Aristotelian Mimesis Reevaluated

Aristotelian Mimesis Reevaluated STEPHEN HALLIWELL IT WOULD BE POSSIBLEtO construct substantial sections of a history of European aesthetics and art criticism around the Greek idea of mimesis and its conceptual legacy. Such a history would embrace at least three major phases--early , classical elaboration; a long process of transmutation during periods of Greco-Roman and, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, neoclassical theorizing; reaction and ostensible rejection in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in the broadly unsympathetic, but somewhat ambivalent , climate of modern critical theory and opinion.' In this whole story, Aristotelian mimesis has played a fundamental role, though one often mediated through adaptation and misinterpretation. While my primary purpose in this article is a fresh consideration of some aspects of the concept of artistic mimesis in Aristotle's own writings, I hope thereby to help to disentangle his views from the larger, more amorphous mass of ancient and neoclassical variations of mimeticism, and hence indirectly to clarify one dimension of the history of categories of artistic representation. In the eyes of many, mimesis has the status of a venerably long-lived but now outmoded aesthetic doctrine--a broken column, perhaps, of an obsolete classical tradition. But if all varieties of mimeticism can be classed as conceptions of representation, it is hard to see how any such conviction of a clean break beVersionsof this paper were givenin seminars at Brown and Harvard Universitiesin April 1989.I am grateful to all who participated, especially Martha Nussbaum, Meg Alexiou, Amdlie Rorty, and Gregory Nagy. ' The reaction against neoclassicalmimeticismisdocumented by, e.g.,J. W. Draper, "Aristotelian 'Mimesis'in Eighteenth Century England," Publ/cat/onsof the Modern Language Association of America 36 0920: 372-40o (but unreliable on Aristotlehimself); M. Iknayan, The ConcaveMirror: From Imitation to Expression in French Esthetic Theory, x8oo-r 83o (Saratoga: 1983).For some reflections on the persistence of mimeticist assumptions see J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (London: 1980, 161--68. [487] 488 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~8:4 OCTOBER 1990 tween past and present can be cogently maintained, since, however problematically , representational assumptions still serve a central, if not always acknowledged , function in most forms of discourse about literature and art. It is partly for this reason that recent years have seen a number of efforts to rehabilitate mimesis at various levels of aesthetic thought.' If such efforts are worthwhile, they require accuracy of historical discernment, and it is in this respect that the present paper too aims to vindicate the critical integrity of the most influential of all conceptions of mimesis. It is a preliminary but indispensable step towards such vindication to grasp firmly at the outset the dangerous inadequacy, for the understanding of Aristotle at least, of the neoclassically established and still current translation of mimesis as "imitation." The semantic field of "imitation" in modern English does not closely enough match, though it partially overlaps with, that of the ancient Greek word familyto which the noun mimesis belongs. To suppose that "imitation" has any priority as a literal equivalent would be to fall into confusion over the nature of translation by compounding misunderstandings of both Greek and English. A valuable further step towards a fresh appraisal of Aristotelian mimesis (though the point has wider applicability) is to recognize that we are not addressing a clearly unified idea, or a term with a "single, literal meaning,''3 but rather the nodal point of a rich locus of aesthetic issues. We will benefit, therefore, from holding in mind two distinguishable angles of approach to artistic representation, whether as a whole or in particular art forms: (a) Views, often more or less explicidy philosophical, of the possibility and nature (perceptual, cognitive, logical, semantic) of representation. (b) Views, sometimes though not necessarily prescriptive, of the content, value, use, and effects of representation. The first category embraces such questions as the character of visual depiction , musical expression, and literary fictions, as well as the relation of representation to concepts of resemblance, symbolism, and reference. Ideas in the second category---common among critics, propagandists, and ideologues, as well as among the ordinary recipients of art--include convictions about the meaning and truthfulness (or otherwise) of particular art...