Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Twenty-two: Forgetting Aristotle?

t w e n t y - t w o Forgetting aristotle? Heidegger’s reflections on mimesis Liberato Santoro-Brienza Philosophers are worth reading also when they do not get it quite right. For even then they set us on the path to further interrogation. to this purpose, arguably there are few as inspiring as aristotle and Heidegger: veritable masters of probing heuristic. it is ironic that the philosopher who indicted his contemporaries and his predecessors since the presocratics with forgetfulness, Seinsvergessenheit, seems alarmingly afflicted by his own lack of memory—or was it, perhaps, a blind spot?—when it came to a convincing understanding of mimēsis. in Heidegger we seem to encounter a spectacular case of Mimēsis-vergessenheit. One may suspect, without exercising excessive hermeneutical violence, that the lapse of memory had a reason. Perhaps he feared that a careful and comprehensive account of mimēsis would condemn some of his ideas to the wastepaper basket. Other probable explanations would prove to be more severe. in order to diagnose, with some degree of accuracy, Heidegger’s suspected inclination to forgetfulness, we will first consider aristotle’s 543 544 Liberato Santoro-Brienza understanding of mimēsis and of correlated concepts such as technē, poiēsis, physis, praxis.1 the analysis will highlight the fundamentally aristotelian character of Heidegger’s reflections on art or, rather, technē in the most generic sense of production, skill, craft. However, it also hopes to fill a surprising lacuna in Heidegger’s thinking by suggesting ways in which mimēsis carries resonances which shed light on the general meaning of technē and poiēsis and the specific nature of the work of art. Mimēsis according to aristotle the brief analyses that follow will show that aristotle understood the concept of mimēsis in a novel and seminal manner that went beyond the meaning, predominantly held by his predecessors, of copying and reproducing. He conceived it as a particular activity or, more precisely, as a specific type of technē/poiēsis, namely the poiēsis of poets and artists in general. and this is seen in function of the specific objects it “imitates,” namely physis and praxis, where these “objects” are—unlike Plato’s ideas—not transcendent and separate, and actually not “objects ” at all. the discussion of our problem could aptly begin by paraphrasing an expression particularly dear to aristotle. Mimēsis, not unlike being, is thought and spoken of in many ways. indeed, the polysemy of the word reminds us of the difficulty of the problem at hand. “since the poet represents life, as a painter does or any other maker of likenesses, he must always represent one of three things— either things as they were or are; or things as they are said and seem to be; or things as they should be.”2 it would be difficult to deny that aristotle understood mimēsis also in the sense of imitation, copying, and miming: as actually re-presenting or picturing and reenacting a given state of affairs. the reference to the human propensity and natural instinct for miming and copying is clearly made, particularly in the Poetics, 1448b2–6, and frequent references to stage acting and actors can be found throughout the text. so the minimal meaning of mimēsis under- Forgetting aristotle? 545 stood as imitation is not ignored by aristotle. it would, however, be equally difficult—if not even more difficult—to reduce the concept of mimēsis to the mere notion of servile copying. it will become clear that the primary and essential meaning of mimēsis, particularly in the context of the Poetics and Rhetoric, is other, richer, and considerably more refined than that of copy and imitation. it will also become clear that mimēsis stood, for aristotle, as the distinctive property and feature of the fine arts—as we understand art—apart from and beyond the generic productive activity of making any kind of artifact. in the Nicomachean Ethics the philosopher draws the distinction between technē/poiēsis and praxis, between making and doing. aristotle explains more clearly and more comprehensively this distinction, which was not unknown to his predecessors, just as he explains— better than his predecessors—the distinction between primarily useful and primarily “aesthetic” or beautiful artifacts. “making is different from doing. . . . all art [making] deals with bringing something into existence; and to pursue an art means to study how to bring...