Mimesis

Mimesis is the Greek term for imitation or representation, used in classical aesthetics for the relation between a work of art and what it represents. The concept stands at the center of Plato's and Aristotle's competing accounts of poetry and the arts. Plato, in Republic Book X, treats mimesis with deep suspicion: poetry imitates the appearances of things rather than their reality, and the imitative artist is at three removes from the truth — the carpenter copies the Form of the bed, the painter copies the carpenter's bed, and what is copied is copied of what is copied.

Aristotle, in the Poetics, defends mimesis against this charge. Imitation is natural to human beings and is the source of our earliest learning; tragic mimesis in particular gives us a structured imaginative engagement with universal patterns of human action that ordinary experience cannot match. The competing Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of mimesis have shaped every subsequent debate over the moral and epistemic status of the arts.

The Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of mimesis disagree at every level: ontological (what is being imitated), epistemic (what mimesis teaches), and moral (whether it is good for citizens to encounter). For Plato, the artist imitates the appearance of the bed, which itself imitates the Form of the bed, so the artwork is at three removes from reality. For Aristotle, mimesis is not impoverished imitation of inferior copies but a structured engagement with the universal patterns of human action that ordinary experience cannot directly disclose.

The twentieth-century recovery of mimesis has come from very different directions. René Girard's work on mimetic desire and scapegoating extends the concept into anthropology and theology. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) traces the representation of reality across Western literary history. Theodor Adorno develops a critical theory of mimesis as a recovery of the non-identitarian relation to nature that instrumental reason has occluded.