Day: August 24, 2026

Will is a useful thing to have as it allows a person to overcome factors that would make their decisions for them, such as pain, fear, anger, fatigue, lust or weakness. I would, of course, be remiss to not mention that the will can be used to overcome compassion, love and mercy as well. The will, as Kant noted, can select good or evil with equal resolve. However, I will set aside the concern regarding the good and bad wills and focus on training the will.

Based on my own experience, the will is like physical stamina—while people vary in what they get by nature, it can be improved by proper training. This, of course, matches Aristotle’s view of the virtues.

While there are many self-help books discussing how to train the will with elaborate and strange methods, the process is straightforward and like training any attribute. To steal from Aristotle, it is mainly a matter of exercising the capacity but not doing so to excess (and thus burning out) or deficiency (and thus getting no gain). For example, one way of developing the will to serve temperance is to practice refraining from pleasures to the proper degree (the mean) and this will help train the will. As another example, one can build will via athletic activities by continuing when pain and fatigue are pushing one to stop. Naturally, one should not do this to excess (because of the possibility of injury) nor be deficient in it (because there will be no gain).

As far as simple and easy ways to train the will, meditation and repetitive mental exercises (such as repeating prayers or simply repeated counting) seem to help in developing this attribute. It might also help by giving the mind (whatever that is) a chance to relax and recover some will.

One advantage of indirect training of the will, such as with running, is that can develop other resources usable in place of the will. For example, when a person tries to get into shape to run, sticking with running will initially take a lot of will because the pain and fatigue will start quickly. However, as the person gets into shape it will take longer for them to hurt and feel fatigued. As such, the person will not need to use as much will when running (and if the person becomes a crazy runner like me, then they will need to use will to take a rest day from running). To borrow a bit from Aristotle, once a person becomes properly habituated to an activity, then the will cost of that activity becomes less, making it easier to engage in that activity.  For example, a person who initially must struggle to eat healthy food rather than junk food will find that resisting not only builds their will but also makes it easier to resist the temptations of junk.

There are also what could be called will surrogates. A will surrogate functions much like the will by allowing a person to resist factors that would otherwise “take control” of them. However, what makes the will surrogate a surrogate is that it is something that is not the will—but merely serves a similar function. Having these would seem to “build the will” by providing a surrogate that can be called upon when the person’s own will is failing—sort of a mental tag team situation.

For example, a religious person could use their belief in God as a will surrogate to resist temptations forbidden by their faith, such as adultery. That is, they can do what they will rather than what lust is pushing them to do. As another example, a person might use pride or honor as will surrogates—she, for example, might push through the pain and fatigue of a 10K race because of her pride. Other emotions (such as love) and other factors could also serve as will surrogates by enabling a person to do what they will rather than what they are being pushed to do. Or not do.

One obvious concern  about will surrogates is that they could be seen not as allowing the person to do as they would will when they lack their own will but as merely being other factors that “make the decision” for the person. For example, if a person resists having an affair with a coworker because of his religious beliefs, then it could be contended that he has not chosen to not have the affair. Rather, his religious belief (and perhaps fear of God) was stronger than his lust. If so, those who gain what appears to be willpower from such sources are not really gaining will. Rather they merely have other factors that make them do or not do things in a way that resembles the actions of the will. But such will surrogates can be useful, like training wheels on a bike that allow one to learn.

 

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Traditionally, drawing is seen as an imitative art in that artists create images based on real things. Naturally, this imitation can range from copying entire scenes to creating an original assembly from bits and pieces of real things. Descartes, in the painter analogy in his Meditations, makes note of this interesting nature of painting (which also applies to drawing). He considers that dreams are assembled like paintings from bits of real things. At the very least, he argues (before moving on to even greater skepticism), the colors used are real.

Moving away from metaphysics and epistemology back to aesthetics, imitating real things does not disqualify a drawing from being art. In fact, artists are often praised for their ability to accurately imitate reality. For example, my friends mistakenly claimed that I am an artist because they could recognize who I was drawing.  Interestingly, though this realism is often praised, there might be a point at which a drawing is too real to be considered art.

One argument for this is easy enough. When I taught an aesthetics class, I demonstrated my lack of artistic ability and asked my students why my badly drawn capybara was not art. They pointed out the obvious—it did not look much a capybara because it was so badly drawn. I then ask them if it would be art if I could draw better and they tend to agree. I then asked about photocopying or scanning the picture I drew my capybara from. They pointed out the obvious—that would not be art, just a copy.

Obviously, part of the reason the photocopy or scan would not be art is that it is just a mechanical reproduction. Things become considerably more interesting when a photorealistic image is created not by a technological means of duplication, but by hand. For example, Samuel Silva recreated the image of a red haired girl from a photo by Kristina Taraina as well as other photorealistic images. While Silva works with color Bic pens (seriously), Paul Cadden creates his photorealistic works by drawing and with paints. He, however, uses the term “hyperrealism” rather than “photorealism.”

Clearly, the creation of such realism in imitation requires great technical skill. For example, Silva can create photorealistic colors using Bic pens and this demonstrates an impressive mastery of color. There is also the obvious technical skill required to imitate a photograph with such incredible accuracy.

However, technical skill alone does not make something art. After all, this technical skill can be exceeded by a decent color photocopier or a smartphone camera.

It might be objected that technical skills do make it art, even though a machine can do it better. To use an analogy, the fact that a scooter could beat a champion runner does not prove that the runner is not an athlete. Likewise, the fact that a machine can imitate better than Silva or Cadden does not mean that they are not artists. This leads to a second point about art and imitation.

The problem, it can be argued, is not that a machine can imitate better than Silva or Cadden. Rather, it is that there seems to be a point at which the exactitude of the imitation ceases to be a contribution to artistry and begins to detract from it. While it seems unlikely that an exact tipping point can be specified, it does certainly seem that this is the case. Why this is so can be shown by returning to the reason why a mechanical copy is not art: there is nothing in the copy that is not in the original (laying aside duplication defects). As such, the more exact the copy of the original, the less room there is for whatever it is that makes a work art. As such, to argue that Silva or Cadden is an artist requires showing that they do more than merely copy. That is, they must add something aesthetically significant to their work that is not in the original. Otherwise, they could be seen as organic photocopiers—somewhat like how computers were once humans who did math.

One way to approach this matter is  an analogy to photography. By its very nature, an unaltered photograph merely captures an image of what is there (photons bouncing of surfaces and all that).  What the photographer adds is her perspective—that is, she selects what she will capture and thus what makes the work art is not that it duplicates reality (which it must by the laws of physics) but that the photographer has added that something extra (which, to steal from Locke’s Indian, I must say is “something I know not what”).

As such, someone who creates photorealistic images of photos could be adding that something extra in a way comparable to what photographers do when they create their art (assuming that a photograph can be art).

The obvious reply is that a person who is creating a photorealistic re-creation of a photograph does not seem to be adding that something extra. Cadden does, however, claim that he is not engaging in photorealism, but rather in what he calls hyperrealism. He says that

“Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilise additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of a reality which in fact either does not exist or cannot be seen by the human eye” and he adds that “Furthermore, they may incorporate emotional, social, cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of the painted visual illusion; a distinct departure from the older and considerably more literal school of Photorealism.”

From a theoretical standpoint, Cadden is certainly on solid ground. After all, he makes an argument analogous to the one used above, namely that he adds that “aesthetic extra” that makes his work more than a technical achievement in manual duplication. There is, however, the question of whether that “aesthetic extra” is present in his works. Since he works from photographs, it seems easy enough to put the matter to an empirical test by comparing his works to the original and giving due consideration to the difference. As such, if his work differs in aesthetically significant ways from the original image, then it would be safe enough to consider it art and him an artist.  In any case, both Silva and Cadden are remarkably talented and do amazing work. While my drawing skill has increased dramatically from my capybara days, I am not an artist—I merely apply graphite to paper in the form of recognizable shapes. After all, my indisputable theory of art is that if I can do it, it ain’t art.

 

 

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