Concept

Mimesis

Overview

Mimesis (; Ancient Greek: μίμησις, mīmēsis) is the representation of aspects of the real world, especially human actions, in literature and art. It is a concept used in philosophy, aesthetics and literary criticism, with many associated concepts, including imitatio, imitation, similarity, receptivity, representation, mimicry, the act of expression, the act of resembling, and the presentation of the self.

The original Ancient Greek term mīmēsis (μίμησις) derives from mīmeisthai (μιμεῖσθαι, 'to imitate'), itself coming from mimos (μῖμος, 'imitator, actor'). In ancient Greece, mīmēsis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society.

One of the best-known modern studies of mimesis—understood in literature as a form of realism—is Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which opens with a comparison between the way the world is represented in Homer's Odyssey and the way it appears in the Bible.

In addition to Plato and Auerbach, mimesis has been theorised by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Philip Sidney, Jean Baudrillard (via his concept of Simulacra and Simulation), Gilles Deleuze (via his "event of sense" concept from The Logic of Sense), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Adam Smith, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Paul Ricœur, Guy Debord (via his conceptual polemical tract, The Society of the Spectacle) Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Nikolas Kompridis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Michael Taussig, Merlin Donald, Homi Bhabha, Roberto Calasso, and Nidesh Lawtoo. During the nineteenth century, the racial politics of imitation towards African Americans influenced the term mimesis and its evolution.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

The beauty of a systematical arrangement of different observations, connected by a few common principles, was first seen in the rude essays of those ancient times towards a system of natural philosophy. Something of the same kind was afterwards attempted in morals. The maxims of common life were arranged in some methodical order, and connected together by a few common principles, in the same manner as they had…
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
States what Mimesis is; the author is tied to Mimesis in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
It follows, therefore, that the agents represented must be either above our own level of goodness, or beneath it, or just such as we are in the same way as, with the painters, the personages of Polygnotus are better than we are, those of Pauson worse, and those of Dionysius just like ourselves. It is clear that each of the above-mentioned arts will admit of these differences, and that it will become a separate art…
Aristotle, Aristotle on the art of poetry
The author is tied to Mimesis in the knowledge graph.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader
Those forms which do not constitute the presentation of a given concept itself but only, as approximate representations of the Imagination, express the consequences bound up with it and its relationship to other concepts, are called (aesthetical) _attributes_ of an object, whose concept as a rational Idea cannot be adequately presented. Thus Jupiter’s eagle with the lightning in its claws is an attribute of the…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Mimesis is.
Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Mimesis

Overview

Possible passages

Philosophers who discussed Mimesis

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition