Vol. 10 No. 1 (2017): Ways of imitation
Monographica

Seeing through Plato’s Looking Glass. Mythos and Mimesis from Republic to Poetics

Andrea Capra
Università di Milano

Published 2017-07-11

Keywords

  • Plato,
  • Aristotle,
  • mimesis,
  • mythos

How to Cite

Capra, A. (2017). Seeing through Plato’s Looking Glass. Mythos and Mimesis from Republic to Poetics. Aisthesis. Pratiche, Linguaggi E Saperi dell’estetico, 10(1), 75–86. https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-20905

Abstract

This paper revisits Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on mimesis with a special emphasis on mythos as an integral part of it. I argue that the Republic’s notorious “mirror argument” is in fact ad hominem: first, Plato likely has in mind Agathon’s mirror in Aristophanes’ Thesmoforiazusae, where tragedy is construed as mimesis; second, the tongue-in-cheek claim that mirrors can reproduce invisible Hades, when read in combination with the following eschatological myth, suggests that Plato was not committed to a mirror-like view of art; third, the very omission of mythos shows that the argument is a self-consciously one-sided one, designed to caricature the artists’ own pretensions of mirror-like realism. These points reinforce Stephen Halliwell’s claim that Western aesthetics has been haunted by a «ghostly misapprehension» of Plato’s mirror. Further evidence comes from Aristotle’s “literary” (as opposed to Plato’s “sociological”) discussion: rather than to the “mirror argument”, the beginning of the Poetics points to the Phaedo as the best source of information about Plato’s views on poetry.

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