Mimetic Production in Plato's Sophist

Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2010

I will begin by briefly setting out a problem in the interpretation of ancient mimesis between the received view and an explanation I think is more adequate to the Platonic and Aristotelian language as well as the social-political problematic in which they unfailingly speak of mimesis. I will then show, even more briefly, how that better view of ancient mimesis ties into language acquisition, findings in contemporary neuroscience, and Rene Girard’s theory about the origin (and plausible destruction) of culture. Those matters together set forth anew the power of the mimetic and place the ancient, and particularly Platonic, philosophical machinery on firm anthropological and cultural ground, where—even today—it finds significant real world traction. In the second part of the paper I will show that even if one disagrees with my interpretation of the mimetic, reading a Platonic dialogue requires attention to at least three levels of discourse: the arguments at the philosophical surface, the interaction of the interlocutors, and what those interactions aim to incite, invite or require of the readers. THIS IS THE TYPESCRIPT, FOR SCHOLARLY NOTATION REFER TO THE JOURNAL.

This paper argues that the semantics of mimesis and related terms in Plato’s dialogues are far less stable than orthodox accounts claim. After some preliminary remarks on the intricate implications of the Republic’s Cave allegory in this respect, I focus first on difficulties of interpretation raised by mimesis vocabulary in the Sophist, including the much-discussed dichotomy of eikastikê and phantastikê, whose complications make it a provisional and ultimately discarded attempt to distinguish between reliable and unreliable forms of representation. In the Republic, the semantics of mimesis expand and contract according to the needs of different stages of the argument, as well as shifting between negative and positive evaluations. Part of my analysis concerns the Republic’s series of comparisons between philosophers and painters, comparisons which are at odds with Socrates’ reductive treatment of painting in Book 10. The Sophist calls mimesis a ‘multifarious class’ of entities: no single argument in Plato supplies a definitive way of theorising its conceptual ramifications; we should abandon talk of ‘Plato’s doctrine’ of mimesis.

In this essay the author offers a reading of mimetic style (lexis) as it is presented in Book three of Plato’s Republic with the aim of disclosing the importance of style in the acquisition and employment of knowledge—whether scientific or ethical. In fact, the author argues that a careful reading of Socrates’ words in the text occasions the idea that reflection on the way that we imitate our inherited content—the ethos, the comportment, in which we exhibit that content—makes visible a potential to appropriate received content and imitated knowledge in original and wakeful ways. In consequence, the author argues that it might be style, not content, that harbors the capacity for us to take a genuine, critical responsibility for our inherited concepts.

ΣΧΟΛΗ. Ancient Philosophy and the Classical Tradition

This article addresses two often perplexing traits in Plato’s philosophical style: first, the fact that Plato’s writings are mimetic, despite the strong criticisms of mimesis we find therein; second, the fact that this mimesis not only features the constitutive defects inherent to any mimesis, but Plato actually increases its imperfection by adding other manifest defects. Based on epistemological and psychological views taken from the Platonic corpus (especially the soul’s tripartition), I show how Plato’s philosophical mimesis uses defectiveness or imperfection to overcome the limitations of mimesis identified in the Republic. To explain this, I argue that Plato’s philosophical mimesis should be primarily conceived as an imitation of people or conversations in which views or arguments are conveyed, but rather as an imitation of the act or practice of philosophical inquiry, and that by rendering this act visible to the reader, the Platonic corpus can better teach how to perform it a...

Literature Aesthetics, 2011

With only a few exceptions, readers of Plato's later dialogue, the Sophist, have not usually associated it with Platonic aesthetics. 2 But this is to overlook two important features of the dialogue. First, the unfavourable contrast, built up throughout the dialogue, between the practice of sophistry-likened to the practice of the mimetic arts (235c-236e)-and the practice of philosophy. Only the latter, the Stranger implies, affords the possibility of what we might call an aesthetic experience, i. e., the experience of beauty in the soul, while the former results in ugliness (230d-e). 3 Second, it overlooks the argument at 235d-236c, offered by the main speaker in the dialogue, the Eleatic Stranger, for the claim that certain artworks, such as monuments and large paintings, are necessarily illusory. The argument is brief but important, since it introduces the idea that the success of these artworks depends on their being at once perspectival-producing for the viewer or audience an appearance of something via a representation designed to adjust or correct for the viewer's perspective-and at the same time hiding or concealing this perspectival nature. This has the result that the audience thinks only of the object that appears, the object depicted in the representation, not the artwork or representation itself, or its adjustments and corrections. In this sense, the artwork is a distortion, and false. The implication, we will see, is that sophistry produces appearances or images in words in just the same way, and they too are distortions, falsehoods.

Epoche: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2013

The traditional reading of Plato’s criticism of the poets and painters in Book 10 of the Republic is that they merely imitate. In light of Plato’s own image-making, the critique of imitation requires a more careful examination, especially in regards to painting. This paper argues that it is insufficient to view Plato’s critique of image-making by the painter solely in terms of the image replication that does not consider the eidos. In view of the context of Plato’s argument within Book 10 and elsewhere, other considerations, such as the ideas of measure and proportion, which pertain to the notion of the beautiful, are required for a complete understanding of the argument against the painter. In light of these further considerations I argue for a threefold distinction between mimesis as replication, mimesis as false resemblance, and mimesis as true resemblance. With respect to the third kind of mimesis, which directly pertains to Plato’s own image-making, one can see in Plato a different configuration of the relation between image and original portrayed in the image.

Anthology of Philosophical Studies, Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2015

Mimesis is one of the “most baffling words in the philosophical vocabulary”. Its importance in the history of Western Philosophy, especially in regards to its aesthetic declination, is never sufficiently highlighted. The word appears in the ancient Greek language as linked to certain theatrical performances from Sicily, but it is Plato who first gave it an enormous philosophical scope. The concept is present all along the Dialogues, with an evolving – or even changing – meaning and function which constitutes a fluctuant reflection. Among these different uses, we will first distinguish between two semantic poles. On the one hand, mimesis allows Plato to understand and to judge phenomena as sophistic discourses as well as poetry and arts. On the other hand, although linked to this aspect, he will make it the bridge point between the two worlds of his ontology. In this way mimesis becomes the main justification for excluding the imitative poet (i.e. the theater’s performer) from the Republic’s just city: imitation is untruthful (book III), and furthermore, it hides the reality (book X). It is nevertheless surprising that Plato builds his criticism around this concept when considering its semantic origin. Why would Plato use a theater-related word as such in order to develop a devastating criticism of theater? This paper tackles this variation of a classic philosophical paradox (why Plato employs the dialogic form of writing, which is theatrical itself, whereas he condemns theatre?) according to a new approach: the conceptual procedure applied by Plato to mimesis is at the very end his answer to a challenge proposed by theater. In order to demonstrate this, it will be necessary to analyze this conceptual procedure on its own, as well as to specify which kind of theater this challenge could possibly come from. This study thus aims to clarify the relationship between philosophy and theater which the concept of mimesis seems to bring to the front. Keywords: Mimesis, Plato, philosophy, theatre.

The Many Faces of Mimesis, 2018

This paper explores the deep connection between Plato’s ideal of “becoming like God” (homoiosis theoi) and his concept of mimesis. In the context of Plato’s critique of poetry, God appears as phutourgos, maker of the unique nature of a thing (ἡ φύσει κλίνη), whose original creativity is opposed to slavish re-production of an image ‘thrice-removed’ from the reality of the ideas. In contrast to the demiourgos, who produces not the couch itself, “but only some particular couch…” (596d), and the painter, who only imitates the appearance of a couch, God produces the essence or reality of the couch. The image of the phutourgos suggests, however, the possibility of a different kind of mimesis. In Plato, the doctrine of “Becoming like God” constitutes the telos of the philosophical life, made possible by the original relationship of the image to its divine paradeigma. By re-creating the world ‘in our own image’ we participate in the original creative act by which the cosmos and all that is in it are generated – and become, each in our own way, divine poets. All truly creative human endeavour can be viewed as divine poetry in this sense. In the Laws, the lawmakers declare themselves poets and tragedians, “artists and actors of the fairest drama”, who create in the polity “a representation of the fairest and best life” (Leg. 817a-d). In his defence of the gods, the Athenian defends things created by humans as existing “by nature or by a cause not inferior to nature” since they are “offspring of mind.” (884a ff., 890 d). Plato’s dialogues are themselves literary and philosophical artworks, which permit the reader to re-enact in a series of stages the unfolding of philosophical argument. As we learn in the Symposium, it is by “procreation in beauty” that love as desire of immortality is realized, and this may occur in the work of poets, craftsmen, lawgivers or philosophers.

The Many Faces of Mimesis. Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Western Greece, 2018

This paper explores the deep connection between Plato’s ideal of “becoming like God” (homoiosis theoi) and his concept of mimesis. In the context of Plato’s critique of poetry, God appears as phutourgos, maker of the unique nature of a thing (ἡ φύσει κλίνη), whose original creativity is opposed to slavish re-production of an image ‘thrice- removed’ from the reality of the ideas. In contrast to the demiourgos, who produces not the couch itself, “but only some particular couch…” (596d), and the painter, who only imitates the appearance of a couch, God produces the essence or reality of the couch. The image of the phutourgos suggests, however, the possibility of a different kind of mimesis. In Plato, the doctrine of “Becoming like God” constitutes the telos of the philosophical life, made possible by the original relationship of the image to its divine paradeigma. By re-creating the world ‘in our own image’ we participate in the original creative act by which the cosmos and all that is in it are generated – and become, each in our own way, divine poets. All truly creative human endeavour can be viewed as divine poetry in this sense. In the Laws, the lawmakers declare themselves poets and tragedians, “artists and actors of the fairest drama”, who create in the polity “a representation of the fairest and best life” (Leg. 817a-d). In his defence of the gods, the Athenian defends things created by humans as existing “by nature or by a cause not inferior to nature” since they are “offspring of mind.” (884a ff., 890 d). Plato’s dialogues are themselves literary and philosophical artworks, which permit the reader to re-enact in a series of stages the unfolding of philosophical argument. As we learn in the Symposium, it is by “procreation in beauty” that love as desire of immortality is realized, and this may occur in the work of poets, craftsmen, lawgivers or philosophers.

Adam Widawski, 2019

In this essay I investigate Plato's critique of poetry and question the grounds for excluding poetic μίμησις from the ideal state. In response to this critique, I refer to the pre-Socratic meaning of truth as ἀλήθεια - truth as unconcealment, as opposed to correspondence model of truth – truth as correctness (δμοιωσις), which is implied by Plato’s theory of forms. I argue against Plato, that not only is there a kind of knowledge necessary for the creation of poetry, but this alternative species of knowledge, which art provides, is necessary for human beings to remain fully human. I scrutinise the epistemological reasons for Plato's view on art and discuss the implications of such a view regarding both its ontological and political validity. I argue that in order for the culture of the state to support the organic development of citizens, the state has to be able to accommodate poetry, despite its potential negative effect on some.