Does Pato Overestimate the Role of Mimesis in Poetry?

Does Plato overestimate the role of mimesis in poetry?

In Book X Plato identifies mimesis, or imitation, as poetry’s cardinal sin. Poetry is mostly banned from the kallipolis, and indeed Socrates applauds himself for not having ‘admit[ted] any that is imitative.’ Plato saw education’s role as ‘to produce a person of a distinctive type,’ namely someone with a stable and uniform soul. He contends that mimetic poetry undermines that stability by promoting its opposite. Mimesis’ role in poetry is thus to actively ‘misrepresent human virtue.’ I will argue that it does indeed play such a role, but that this is neither problematic nor surprising. I will first explain Plato’s theory of mimesis, after which I will apply it to poetry and subsequently consider its effects on the audience. I will end with a reflection on the nature of art and humans, concluding that while Plato does not overestimate the role of mimesis in poetry, he is mistaken in his vilification of it and does not need to expel it from the kallipolis.

Plato elucidates mimesis through the Image of the Bed. He identifies three kinds of beds. ‘The first is in nature a bed,’ which is to say it is the Form of the Bed. The second bed is the material bed on which one sleeps, or the ‘work of a carpenter.’ This type is not ‘the being of a bed,’ and so the carpenter ‘isn’t making that which is, but something which is like that which is, but is not it.’ It is an image or copy of the Form. The third bed is made by the painter, and is clearly farther removed from the Form than the carpenter’s bed. The painter’s bed is not even a copy of the copy of the Form. Instead, it is a depiction of the appearance of the copy of the Form. Socrates points out that rather than imitating ‘that which is as it is,’ the final bed imitates that which appears as it appears… [it is] an imitation of appearances,’ and not of truth.

The impacts are that this image is deceptive, and that its creator has no knowledge of the truth (at...