MIMESIS [in Bloomsbury Handbook of Plato, 2nd edn, AUTHOR'S MS] (original) (raw)

2023, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Plato (2nd edn)

Mimēsis The vocabulary of mimēsis, conventionally but often inadequately translated as 'imitation,' is found in numerous Platonic contexts, but its most significant uses occur in dialogues from Cratylus to Laws in connection with two philosophical topics (Halliwell 2002:37-71): first, questions concerning the representational and expressive capacities of poetic, musical, and visual art; second, the epistemologically problematic relationship between representation per se and reality. The shifting terms in which both sets of issues are formulated make it misguided to seek a unified Platonic theory of mimēsis. In Cra. Socrates calls language itself mimetic (414b, 422e-7d): the 'primary names' of things, he proposes, were based (by the hypothetical name-giver) on natural likenesses between individual sounds and elements of reality. But semantic mimēsis is differentiated from mimēsis in the musico-poetic and visual arts: such arts are taken, with simplification, to represent only the sensory properties of things, whereas names supposedly capture their essence (ousia). Socrates allows visual images to be 'correct' or 'incorrect,' but not, unlike discourse, true or false (430a-31d). Correctness here denotes something like resemblance, a qualitative not 'mathematical' relationship (432a-d). Philebus, by contrast, gives the idea of an image quasi-propositional force by associating the inner discourse (logos) of thought with 'paintings in the soul' (39b-40b), a sort of illustrated book (38e-9b). Here the terminology of mimēsis is used not of mental images themselves, but to describe the 'false [i.e., ethically mistaken] pleasures' attaching to misconceived mental states (40c). Such pleasures are hardly 'imitations' of true pleasures, more like defective surrogates (cf. Politicus 293e, 297c for comparable usage). The Republic has repeated recourse to the vocabulary of mimēsis. In an often overlooked passage (2.373b), Socrates categorizes all visual, musical, and poetic arts in the 'city of luxury' as kinds of mimēsis; they form a cultural system of depictive and performative practices. Later, however, he temporarily restricts poetic mimēsis to one particular mode of discourse: first-person, direct speech, as opposed to third-person narrative (3.392d-98b). He dwells on the psychic assimilation ('self-likening') which this requires of both the makers and performers of such poetry, stressing the ethically destabilizing consequences of imaginative identification with multiple characters (Richardson Lear 2011). Subsequently, a modified conception of mimēsis is applied to music at 399a-400a, where Socrates follows the musicologist Damon in attributing to rhythms and melodies the expressive capacity to embody equivalents of states of soul/character and even the ethical qualities of 'a life' (399e-400a). Although mimēsis is glossed at 393c by reference to vocal and bodily impersonation, what ultimately matters are the internalized effects of mimēsis (395d). The supposed limitation of artistic mimēsis to purely sensory properties at Cra. 423c-d no longer holds: music's expression of emotions and character traits demonstrates that point. Mimēsis communicates meaning through simulation and symbolization; there is an important suggestion at R. 399e-401a that it includes the manifestation of ethical values in a society's entire material culture (Burnyeat 1999:218-22). Furthermore, even philosophers' self-assimilation to timeless values is described as mimēsis (6.500c): philosophers are metaphorical painters with access to a perfect model (6.484c-d, 500e), and the R. itself is like an idealized painting (4.420c, 5.472c-d). Fluidity in the scope of mimēsis helps to explain why in R. 10 Socrates returns to the subject and now asks what (artistic) 'mimēsis as a whole' consists in (595c). But bk 10 adds new puzzles. Socrates develops an analogy between poetry and painting on the basis of a notorious mirror simile (596d-e) which seems to condemn mimēsis to mere replication of appearances. The mirror comparison is