The Rhetoric of Mimêsis

This chapter reconsiders Plato’s monolithic concept of mimêsis. To develop this concept mimêsis, Plato invents two altogether novel senses of the term, which had previously meant simply “imitation.” In Book 3 of the Republic Plato defines mimêsis as a specific kind of poetic speech and in Book 10 he defines it as a kind of falseness. In this way, he has created the two concepts—mimetic language and mimetic falseness—that lay the groundwork for designating false speech for itself. Accordingly, mimêsis is a partial but incomplete theory of logos, a partial but incomplete definition of falsehood, but not yet a complete structure of thought that delineates between true and false, or reality and appearance. This reading detaches Plato’s mimêsis from the metaphysical concepts that are traditionally used to interpret it: Plato’s famous analogies of the sun, the line, and the cave. Rather than interpreting mimêsis through the lenses supplied by these analogies, the chapter proposes that Plato’s theory of mimêsis is only complete once he explicitly links it to his concepts of onoma and rhêma in the Sophist dialogue. Only then does he have a concept of true and false discourse, based on a distinction between seeming and being.

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