Compare and contrast Aristotle's views on imitation with those of Plato.
Poetics is a defence of poetry against the attack scattered among the writings of Plato who taught philosophy to Aristotle when he was a young man. Plato condemned poetry as remote from reality and Aristotle's reply to this charge of Plato involves the concept of imitation. Aristotle borrows the term imitation from Plato but he gives a new sense and a fresh meaning. It goes to the credit of Aristotle that He makes imitation an aesthetic faculty.
The aesthetic meaning of imitation is a representation of a natural object. It does not mean that an artist makes a true copy of the world of reality but it means that an artist imitates nature and by doing this he presents an imaginative reconstruction of life. An artist presents an image of the impressions made by an object on his mental surface. He does not copy reality as it is but its sensible reality.
In the words of Butcher. " Fine art passes beyond the bare reality given by nature, and expresses a purified form of reality disengaged from accident, and freed from conditions which thwart its development. " Plato discussed the problem of imitation in art in accordance with his theory of idea.
Consider Aristotle's contribution to the art of criticism.
In book X of his Republic Plato argues roughly as follows. There are many tables in the world, but there is only one idea or form ( Platonic idea ) of a table. When a carpenter makes a table he produces a mere semiblance of this idea which is the one ' real ' table bying beyond all the tables which have been or can be made: So that the idea, for our present very general purpose, is outside the world altogether.
And when an artist sits down in front of the Carpenter's table to paint a picture of it, the picture that results is a copy of something which is itself a kind of shadow of the real object. Thus the artefact is removed at two stages from reality. Aristotle refuted the argument of Plato that imitation takes the artist away from reality; he asserted that it brings him nearer to reality.
Aristotle replied to their argument of Plato by saying that tables are matter - and - form compounds, matter is the brute - stuff of their make-up and form their intelligible essence. We all know a table when we se one, but we do not know what we are doing when we see - and - know a table The artist, who may or may not know what he is doing, is concerned with the intelligible essence, the form, in a manner which distinguishes him both from philosophers and from ordinary men.
His activity is the contemplation of a form followed by the rendering of it into the medium of his art. In this way Aristotle's artist sits before the carpenter's table in brooding consideration of its form, and then he tries to coax the form onto his convas. This interpretation of the artist's imitation of the idea raised the status of the artist in the exalted sphere of philosophy.
Like Plato, Aristotle stressed that an artist imitates because he gets pleasure in imitation and this faculty is an in born instinct in man. It is this pleasure in imitation that enables the child to learn his earliest lessons in speech and conduct from those around him. They are imitated by him because there is pleasure in doing so. A poet or an artist is just a grown-up child indulging in imitation for the pleasure it affords.
When Aristotle says that the aim of art is to provide pleasure, he is perhaps laying the foundation of art for art's sake. But for Plato, the purpose of a work of art is not to provide pleasure alone, but also to teach us. Art, in his view, has a moral aim, and because of this view, he denounced poets as liars and corrupters of mankind.
Today this view does not get much support. Professor Abercrombie has rightly observed. " Aristotle's way of interpreting poetic imitation is possibly the most valuable of all his contributions to aesthetic theory. At any rate, it but the theory on perfectly secure and solid foundations.
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