Philippine E-Journals

Plato and Aristotle: Their Views on Mimesis and Its Relevance to the Arts

Lok Chong Hoe

Discipline: Philosophy

 

Abstract:

Plato and Aristotle both consider the arts to be forms of mimesis (often translated as “imitation”), but their meanings of mimesis do not entirely overlap. Plato employs the term mimesis with several meanings, which include reproducing the speeches, tones, and gestures of another person; the making of accurate copies or likeness of real objects; impersonating another person; and representing men in action. But his emphasis was on mimesis as the production of accurate copies of real objects (painters and sculptors, he believes, fill this role), and the reproduction of speeches and gestures of another person (which was precisely the role of Ion who was the rhapsode for Homer), and this has led him to conclude that artists are making redundant reproductions that contribute nothing to knowledge. Worse, these artists sometimes even mislead or deceive their spectators. He claims that painters deceive foolish men and children into believing that what they painted were real objects, and poets deceive by making false claims about the gods and heroes from legend (i.e., these characters never really did what these poets claimed they had done). Hence, artists have no place in Plato’s ideal republic; and they must be expelled if they choose to stay. Although agreeing with Plato’s definition of mimesis, Aristotle defended the arts by emphasizing artistic mimesis as the representation of human action. As representations of human action, art goes beyond the production of accurate copies of the original because it has its own rules of unification and integration of parts, which enables the spectators to view artworks as coherent and intelligible wholes. Unlike the historian, the poet or dramatist describes events to satisfy the conditions of artistic unity, and it is never his intention to claim that the events he describes really took place (hence he cannot be accused of deceiving the audience). Plato never reached this conclusion that artworks are actually not merecopies but are entities existing in their own right, with their own rules of internal structuring that enable them to be presented as unified wholes, which means they can be intelligible to the audience without reference to originals existing in the real world. And this is because Plato did not emphasize art as representations of human action, and he chose instead to see them as mere copies or reproductions of originals existing in this world. My chief contributions would be, firstly, to show how Aristotle’s notion of mimesis distinguishes claims made in works of art (such as those which are found in or implied by the plot of a literary work) from similar assertions made in the social sciences; and secondly, to support certain interpretations of (what Aristotle means by) artistic unity and coherence through my employment of textual analysis of the Poetics.