Metaphorical Mirrors: Aesthetic Reflections from Plato to Nietzsche (and Beyond)

International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-024-00682-0 ARTICLE Metaphorical Mirrors: Aesthetic Reflections from Plato to Nietzsche (and Beyond) Stephen Halliwell1 Accepted: 15 October 2024 © The Author(s) 2024 Abstract This article weaves together three main strands: first, the ambiguities of mirror metaphors in relation to concepts of artistic representation and expression; secondly, the double-sided and sometimes paradoxical influence of Plato in this area of aesthetics; thirdly, the need to interpret long-lasting metaphors in the history of ideas not as static figures of speech but as dynamic tropes which shift in sense and implications with changes of context. In constructing and exploring this thematic configuration of mirrors, metaphors, and Plato, the chief concern is to draw out—via a small selection of texts, including passages from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—some underappreciated complexity in the various classical traditions that have contributed to aesthetics and philosophy of art. ‘And the mirrors! Reflecting us … I called that cruel.’ (Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts) This paper will attempt to weave together three main strands: first, the ambiguities of mirror metaphors in relation to concepts of artistic representation and expression; secondly, the double-sided and sometimes paradoxical influence of Plato in this area of aesthetics; thirdly, the need to interpret long-lasting metaphors in the history of ideas not as static figures of speech but as dynamic tropes which shift in sense and implications with changes of context. In constructing and exploring this thematic configuration of mirrors, metaphors and Plato, my chief concern is to draw out from a small selection of texts some underappreciated complexity in the various classical traditions that have contributed to aesthetics and philosophy of art. Let us plunge in medias res with a well-known literary example, though one with a partly philosophical hinterland. At the head of Book I, Chapter 13, of his novel Le Rouge et le Noir, Henri Stendhal places an epigraph which, as with many of the book’s other epigraphs as well, is given a false attribution: in this instance, to a * Stephen Halliwell 1 School of Classics, University of St Andrews, Swallowgate, Butts Wynd, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, UK Vol.:(0123456789) S. Halliwell 17th-century French historian, the Abbé de Saint-Réal, whose name allows an ironic pun to be heard. The epigraph reads: ‘Un roman: c’est un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin’ (‘A novel: a mirror you take with you for a walk along a path’).1 The metaphor is both superficially familiar—the mirror was by 1830 so well established a trope for literary vividness and realism as to be a cliché—and yet somewhat perplexing. Stendhal, only too well aware of the cliché he is toying with, offers the reader a provocation. To put the point bluntly, or perhaps naively, why would anyone take a mirror on a walk, or, for that matter, carry it ‘through the street’?2 And if one did, what could it show that one could not see with one’s own eyes, especially since, in many contexts, mirrors show less than the eyes can see unaided? One might add that whatever, in the terms of the metaphor, the mirror is a means to, it is not itself the path taken nor the person who chooses that path. Is the mirror then simply an instrument, subject to manipulation by the one who brandishes it? Matters become, metaphorically, even stranger when the idea encapsulated in that epigraph recurs at a much later stage of the novel, now in a parenthetic set of authorial remarks inserted in Book II, Chapter 19. Here, in the process of defending himself against a hypothetical charge of immorality (by creating a figure, Mathilde de la Mole, who might be supposed by some readers to reflect the follies of contemporary young women of high social status), the author asserts that ‘a novel is a mirror going along a main road. Sometimes it reflects into your eyes the azure of the sky, sometimes the mud of the quagmires on the road. And the man carrying the mirror in the basket on his back gets accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shows the mire, and you accuse the mirror!’3 In this case, it seems, the mirror is not directly under the novelist’s control; it is not being purposefully held but carried on the back (the novelist as some kind of journeyman? or pedlar?), where its reflections (as if seen by someone walking behind the novelist?) are subject to up-and-down movements that make them oscillate or shift between the vast blue sky above and the muddy ground underfoot. This more elaborate version of the mirror metaphor seems to make realism something more like an accidental or at least contingent field of vision, varying between wide-angle and close-up, as well as between beauty and ugliness. What is more, the authorial self-defence in question starts from the claim that Mathilde is a purely imaginary character (‘Ce personnage est tout à fait d’imagination’), so that whatever the mirror is doing on the novelist’s back, he is not wholly dependent on 1 H. Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, ed. P.-G. Castex, Paris, 1973, p. 72; see Castex’s note (p. 540 n. 1) for a passage of Saint-Réal himself in which history is compared to a mirror. M. Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World, Princeton, 2005, pp. 6-8, rightly contests the assumption that Stendhal’s epigraph is a straightforward statement of ‘naive’ realism. 2 This last phrase is from a passage of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The Poet’ in which he tacitly echoes Stendhal, though from a very different intellectual point of view, by describing Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare (hardly a trio of straightforward realists) as resembling ‘a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing’: R. W. Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. L. Ziff, New York, 2003, p. 283. 3 Translation by Catherine Slater in H. Stendhal, The Red and the Black, Oxford, 1991, p. 371. (‘Eh, monsieur, un roman est un miroir qui se promène sur une grande route. Tantôt il reflète à vos yeux l’azur des cieux, tantôt la fange des bourbiers de la route. Et l’homme qui porte le miroir dans sa hotte sera par vous accusé d’être immoral!’, Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir [n. 1 above], p. 342.) Metaphorical Mirrors: Aesthetic Reflections from Plato to… it for his creativity. Yet, that seems in tension with the double statement, both in the earlier epigraph and in the present passage, that the mirror is the novel. The novel as mirror makes a third and final appearance in Le Rouge et le Noir just a little further on in Book II (Chapter 22), this time in another authorial and metafictional parenthesis, a highly ironic conversation between author and publisher in which the former’s resistance to the idea of incorporating contemporary political concerns in his work (a work, he insists again, of the imagination, unlike a newspaper) is (...truncated)