Once I learned this truth, I began to see examples of it everywhere. A picture hung on the wall of our parlor. In it, a woman was taking a shirt from a clothesline. She had clothespins in her teeth and it was windy and a boy was tugging at her dress. The woman looked like she was in a hurry and the whole scene gave me the idea that, just outside the frame, full, dark clouds were gathering. But that was not what it was. It was paint. So I decided right then and there to see the picture as it really was. I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is.”— Norm MacDonald
As my mentor once said, Norm is a deceptively deep well. I found this passage early on in the comedian's shaggy-dog-story of a book.
What’s striking to me is how it folds three interwoven insights into a simple reflection. First, is Norm's awareness that perception is a kind of construction. He intuits a disjunction between the reality as it is, and the “lies” his mind imposes on it. The second is his unusual characterisation of a "powerful imagination." He reverses the common characterisation of imagination as a force of invention and fantasy, by suggesting that it can be the precise counterforce—an effort of discipline and restraint that seeks to see clearly, and resist illusion. But perhaps the most telling insight is embedded in the brief, riddling confession: “I finally gave up.”
Norm’s idea of "the lie" maps cleanly onto one of the oldest critiques of representation in Western thought: Plato’s theory of mimēsis. In Republic X, Plato describes a hierarchy of truth. At the top is an ideal world of Forms (e.g., the ideal bed) that exists beyond the physical world. Physical objects like the carpenter’s bed, are imperfect copies of those Forms. And Art—a painting of a bed—is a copy of a copy, even further removed from the truth. For Plato, these layers of imitation (mimēsis) were deceptive, emotionally seductive, and morally corrosive. He distrusted art precisely because it appeals to illusions rather than reason. This suspicion still circulates today in secular aesthetic form. Many contemporary artists and critics assert that art has “moved beyond” mimēsis, and representational work is indeed naïve or regressive. In contrast, abstraction or conceptualism are often seen as more honest, dealing more directly with the medium (paint as paint, canvas as surface, artwork as object), and exposing the act of perception, or creation for what it is. To reframe Plato’s theory in modern scientific terms, we might say that Plato’s Forms are akin to a perfect mathematical model of the world, whereas mimētic art is a poetic rendering based on our faulty perceptions. A painting of the leaves rustling in the wind might stir emotion, but a physicist analysing the same gust might uncover the mechanisms of turbulence or plant evolution.
Yet Plato’s own student, Aristotle, took a radically different view. Rather than seeing mimēsis as deception he saw it as fundamental to human cognition and learning. In Metaphysics I. 1 he writes:
“Human’s differ from other animals in that they are the most mimētic and learn their first lessons through mimēsis.”
For Aristotle, mimēsis had several critical functions: it was a tool for learning, a vehicle for emotional persuasion in rhetoric, and a central mechanism in ethical development and moral formation. In tragedy it allowed for catharsis—the purging or purification of pity and fear—by enabling viewers to process intense emotions at a safe aesthetic distance. He recognised a basic human pleasure in recognition—we are drawn to representations, even of unpleasant things, because we delight in the act of deciphering and mentally reconstructing reality through form. Whether in literature, theatre, music or visual art, mimēsis was not just a deception, but a cognitive and emotional gateway integral to how humans understand themselves and the world.
There is a significant overlap with Aristotle's mimēsis and the modern concept of empathy. When we watch a tragedy or engage with a story, we imaginatively imitate the emotional and ethical situations of the characters. We don't just observe; we simulate the feelings, dilemmas, and suffering internally, the way that Norm recognised the psychological weight of the characters in a painting. These mimetic experiences can be a critical tool for the formation of character. The inability to see a painting for what it is physically (paint on a surface)—and the inability to resist emotions or narrative is—in and of itself, indicative of a basic human reality.
So where do these opposing views leave us? At what point can we say our perception becomes projection, and imitation is deception.
Perhaps we can turn to Plato’s elusive mentor: Socrates. Unlike Plato’s metaphysical certainties, or Aristotle’s empirical curiosity, Socrates gave us the method of questioning—the dialectical approach (elenchus), which sought not to establish truth but to refute error. A person would offer a definition (say, of justice), and Socrates would test it through questions. If contradictions appeared, the definition was discarded. The goal was not to arrive at truth, but to clear away falsehood.
In this, Socrates anticipated modern scientific thinking—especially Karl Popper’s falsifiability principle. Fact becomes something that survives confrontation, not something we assert with confidence, and it always remains provisional.
However, I would like to argue that the Socratic mode of thought also has its profound uses in the field of aesthetics too.
As illustrated by Norm’s dilemma, art is something that straddles the line of both the physical world and a world of imagination, values, and symbols. In Norm’s dilemma, his character recognises that there is a physical dimension to the painting he sees. So he attempts to correct his perception, and refute his initial reading of the picture. Theoretically, this would result in being able to perceive art as mere object, a matter-of-fact record of process. However, in practice he arrives at the conclusion that he is still unable to divorce narrative, or meaning from his interpretation. In fact, much to his surprise, the illusions only became more compelling the harder he tried to see passed them. Finally he surrenders to the fiction.
It is a curious conclusion to his Socratic questioning, as if he was seemingly unable to shed falsehood. But it is not entirely cyclical either, in that he does not surrender to the same fiction he started with.
The dialectic method arrives at the provisional truth, and he is left with a contradiction. Fundamentally, he was unable to resolve the disjunction he was feeling about the reality of the painting, and his interpretation of it. The falsehood he shed was, in fact, the very idea that you could just see reality for what it is. The fiction of the painting, became one that withstood confrontation.
This reverses a common assumption that the human imagination is something to dream away the constraints of the real world. Indeed, Aristotle understood that mimēsis could be a tool for gaining greater understanding of reality, and even Plato assumed that the ideal truth existed in another realm beyond physical objects. Norm's dilemma in trying to separate interpretation from truth, points to a kind of 'practical' fallacy.
I think this is a sentiment many Realists will be able to sympathise with.
In the occasional interview, Norm talked about his ideal for the 'perfect joke' where the set up and the punchline were the same thing. (Here, I won't repeat this article.)
But it is interesting to note that in art too, a lot of the time, you arrive seemingly at the same place with different conclusions.
It's also interesting to me that Norm had talked about how he did not like seeing art in his private life, as it seemed to affect him profoundly and uncontrollably.
With regards to the book, almost as soon as I picked it up, I quickly discovered that "Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir" is more of a novel than an autobiography, so read at your own discretion.
Anyway...
"Hilarious!" Comedian Norm Macdonald died on September 14, 2021, at age 61, following a private...
I'm sorry, that should've been:
Hilarious comedian, Norm Macdonald died on September 14, 2021, at age 61, following a private, nine-year battle with cancer, which later developed into acute leukemia.
