Mimesis: art and reality

Introduction

The word “representation” is applied to art as if it had a single sense; in reality it covers distinct actions — copying, imitating, abstracting, expressing, revealing — that the history of philosophy has gradually separated. The concept of mimesis (μίμησις) is the thread of that history.

1. Plato: mimesis as deficient copy

Plato condemned mimesis in Republic X (597a–e) with the example of the three beds: the Form of the bed — the work of God, full reality —; the material bed — the work of the carpenter, a copy of the Form —; and the painted bed — the work of the painter, a copy of a copy, situated “three degrees from the truth”. The painter imitates the appearance (φάντασμα) and not being, and “knows nothing” of what he imitates. Mimesis is, for Plato, epistemologically deficient and morally dangerous, for it feeds the irrational part of the soul.

2. Aristotle: mimesis as knowledge

Aristotle revalues it in the Poetics. He holds it to be natural: “man is the most mimetic animal and learns his first lessons through mimesis” (1448b4–19). There is pleasure in the image even of the repugnant, because of recognition (“this is that”): the pleasure of learning and inferring. And he states that poetry is more philosophical than history, because “poetry speaks of the universal and history of the particular” (1451a36–b11) and speaks of what “might happen” (τὸ εἰκός, the probable or necessary), not of what happened.

The difference with Plato is decisive: mimesis is not copying, but representation of the universal in the particular. It is a mode of knowing, not of deception. Tragedy, with its kátharsis (κάθαρσις, “purification”, Poetics 1449b), fulfills a function that is at once cognitive and emotional.

3. Eight senses of “representing”

Asserting that “art represents reality” is ambiguous, because “representing” can mean eight different things: copying (reproducing the appearance of a particular), imitating (following a model and reproducing its form), representing (presenting again, standing in place of), interpreting (offering a reading, bringing a meaning to light), abstracting (isolating essential features), transforming (reorganizing the material), expressing (manifesting an inner state) and revealing (disclosing what is not otherwise visible).

Plato reduced mimesis to copying and thus condemned it; Aristotle understood it as representing and abstracting the universal and defended it; Romanticism shifted it toward expressing; Heidegger and contemporary hermeneutics re-understood it as revealing. It is not, strictly speaking, a single assertion, but a bundle of assertions.

4. Truth through the fictitious

A work can reveal something true even though it represents the fictitious. The key distinction is this: one thing is the represented content — fictitious, like a nonexistent character — and another is what is revealed — true, like the universal form of a type of action or emotion —. The work can be “false” in its content and “true” in what it reveals.

Artistic truth is not, therefore, the propositional truth of adequation; it is the adequation of a form to a real possibility, or the revelation of a structure of the real. The fictitious reveals the real by three paths: the universal (Aristotle), the probable or necessary (τὸ εἰκός), and the symbol or allegory, which represent the invisible through sensible figures. It is advisable, however, not to absolutize: not every fiction reveals truth, and it can be mere evasion or deception. The truth-value of art is not automatic.

5. The medieval reception

The Christian tradition rehabilitated the image as a way toward truth, against the Platonic suspicion. The defense of icons (Saint John of Damascus; Second Council of Nicaea, 787) distinguishes the idol — an image that absolutizes itself — from the icon — an image that refers beyond itself —. Pseudo-Dionysius understands images as ascent (anagogia) toward the invisible. For Saint Bonaventure creation is, in turn, vestige and image of God. And Saint Thomas integrates the beautiful with the true and the good: pulchra dicuntur quae visa placent (“beautiful is that which, when seen, pleases”), beauty as the splendor of the form (splendor formae).

Conclusion

It can be safely asserted that Plato condemned mimesis as copy, that Aristotle revalued it as knowledge of the universal, that “representing” is an ambiguous term, and that a work can reveal truth through the fictitious. It should not be asserted that all art represents reality in the same sense. The distinction between imitating appearance and reproducing operation — crucial here — is made precise in Creating, making, and imitating nature; the limits of the thesis that all art represents, in The artist, representation, and reality.