Comparison Between Aristotle and Plato on Mimesis Essay Example

2 Comparison between Aristotle and Plato on mimesis 2. 1 Similarities Although it is often said that Aristotle’s account of mimesis in the Poetics is a critical response to Plato’s exile of the poets in the Republic, the relationship between the two philosophers is somewhat more complicated and remains a matter of scholarly dispute. In fact, they do share some similarities.

Plato was Aristotle’s mentor, and although he is never named in the Poetics, his presence is unmistakable. Aristotle borrows a number of formulations from Plato. Admittedly, he challenged his mentor’s claims about the nature and effects of mimesis. Crucially, however, he does not question Plato’s basic assertion that all art is essentially imitative, even in his critique of Plato. Aristotle reinforces the conceptual hold of Platonic mimesis. And again like Plato, he contrasts the representational arts with other forms of human inquiry, such as science and history, which are conventionally associated with truth and reality.

Moreover, his defense of mimesis also turns on a fundamentally Platonic concern: quite obviously which is reason. Furthermore, even though Aristotle counters Plato’s assertion that mimesis is opposed to reason, and argues instead that tragedy offers quite philosophical insights into human actions. Mimesis, for Aristotle, is a real thing, worthy of critical analysis, but its definition still relies, along with all following theorists, on the framework set up by Plato.

A lot of Aristotle’s conceptual holds are traceably deviated from Platonic mimesis; nevertheless, despite these similarities, their difference remains divergent. 2. 2 Difference 2. 2. 1 Definition Plato defines imitator as “a long way off the truth, and can reproduce all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them,

and that part is an image”(11). A tragic poet, in his eyes “is an imitator” and is thrice removed from the nature and the truth. Thus for Plato, mimesis is just a mirror of something else and therefore potentially deceptive.

Aristotle, however, offers many persuasive responses to Plato’s critique of mimesis. Unlike Plato, Aristotle defines mimesis as one instinct of our nature implanted in man from childhood through which we learn our earliest lessons and enjoy pleasure felt in things imitated no less universal. Therefore, unlike being delusional and reflective, mimesis is a craft with its own internal laws and aims. 2. 2. 2 Conceptual focus Aristotle advocates to treat poetry “in itself”, not primarily as a reflection of something else. This is the premise established at the beginning of the Poetics.

As the lines read “I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential quality of each……. Following, then, the order of nature, let us begin with the principles which come first. ” Therefore the poem, for Aristotle, is much like a natural object. We can study its parts and structure, classify it according to kind and aim, and determine in individual cases whether it is good. It is an appropriate subject for philosophical inquiry, which conforms to fixed or principles and the “order of nature”.

It thus can be concluded that Aristotle’s metaphors for poetry throughout the Poetics stress the naturalness of mimesis. Whereas Plato’s most common metaphor is mirrors, shadows, optical illusions, which highlight the artificiality or unreality of art and literature. Aristotle’s metaphors emphasize their similarity to natural objects. For example, in asserting that artistic beauty depends

on the order and magnitude of the parts, Aristotle draws an analogy between art and animals: ‘As, therefore, in the case of animate bodies and organisms, a certain magnitude is necessary’ (1951: 31).

Besides, Aristotle’s initial analysis of mimesis also embodies the argument that art has a specific nature of its own. The first three chapters of the Poetics make a distinction among the media, the objects and the manner of mimesis for the different representation of arts. In each case, Aristotle modifies a distinction from Plato, or introduces a distinction where Plato fails to make one. The medium of imitation concerns the “materials” each art uses to represent people and objects. For Plato, poetry and painting, epic and tragedy are essentially the same in their imitation of the real because they are all imitative works.

Aristotle, by contrast, differentiate arts by the material they employ, like painters use figure or color, musicians melody and rhythm, and poets rhythm and meter. These arts all mimetic, but they imitate with different tools, or use the same tools in different combinations. Therefore, rather than being a mere imitator, the artist is a maker, a craftsman. Also, Aristotle points out that many works use the same media as poetry does, but are not for that reason becomes poems: Greek medical and scientific treatises were typically written in poetic meters, but the mere use of meter does not entitle the scientists poet”. Thus, it is the imitation that makes the poet, not the rhetorical form of the work. Though imitative, poetry has its own proper methods and aims, not just a diminished version of science of philosophy. 2. 2. 3 Objects

of imitation Aristotle considered that the objects of imitation are man in action, a notion Aristotle takes straight from Plato’s discussion of tragedy in the Republic, but gives it a new interpretation. The individuals and actions depicted in arts, he notes, are necessarily of a higher or lower moral type.

While Plato treats such types according to their good or bad effect on the audience, Aristotle finds in the varying objects of mimesis a way of differentiating genres and artistic styles. In Poetics, epic and tragedy present people as better than they are in life, whereas comedy presents them as worse. Aristotle emphasizes that the moral standing of artistic subjects does not immediately affect the moral standing of the audience. It is in Aristotle’s description that moral distinctions marks the poetic genre, and cannot be unprovokedly compared to the moral distinctions in life.

Such is what makes imitative works detached objects from reality. Namely, if mimesis can diverge from an unreserved reproduction of life, then it does far more than mirror the real. 22. 2. 5 2. 2. 42 3TRAGEDY, PLOT AND REASON As we have seen, Aristotle borrows many details in his account of mimesis from the Republic, but greatly complicates and revalues Plato’s ideas. Aristotle stresses that mimesis, far from being an alien intruder in the otherwise harmonious soul, is in fact a natural aspect of human life, and even a unique source of learning.

His use of organic metaphors and the example of childhood play reinforces the claim that mimesis need not be a threat to the soul or the city. We find a similar effort to revalue Plato’s judgements in Aristotle’s account of tragedy.

Plato argues that tragedy dangerously stirs our emotions at the expense of our rational faculties. For Aristotle, tragedy is soundly rational. Indeed, although tragedy often deals with extreme emotions, irrational desires and supernatural forces, good tragedies are constructed rationally and engage the rational faculties of the audience.

Even tragic emotions, Aristotle argues, can be made predictable and reasonable. Aristotle begins his discussion of tragedy with a definition: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action not narrative; through pity and fear effecting the purgation of these emotions. (1951: 23) All tragedies have six parts: plot (mythos), character (ethos), diction (lexis), thought (dianoia), spectacle (opsis) and song (melopoeia).

Plot is the arrangement of incidents; character is the particular moral qualities of the agents revealed by the plot; diction is the metrical arrangement of words; thought is the process of reasoning that characters use to defend or justify themselves; spectacle is the stage machinery; and song refers to the musical passages that were common in Greek tragedy. As is typical 38 FOUNDATIONS with Aristotle, what initially seem banal and rather dry distinctions turn out to be complicated and far-reaching in implication.

On one level, this definition simply categorizes tragedy as a form of mimesis: its medium is language and rhythm (diction, song); its objects are men and actions (plot, character, thought); and it is performed rather than narrated (spectacle). On another level, though, the definition proposes a comprehensive theory about the nature of tragedy and the

rationality of mimesis. There is a great deal to be said about each of these terms, but for our purposes we can attend primarily to plot. Let us begin with the first two parts of Aristotle’s initial definition: that tragedy is the mimesis of an ction and that this action is complete and of a certain magnitude. Completeness, for Aristotle, does not refer to a subjective sense of resolution but to the structural relationship of incidents: A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity or as a rule, but has nothing following it.

A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. (Aristotle, 1951: 31) While this passage might seem to border on tautology, Aristotle is making a major claim about mimesis. Simply describing an artwork as whole and complete flies in the face of Plato’s claim that mimesis is dependent on something else and hence by definition incomplete. For Aristotle, the mimetic work can have its own internal unity, a unity governed by necessity and reason, not by chance, deception or individual whim. Beginning, middle and end are logical categories, not just temporal markers.

The beginning causes something to happen, sets a chain of events in motion; the middle is caused by the beginning, and causes something else in turn; and an end is produced ‘by necessity or as a rule’ out of something else, but has

no consequences of its own. One could define the principles of physics or of bodily functions in much the same terms. Reason and law are the foundation of mimesis, even if the story itself concerns lawless acts or emotional extremes. ARISTOTLE’S POETICS 39 A similar stress on rationality informs Aristotle’s account of magnitude.

Beauty, Aristotle claims, relies on both order (that is, completeness) and magnitude. While order is defined logically, magnitude is defined in terms of the audience and, more specifically, in terms of human cognitive processes. If order describes the rational relationship among the parts of a tragedy, magnitude describes the processes by which the audience discerns this relationship: a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time.

Nor again can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator. (Aristotle, 1951: 31) Smallness or largeness are not absolute qualities, but reflect the position and cognitive abilities of the viewer. A work has proper magnitude, conveys beauty and a sense of unity, if the spectator can grasp it in one view. ‘Seeing’ here, as elsewhere in Aristotle and Plato, is a key metaphor for knowing. The single ‘view’ refers to a single train of thought.

The sense of unity we gain from a mimetic work is defined by the unity of the thought process it inspires. Thus the proper magnitude for a tragedy is ‘a length which can be easily embraced by the memory’ (Aristotle, 1951: 33). Aristotle’s emphasis on

the rationality of mimesis explains his focus throughout the Poetics on plot. Aristotle claims that plot is the single most important element of tragedy: it is, he says, the ‘soul [psyche]’ of a tragedy, the very seat of its rational faculties (1951: 29).

We are now more accustomed to understanding character as the key to literary art, but Aristotle ranks plot higher, chiefly because it is only through actions and choices that character is revealed. Action, for Aristotle, is a basic unit of human understanding. But even more crucially, plot epitomizes the rationality of tragic mimesis. Plot is not simply a mimesis of action but of action ordered and structured to achieve certain ends. Unlike the theatrical staging associated with spectacle, which Aristotle sees as irrational, plot is governed by reason.

The incidents in a tragic plot should be unified by probability and necessity. Such unity does not 40 FOUNDATIONS come from the focus on a single character, since an individual’s life may contain many different plots. Nor can a single historical period or mythic tale be made without selection and reordering into a unified plot. Aristotle points to the example of Homer, who bases the Iliad on a major turn of events in the Trojan war, not on the entire conflict. The worst plots are episodic, where the events seem simply to follow one another in time, and not by any internal logic.

Unlike good tragic plots, such episodic plots are not unified by probability and necessity and therefore do not appeal to reason. Aristotle’s focus on probability and necessity suggests that the realism of a mimetic work comes not from its reflection of the external world

but from its congruence with the norms of human thought. The work strikes us as realistic because the events of the plot are joined according to the same rules that govern events in our actual experience. Reasoning in and about art is not essentially different from reasoning in other contexts.

As in art, so in daily life we rely on logic (necessity) and belief (probability) in making choices. Mimetic artists are thus perfectly justified in seeking validation for their artistic choices in other places than brute fact. They might appeal to the example of Sophocles, who depicted people as better than they are, and claim that their art aims for higher truths. Or they might appeal to custom or received opinion – ‘what is said’ (Aristotle, 1951: 101) – even if those opinions are manifestly false from the perspective of philosophy.

By the same token, unfamiliar or impossible actions can be plausible if they resonate with habitual manners of thinking. Aristotle notes, for example, that impossible incidents can be made realistic if they seem probable. Indeed, such incidents may be artistically preferable to the truth, so long as they are called for by the ‘inner necessity’ of the work: ‘a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible’ (Aristotle, 1951: 107). The effect of the work comes from the rational ordering of events, not from the realistic quality of the individual events the play represents.

Even though Aristotle counsels the poet against including irrational events, he nevertheless acknowledges that, from an artistic perspective, the irrational ‘sometimes does not violate reason’ (1951: 107). Mimesis, in other words, need not be true to fact to

be pleasurable and persuasive. It need only be true to the principles and normal processes of human cognition. 1222 ARISTOTLE’S POETICS 41 Aristotle also argues that the tragic action should adhere to reason and the norms of human cognition. This dictate applies both to the structure of the plot and to the behaviour of the main characters.

Aristotle divides plots into two kinds – the simple and the complex. Simple plots are one and continuous, detailing, for example, the steady decline of a character’s fortunes through a closely linked series of events, whereas complex plots are marked by a reversal and recognition. Reversals ( peripeteia) occur when an action veers around to its opposite. Aristotle gives the example of a royal messenger in Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus the King (c. 426 BCE), who comes to give Oedipus the good news that he has become the king of Corinth, but instead accidentally reveals disturbing details about his origins.

Recognition (anagnorisis) describes a character’s change from ignorance to knowledge, which produces love or hate between persons or marks a change of fortune. Both reversal and recognition are grounded in reason. Reversals, for example, ‘should arise from the internal structure of the plot, so that what follows should be the necessary or probable result of the preceding action’ (Aristotle, 1951: 39, 41). Reversals that do not adhere to these laws will strike the viewer as arbitrary and unconvincing. Recognition also describes a rational process.

Here the character reasons and draws inferences from various kinds of evidence, such as suspicious objects or other people. In both structure and unfolding, then, tragic plots rely upon, and inspire, a cognitive effort on the part of

poet, characters and audience. Indeed, poetry approaches the status of philosophy for Aristotle. Against Plato’s claim that there is an ancient war between poetry and philosophy, Aristotle argues that poets, somewhat like philosophers, concern themselves with universal principles of action and character and not with mere fact.

More than simply imitating what is or has been, poets relate ‘what may happen’ according to probability and necessity, or what is broadly and characteristically true of a given type of situation (1951: 35). Historians, by contrast, are limited to what has happened. This makes poetry a higher pursuit than history. The historian expresses the particular, and remains tied to facts. The poet, by contrast, expresses the universal by way of particular characters or actions: ‘how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability and necessity’ (Aristotle, 1951: 35). Thus poetry is ‘more 42 FOUNDATIONS hilosophical’ than history. This is true even when the poet takes a historical subject. The poet, Aristotle writes, is ‘the maker of plots rather than of verses’ (1951: 37). Aristotle again condenses a major point into an unassuming comparison. Mimesis is defined not by its repetition of the real but by its ability to reveal universal truths in particular characters and actions. While Plato sees the poet’s divergence from fact as a key failure, Aristotle regards it as part of the poet’s most characteristic power. History, bound as it is to repeating facts, comes closer to Plato’s account of mimesis than poetry does.

THE TRAGIC EFFECT Aristotle extends his claim that mimesis is rational to his account of the ways in which tragedy affects its

audience. Although the tragic effect is fundamentally emotional, the particular emotions Aristotle identifies, and the process by which the poet produces them in the spectator, are entirely rational. Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not simply oppose the emotions to reason, nor does he insist that tragedy’s ability to rouse the emotions threatens to destabilize the city and the soul. For Aristotle, emotion is the proper issue of tragic mimesis, not its problematic side effect.

Such response is predictable, closely tied to the development of the plot, and can be managed by the poet. Poets fail when they do not produce tragic emotions – not, as for Plato, when they do. Thus Aristotle explains how tragic poets can best produce the ‘essential tragic effect’ (1951: 29), and suggests that tragedy’s power to rouse the emotions, far from being a danger to the spectator, is a natural and rational response to mimesis. The particular emotions Aristotle identifies are produced by both identification and reflection on the part of the spectator.

The end result of these emotions is not more emotion, as Plato insists, but a release or refinement of emotion, and a consequent improvement of the spectator’s emotional state. According to Aristotle, tragic emotions are a result of the plot structure as a whole, and not just a catastrophic event at the end. They are most effectively produced in the audience by surprising turns of events. But surprise is only effective if it seems to issue from the causal logic of the plot: ‘The tragic wonder will then be greater than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most 1222 ARISTOTLE’S POETICS 43 triking when

they have an air of design’ (Aristotle, 1951: 39). Even the most horrifying event will seem arbitrary, and thus fail to elicit the proper emotions, if it strikes the audience as improbable. Aristotle gives the example of the statue of Mitys at Argos, which, according to legend, fell on and killed the man who murdered Mitys. Although the incident seems to arise out of mere chance or by way of irrational forces, it has what Aristotle calls an ‘air of design’: even though the coincidence seems supernaturally motivated, it is internally logical, and so satisfies our sense of probability and necessity.

Aristotle further suggests that the true tragic pleasure should arise not from the spectacle, but from the inner structure of the plot: ‘For the plot ought to be so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will thrill with horror and melt with pity at what takes place’ (1951: 49). Emotions produced by spectacle alone, such as frightening masks or special effects, will engender a sense of the monstrous and not of the feelings proper to tragedy. Such emotions are irrational, and ‘within the action there must be nothing irrational’ (Aristotle, 1951: 57).

Aristotle identifies two essential tragic emotions: fear (phobos) and pity (eleos). Pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, and fear by ‘the misfortune of a man like ourselves’ (Aristotle, 1951: 45). Both of these emotions presuppose a complex cognitive process. Whereas Plato imagines emotion in the audience as an imitation of the emotions depicted on the stage, Aristotle describes a form of psychological identification. The effects of fear and pity that we experience in the theatre,

while genuine, differ from the effects of these emotions in daily life.

In other contexts, we might run from something we fear, or offer help to an object of pity. Yet much as mimesis allows us to view dead bodies dispassionately, so it also allows us to experience our emotions dispassionately, to enjoy them rather than suffer from or react to them. Aristotle never explicitly describes this process, but he clearly associates tragic emotion with the same cognitive processes that define our response to plot more generally. Even in the grip of emotion, the spectators reflect upon the actions of the tragic character, and compare the character with themselves.

Only certain situations rouse tragic fear and pity. We do not feel pity for every misfortune, but only for those that come to people who do not deserve it. We must therefore have a sense of what would be probable in order to discern an unmerited misfortune. Similarly, we 44 FOUNDATIONS feel fear only when we can relate what befalls the tragic character to the circumstances of our own lives. We implicitly compare ourselves with the character, and imaginatively put ourselves in his or her place. Much as pity demands both sympathy and moral judgement, so fear demands imagination and self-reflection.

Mimesis allows us a form of distance that enables rational reflection on even disturbing sights, and tragedy in particular produces emotional effects out of a rational reflection on the course of human life. Aristotle’s detailed account of how mimesis affects our emotions stands in notable contrast to Plato’s suspicion of all tragic emotions. Whereas Plato sets emotion and reason in opposition, Aristotle suggests that tragedy produces emotions rationally,

and that the key tragic emotions are themselves grounded in reason.

Aristotle also challenges Plato’s account of the emotions roused by mimesis in his controversial claim about the ultimate effect of tragedy for the audience. Plato argues that mimesis arouses emotions that would best be suppressed. Aristotle claims, by contrast, that tragedy can lead to the ‘purgation’ (katharsis) of the emotions. This is the final clause of his initial definition of tragedy: ‘through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions’ (Aristotle, 1951: 23). There are few passages in the history of literary theory that have produced as much debate and speculation as this so-called ‘catharsis clause’.

On the most basic level, Aristotle seems to be arguing that tragedy does not simply arouse emotions but allows for their beneficial release or transformation. Tragedy is broadly therapeutic rather than pathological, allowing us to experience fears or fantasies vicariously so that we do not need to enact them in life. But this is where uncertainty sets in. Part of the difficulty of understanding this clause lies in the many meanings and uses of the word catharsis in Greek culture. Each meaning suggests a different account of the function of tragic mimesis. Etymologically, catharsis means to prune or cut away.

Plato often uses some derivative of the word to describe the way philosophical dialogue removes our incorrect opinions. Accordingly, some scholars have suggested that Aristotle imagines catharsis as a kind of ‘intellectual clarification’ (Golden, 1992). Eighteenth-century theorists, by contrast, understood the purifying effect of catharsis as a form of moral improvement. The German critic and playwright G. E. Lessing, for example, 1222 argues in his Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) that

tragic catharsis brings about ‘the transformation of passions into virtuous habits’ (1962: 193).

Tragedy makes us better citizens by making us more humble and sympathetic. But other contexts for the word go against this notion. The most common uses of the word catharsis in ancient Greece described a ritual purification or a medical purge. The notion of purification suggests that tragedy improves us either by washing away our problematic emotions or by purifying the emotions themselves. The medical definition would claim that tragedy literally purges us of unhealthful feelings. This interpretation, first proposed by Jacob Bernays in 1857, was important for odern interpreters, notably Bernays’ nephew by marriage, Sigmund Freud. But the purgative account sits uneasily with Aristotle’s claim that tragedy is both pleasurable and intellectually illuminating. Construing Aristotle’s syntax differently raises another question: does tragedy purge existing emotions, those the audience members bring with them to the theatre, or does it purge emotions that it arouses? The various meanings of word of catharsis seem to suggest the former, but the attention Aristotle gives to fear and pity points us to the latter.

In this reading, tragedy would provide a kind of emotional purgation by rousing fear and pity and allowing us to enjoy them, not by removing the fear and pity we bring to the theatre or by altering our general emotional state. Catharsis would describe the proper result of the tragic plot. In a suggestive reworking of this reading, the twentieth-century French playwright Antonin Artaud reimagines theatre as a plague that brings forth ‘all the perverse possibilities of the mind’ (1958: 30). For Artaud, the aim of catharsis is metaphorically to sicken the audience, not

to cure it. These disputes over the meaning of catharsis are nlikely to be answered in any definitive way. But this should not distract us from the originality of Aristotle’s conception. Although Aristotle canonizes Plato’s reduction of all art to mimesis, he also provides what remains the most powerful defence of art in the history of literary theory. Alongside the claim that mimesis is natural, rational and educational, the notion of catharsis implies that art might also be beneficial. In his acknowledgement that it is secondary and derivative, Aristotle gives art a primary and crucial function. The effects of this double argument continue to resonate in current discussions of art.