Mimesis facts for kids

Mimesis (pronounced mim-EE-sis) is a word used in literary criticism and philosophy. It means many things, like imitation, representing something, or even acting like someone else.

The word comes from ancient Greek, mīmēsis, which means 'to imitate'. In ancient Greece, mimesis was an important idea for creating art. It was about how art copied the real world, which they saw as a model for beauty and truth. Plato thought mimesis was about copying, while diegesis was about telling a story.

Later, the meaning of mimesis became more about how stories and literature work. A famous book about mimesis in literature is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature by Erich Auerbach. It compares how the world is shown in Homer's Odyssey and in the Bible.

Many thinkers have explored mimesis, including Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, and René Girard.

What is Mimesis?

Mimesis is a big idea that helps us understand how art, stories, and even our own actions copy or represent things from the real world. It's about how we imitate what we see and experience.

Mimesis in Ancient Greece

In ancient Greece, people like Plato and Aristotle thought about mimesis a lot. They saw it as art showing nature, including human nature, like in plays.

Plato's View on Mimesis

Plato wrote about mimesis in his books Ion and The Republic. He believed that poets and artists copied things from the world around them.

• Poetry and Truth: Plato thought that poetry came from a kind of "divine madness" or inspiration, not from true knowledge. He worried that poets and actors could persuade people with their words, even if they weren't telling the truth. For Plato, truth was found in philosophy, not in art.
• The Three Beds: Plato used the idea of three beds to explain his point.

* First, there's the perfect idea of a bed, made by God (the Platonic ideal). * Second, there's a real bed, made by a carpenter, which copies God's idea. * Third, there's a painting of a bed, made by an artist, which copies the carpenter's bed. * So, the artist's bed is two steps away from the real truth. Plato believed that artists only show a small part of reality and don't truly understand the things they copy.

Aristotle's View on Mimesis

Aristotle also defined mimesis as the way art copies and perfects nature. He believed art wasn't just copying, but also using math and balance to find what is perfect and lasting.

• Art and Reality: Aristotle thought that humans naturally want to create art that shows reality. He wrote about this in his book Poetics.
• Distance and Feeling: Aristotle felt it was important for art to be a bit separate from real life. For example, we learn from sad plays (tragedies) because they don't happen to us directly. This distance helps us feel a release of emotions, called catharsis.
• Empathy in Drama: At the same time, art needs to make us feel connected to the characters and events. When actors show what characters feel, we can understand and feel with them. This is how drama helps us feel empathy.
• Literature vs. History: Aristotle argued that literature can teach us more than history. History tells us specific facts that happened. Literature, even if based on history, shows us things that could happen or should happen, which can be more interesting for learning.

Showing vs. Telling

Both Plato and Aristotle compared mimesis with diegesis.

• Mimesis (Showing): This is when a story shows you what's happening through direct action. Think of a play where characters act out everything. The audience sees the events unfold.
• Diegesis (Telling): This is when a story tells you what's happening through a narrator. The narrator describes the actions, thoughts, and feelings of the characters. The narrator might be a character in the story or an "all-knowing" voice.

In plays (like tragedies and comedies), the story is mostly shown (mimesis). In poems that tell a story, like epics, there's a mix of showing and telling.

Imitation of Other Authors

In ancient times, there was also a concept called Dionysian imitatio. This was a literary method where writers would imitate, adapt, and improve upon texts by earlier authors. It was about learning from and building on the works of others, rather than just copying nature.

Mimesis in Modern Times

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) thought about mimesis as "imitation." He believed that art doesn't just copy nature exactly. Instead, it shows how the same ideas or processes can appear in different forms. For him, imitation was about finding the deeper unity in nature, not just making a perfect copy.

Erich Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) wrote a very important book called Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. He looked at how reality is shown in Western literature throughout history. He started by comparing how the world is described in Homer's Odyssey and in the Bible.

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) wrote about how mimesis is connected to things like sympathetic magic. He thought that humans have a "mimetic faculty," meaning a natural ability to imitate and recognize similarities.

Luce Irigaray

The feminist thinker Luce Irigaray (born 1932) used mimesis to describe a way women could resist stereotypes. She suggested that women could imperfectly imitate stereotypes about themselves. By doing this, they could show how silly or wrong those stereotypes are and weaken their power.

Michael Taussig

Michael Taussig (born 1940), an anthropologist, explored mimesis in his book Mimesis and Alterity. He looked at how people from one culture might adopt parts of another culture (mimesis) while also keeping their distance from it (alterity). He studied how a group called the Guna people in Panama used images that reminded him of white people they had met, without saying they were doing so.

René Girard

René Girard (1923–2015) believed that much of human behavior comes from mimesis, or imitation. He said that people often desire things because others desire them (this is called "mimetic desire"). This can lead to competition and conflict. He noted that competition can be good for progress, but it can also become a problem if people focus more on rivaling each other than on the original goal.

Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso (1941–2021) wrote about how the Nazis misused the idea of mimesis. He explained that they saw imitation as a bad trait, especially in Jewish people. This twisted view of mimesis was part of their reasoning for the terrible events of the Holocaust. Calasso suggested that a strong dislike for human imitation can be a sign of totalitarian thinking.

Nidesh Lawtoo

Nidesh Lawtoo (born 1976) is a modern philosopher who wrote Homo Mimeticus. He argues that not just desires, but all our feelings and emotions can be mimetic. He looks at how much we imitate each other in the digital age, for both good and bad reasons.

See also

• Similarity (philosophy)
• Anti-mimesis
• Dionysian imitatio