The Artist as Pretender and Believer: Diderot, Nietzsche, and Aesthetic Self-Deception

Durer’s Nietzsche & Diderot. AI-art

Introduction

What happens when the artist can no longer distinguish between what they invent and reality? This question, echoing from antiquity in reflections on theatre and mimesis, finds sharp formulations in the thought of Denis Diderot, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Diderot proposes that the ideal actor is not the one who feels what they perform but the one who simulates emotion with technical precision. Nietzsche, by contrast, worries that the modern artist risks falling into the trap of their own fiction, unironically adopting the role of creator of ultimate truths. Coleridge, meanwhile, introduces the notion of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” originally applied to readers or spectators, but here reconsidered from a Nietzschen perspective.

This article offers a comparative reading of these three perspectives, tracing a path from the rational technique of feigning to aesthetic self-deception. Rather than a simple opposition between coldness and delirium, what emerges is an internal tension within the creative act itself: between awareness of fiction and the temptation to absolutize it.

Diderot and the Coldness of the Good Actor

Denis Diderot, in Paradoxe sur le comédien (written between 1773 and 1777, published posthumously in 1830), advances a thesis that runs counter to Romantic notions of art as direct emotional expression. For Diderot, the best performer is not the one who sincerely feels their character’s passions, but the one who reproduces them with precision, through rigorous control of expression:

“Le grand comédien n’est pas sensible : il est froid. Et plus il est froid, plus il est maître de lui, plus il est en état d’observer, plus il est exact imitateur des effets de la nature.”¹

For Diderot, sensitivity disrupts execution: it impedes repetition, introduces randomness, and undermines the stability of performance. Dramatic art, then, does not arise from lived pathos but from reflective distance. The paradox lies in the idea that genuine emotion does not move as deeply as its well-crafted imitation. In this view, acting is a technique of precision rather than an experience of authenticity, and the ideal actor resembles the scientist: methodical, dispassionate, and analytical.

Nietzsche: The Creator Seduced by Their Own Illusion

Friedrich Nietzsche revisits the issue of artistic feigning from a very different angle. Rather than defending the artist’s rational control over their work, he warns of the dangers of aesthetic self-deception. In Human, All Too Human (1878), he notes how the prolonged practice of fiction-making may turn against the artist:

“Wer künstlerisch lügt, kommt zuletzt auch sich selbst gegenüber aus Übung der Unwahrhaftigkeit abhanden und glaubt zuletzt seine eigene Lüge.”²

This risk—the artist eventually believing in the illusion they themselves created—transforms the artist into a believer in their own mythology. According to Nietzsche, audience applause and enthusiastic reception can seduce the artist into viewing their work not as artifice, but as revealed truth. In The Case of Wagner (1888), Nietzsche mocks this attitude, denouncing the confusion between aesthetic depth and empty grandiloquence:

“Was liebt man an Wagner? Dass er sich für tief hält… und dass er tief erscheint. – Wer sich nicht zu helfen weiß, der ist für den Tiefen dankbar.”³

This is not merely a stylistic critique, but an ontological one: the artist who once feigned with lucidity ends up identifying with the divine figure they portrayed. For Nietzsche, this confusion between symbol and being, between mask and face, constitutes a modern drama: the self-deification of the creator through the power of their own rhetoric.

Yet it must be emphasized that Nietzsche does not reject art as such. He values it as a vital impulse, an aesthetic affirmation of existence. The problem lies not in fiction-making, but in its absolutization. The tragic lucidity of the artist, for Nietzsche, lies in knowing that all truth is also invention.

Coleridge and the Inversion of Disbelief

Samuel Taylor Coleridge introduces in Biographia Literaria (1817) a key concept for understanding fiction: the “willing suspension of disbelief.” According to Coleridge, the reader must consent, even temporarily, to accept the implausible in order to experience aesthetic pleasure:

“That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”⁴

Traditionally, this principle pertains to the reception of art. But if applied to the creative process itself, a disturbing possibility arises: what if it is not the audience but the author who suspends their disbelief? In a Nietzschean reading, this inversion is precisely what occurs: the creator ceases to see their art as artifice and begins to experience it as revelation. What Coleridge proposed as aesthetic complicity between reader and text thus becomes a mechanism of self-deception that threatens the artist’s psychic integrity.

This inversion marks a transition: from voluntary suspension to involuntary belief; from conscious play to aesthetic dogma.

The Artist as Creator Mundi

In this context, Nietzsche ironically introduces the figure of the Creator mundi, the creator of the world—a term of theological lineage that, in his writing, takes on a mocking tone. The artist, intoxicated by the effects of their work, ends up believing themselves a demiurge: a source of meaning, a bearer of ultimate truths. This critique already surfaces in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where Nietzsche describes the Dionysian artist as someone who dissolves into their work to the point of indistinction:

“In jener dionysischen Ekstase, [...] wird der Künstler nicht mehr Künstler, sondern er ist Kunst geworden.”⁵

Yet this dissolution, which might initially appear as a moment of aesthetic communion or transsubjectivity, becomes dangerous when naturalized. The artist no longer represents a god: they believe they are one. Mimesis becomes ontology; feigning becomes dogma.

This is the limit-point of art as experience of the absolute: when creation ceases to be play or critique and becomes a closed system of belief—a symbolic substitute for religion.

Conclusion

From Diderot to Nietzsche, art emerges as a field of tensions between feigning and faith, technique and intoxication, irony and delirium. While the former advocates emotional distance as a prerequisite for expressive efficacy, the latter warns of the dangers of self-enchantment: when the artist stops pretending and starts believing. Coleridge, whose theory of the suspension of disbelief targets the reader, unknowingly provides a useful framework for understanding the inversion Nietzsche denounces: the author as victim of their own power to create illusions.

This trajectory does not denounce art, but warns of a temptation inherent to it: that of confusing the symbol with the sacred, the work with the world. In this confusion, the artist ceases to be a pretender and becomes a believer—and in doing so, also loses the critical lucidity that defines the artistic gesture at its most radical.

Notes

1. Denis Diderot, Paradoxe sur le comédien (1830), ed. Jean Pommier, Paris: Flammarion, 1967, p. 45.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (1878), §59.
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem (1888), §1.
4. Samuel T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ch. XIV. Ed. J. Shawcross, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872), §5.

Bibliography

• Coleridge, Samuel T. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.
• Diderot, Denis. Paradoxe sur le comédien (1830). Ed. Jean Pommier. Paris: Flammarion, 1967.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der Tragödie (1872).
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (1878).
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. Der Fall Wagner. Ein Musikanten-Problem (1888).