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...