential that creators produce their work while fuelled by emotion, it’s essential that artists who act as mediums (including actors, cover bands, ghostwriters and any other artists hired to publicly put forth the ideas and/or emotions of others) remain unswayed by their emotions while performing or presenting and instead stick to engaging in accurate imitation of the emotions they’re required to express. Since I’m a writer of various types of pieces, I must sometimes switch back and forth between the modes of medium and creator. While I often express my own ideas and views through my writing, as I do when I write for The Mindful Word, I’m occasionally employed as a ghostwriter and must then take on the ideas and voices of others.
