mimesis (μιμησις)

(Language: Greek)

Short Description: imitation, representation

Long Description: imitation, representation; in Poetics 1447 ab Aristotle includes all the fine arts under mimesis, among them epic, tragedy, comedy, painting and sculpture; the images produced by mimesis are not at all like photographic images; according to H.Armstrong, the classical Hellenic artists images are mimetically closer to those of the traditional arts of the East than to those of nineteenth-century Europe: ‘if we establish in our imagination the figure of the masked singing actor as our image of mimesis we shall not do too bad’ ( Platonic Mirrors, p.151); however, in a vocabulary used by Proclus the terms mimesis and mimema are usually reserved for art of an inferior type, though Proclus says that ‘the congenital vehicles ( ochemata) imitate ( mimeitai) the lives of the souls’ ( Elements of theology 209) and ‘each of the souls perpetually attendand upon gods, imitating its divine soul, is sovereign over a number of particular souls’ (ibid.,204).

Sources: The Golden Chain: An Anthology of Platonic and Pythagorean Philosophy, by Dr. Algis Uždavinys