Diderot's paradox of acting

“Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” said George Burns. This is a variation of the ‘paradox of acting’ – but funnier than Diderot’s original.

The Paradox of Acting is a famous work by the 18th century French philosopher Denis Diderot. The paradox, Diderot claims, is that an audience is most moved by an actor who remains unmoved. In order to convince the audience that the character onstage is feeling this or that emotion, the actor should precisely imitate all external evidence of such an emotion but should not actually feel or try to feel it. To an extent this is because the actor’s profession entails repeating the performance, night after night after night. While an actor who enacts a part by feeling or attempting to feel the emotions of the character will very likely perform differently on different nights, sometimes better and sometimes worse, the actor who merely but precisely imitates externals will be much more able to sustain the same level of performance.

Using the term 'sensibility' to denote a tendency to feel emotions, Diderot sums up his central proposition in this categorical way: “Extreme sensibility makes middling actors; middling sensibility makes the ruck of bad actors; in complete absence of sensibility is the possibility of a sublime actor”. The talent of a sublime actor, he expands, “depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the trap” – “you” being the spectator who falls into the trap of believing that the emotions expressed are real, and who can then empathize with or even feel them vicariously. The fulfilment of the actor’s implicit contract with the spectator can then be summed up neatly: “[the actor] has had exertion without feeling, [the spectator] feeling without exertion”. Nevertheless, Diderot cannot resist the irony implicit in some unsavoury analogies with the sublime actor’s benign confidence trick. He observes that such an actor “weeps as might weep an unbelieving Priest preaching of the Passion; as a seducer might weep at the feet of a woman whom he does not love, but on whom he would impose” and he compares the actor to “a courtesan who has no heart, and who abandons herself in your arms”.

Drama, it is often said, consists of actions, which are motivated by inner forces. In this view, what we understand by drama is a probing or exploration of inner life by means of its outer signs. There is no narrator, as there is in novels, to tell us what is going on inside the mind or the heart or the soul of a character. The character herself or himself may tell us something of this, of course, but such a device would not be very persuasive, or even interesting, if the whole play were to depend on it. On the contrary, we, the audience, prefer to exercise our social skills, for it is essential to human social life that we can accurately read the facial expressions, the tones of voice and the body language of others. In real life, our safety and our success depend on this, and nature has ensured that we continually hone the necessary skills by endowing us with an insatiable fascination with our fellow creatures.

In my view this distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds is a metaphor that we tend to take too literally and thus to mistake for reality. Diderot’s paradox, in fact, is rooted in precisely this mistake.

Diderot's basic assumption is that it is possible for an actor to imitate the external evidence of an emotion without feeling that emotion. This implies that causality is all one-way. The felt emotion causes visible or audible symptoms of it. These symptoms, being mere effects, can be ‘faked’ without any emotion being felt. But what if those external symptoms have some causal power themselves? What if imitating the outer effects of an emotion serves to arouse that emotion? To test this, simply try banging your fist hard on a table, as if you are angry. Do you not feel something like anger, if only briefly, as a result of doing so? If this is generally the case, how could an actor imitate the external evidence of an emotion without generating at least some of that emotion in the process?

This possibility raises the very difficult question of how causality can be two-way. Causes come before effects, so how can effects be ‘causes of their causes’? But perhaps the problem here is that the traditional cause-effect model is too crude for the complex psychophysical reality we’re dealing with.

From a strictly philosophical point of view, it is worth noting that Diderot’s ‘paradox of acting’ is a kind of variation on the ‘problem of other minds’. How do I know that others have ‘minds,’ that is, subjective experience? I know that I have subjective experience because I have direct access to it, by its very definition. But by the same token, the only access I can possibly have to the subjective experience of others is indirect, by means of the outer signs of its occurrence for (or ‘inside’) those others. Is it not possible, then, at least theoretically, that an automaton or robot of some kind might exhibit exactly the same signs, yet without having any subjective experience at all? If I concede this, then, for me, the question arises: are you that robot?

Diderot’s sublime actor is in full possession of a mind, of course. But this mind attends only to the business of achieving the precise imitation of the effects of emotions which it does not feel. Put differently, in performance this mind is simply executing a program which, through the rehearsal process, it has previously written. Modern technology is only now introducing driverless cars, so doubtless there is a long way to go before we get to program the truly ‘mindless actor’ – but such a possibility seems to follow from Diderot’s assumption that the actor does not have to, and indeed should not, live the scene onstage.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, back to George Burns and to the bizarre idea of ‘faking the truth’. When, in the well-known story, Laurence Olivier asked Dustin Hoffman “Dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”, I doubt he meant that Hoffman should ‘fake’ something without feeling it. For Olivier, ‘acting’ very probably meant conjuring up both the feelings and their effects without having to live the real situation that gave rise to them. A perfect example of ‘acting’ in this sense is the First Player’s performance of Aeneas’ speech to Dido in Hamlet, which gives rise to Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy :

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

Could force his soul so to his own conceit

That from her working all his visage wanned,

Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,

A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing?

For Hecuba!

What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her? (2.2.503-512)

It is evident, firstly, that the Player genuinely feels the emotion that he expresses and, secondly, that he can ‘turn this feeling on’ whenever required. At any rate, Hamlet does not for a moment imagine that the Player is merely imitating the outward show of grief.

We need to be clear that Hamlet is not criticizing the Player’s acting in any way, as Coleridge supposed he was. What is “monstrous” is the disproportion between the Player’s passion in the context of a mere fiction and Hamlet’s lack of passion in a real-life situation that should demand it – not the actor’s performance. And for this to provoke him so, it is necessary that the Player’s passion seems to Hamlet to be real.

It’s worth untangling the Jacobean psychology in the lines quoted. The Player can “force his soul... to his own conceit”. “Conceit” here is a product of mind, akin to our ‘conception,’ but with a stronger implication of something imagined. The Player forces his soul to believe in or to function in accordance with that conceit – he must ‘force’ it because this would not be the natural disposition of his soul, left to itself. Thence, it is from the soul’s working that the bodily effects – a pale face, tears, apparent distraction, a broken voice – are generated. The soul, in fact, remains the grammatical subject, hence the agency, that ‘suits’ the Player’s “whole function” (the various workings of his body) with the “forms” (the expressions) that are appropriate to his “conceit” (mental image). Notably, then, the Player’s inner conceit does not feed directly into his external bodily behaviour. It must first enlist the Player’s soul. And it is the involvement of the soul that guarantees the reality or the truth of the Player’s emotion. In the terms of George Burns' wisecrack, you can 'fake' something 'honest'.

In effect, Diderot supposes that the soul can be bypassed, as though an actor’s ‘conceit’ can directly engage the bodily functions. In the Jacobean model, something (the soul) mediates between mind and body. For Diderot, mind can have absolute control over body. And this, of course, is the problem. For Diderot, mind has been abstracted from body and then set up in sovereignty over it. It’s an extreme version of what a lot of people, even today, take for granted. But it’s so extreme that it calls not only itself – the extreme formulation – into question, but the more widespread common sense version of ‘mind over matter’. In that common sense idea too something crucial is left out, not the soul but what can be called the normal ‘phantom body’ or the normal ‘imaginary body’. See Appendix 2 of Re-Imagining Your Body for a discussion of the scientific basis for this.