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Theoria, Aisthesis, Mimesis and Doxa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Éric Méchoulan
Éric Méchoulan*
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal

Extract

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Theoria, aisthesis, mimesis and doxa are terms that sometimes are opposed, and sometimes their particular relationships are denied. However, the system of the paradox that often animates esthetic theories and conceptions of mimesis have only the pathetic enjoyment of reclaimed and affirmed unsolvable questions. Therefore it would be well to grasp the historical configuration that ordered the play of these concepts and their evolution up until our contemporary poetics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 38 , Issue 151 , September 1990 , pp. 131 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © 1990 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

* This study was realized as a result of a subvention from the Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada.

1 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, Paris, Maspero, 1982, Vol. 2, p. 115, Note 51.

2 See Florence Dupont, "Cicéron, sophiste romain" in Langages, No. 65, March 1982: "The people of Athens is a collectivity of anonymous persons […] No citizen has a priori quality to speak truer or more just. Demos is the common subject of all the pronounced discourses that, ideally, make up all the possible discourses of Demos on the object of the debate […] The words of the orator are not the expres sion of a judgement whose vote would be recognition. On the contrary, it is to the degree in which the speaker disappears as an individual, in which he is identified with the Demos that his discourse is convincing." (p. 26).

3 Wlad Godzich, "The Tiger on the Paper Mat," introduction by Paul De Man, The Resistance as Theory and Other Essays, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. XIV.

4 Godzich, ibid., p. XV.

5 As is shown by the linguistic model that Benveniste reconstitutes when he com pares the Greek derivation polis-polites to the Latin civitas-civis. In the latter case, the "co-citizen" is first and the city is defined with regard to him as the ensemble of those who have relations of co-citizenship. In the first case, on the contrary, we start from an abstract term from which is derived the polites, that is, one who be longs to the polis: it is the abstraction and equality before this abstraction which are at the base of Greek civil thought. See Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1982, Vol. 2, pp. 272-280. In addition, it should be noted that in French we have followed the Greek model and not the Latin: our concep tion of civic society is closer to that of the Greeks. It is necessary to see how the linguistic reversal operated, beginning with the 12th and 13th centuries, along with the notion Universitas. See in this regard P. Michaud-Quantin, Universitas: expres sions du mouvement communautaire dans le Moyen Age latin, Paris, Vrin, 1970.

6 I use the Greek text in Nestor-Luis Cordero, Les deux chemins de Parménide, Paris, Vrin, 1984. We know that this only text remaining to us of Parmenides is a poem and that it relates the visitation of a goddess who came to teach Parmenides the two roads to truth (aletheia) and opinion (doxa).

7 Régnier, Les Infortunes de la raison, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 140.

8 Plato, La République, Book X, trans. by E. Chambry, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1982. I sometimes modify the translation to make it more literal.

9 "If we insist on saying that Plato does not inquire about art from a ‘political' point of view, it means only that Plato evaluated art from its position in the State, according to the essence of the State… that is, knowledge concerning the ‘truth'. Such an inquiry on art is a ‘theory' of it to the highest degree." M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. by P. Klossowski, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, Vol. 1, p. 153.

10 We must not see in this a chance: in the dialogue of the Sophist we will find exactly the same accusation with even something more (the idea of payment). "The one who would affirm that he knows how, not to say nor to contradict, but produce and make, through one sole art, all things […] The one who would produce and you and me and all the rest that grows (…) and the sea and the earth and heaven and the gods are the rest. What is more in a turn of the hand producing one or the other of these creations, he gives for a minimum amount. It is a jest you are making. What? When one affirms that one knows everything and that one will teach everything to someone else for practically nothing in a short time, must we not think that it is just in jest? […] Now do you know a more savant or more gracious nest than mimetics?" Plato, Sophiste, trans. by A. Diès, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1950, 233c-234a. Quickness and money are two nerves of the value that Plato here devalues.

11 Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 166.

12 It is interesting that Plato should choose this name that earlier designated the wise man, the shaman, for its literal value demos-ergon. In Timaeus however this same term named the creator god of the universe. These lexical variations allow us to grasp how one of the aims of The Republic is to show the difference between Phusis, Demos and Mimetes.

13 We may note that phenomenology errs exactly inversely when it claims that the cube with six faces never has its six faces at the same time to the degree in which, if the real cube is the cube for myself, I only see its faces one at a time. See Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement, Paris, P.U.F., 1942, p. 201, and for a Witt gensteinian critique of the epistemological presuppositions of phenomenology, see Vincent Descombes, Grammaire d'objets en tous genres, Paris, Minuit, 1983, pp. 55-123.

14 Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 170.

15 To take only one example, the medical discourse of Balzac, not only is accept ed without a problem, but authority itself legitimizes it since there are medical theses on the illnesses of certain characters in La Comédie Humaine, and we congratulate Balzac on the acuity of his descriptions! On the other hand, it is less well accepted when an author explicitly claims such authority, thus with Zola, in which the same doctors show instead the derisory and caricature of somatic descriptions.

16 Heidegger, Nietzsche, p. 169.

17 For the conception of appearance as flexion of being, see Heidegger, Introduc tion à la métaphysique, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, pp. 107-124. See also Être et temps, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, para. 44.

18 "The aim of division is not at all to divide a type into elements but to select the issues: distinguish the pretendents, distinguish the pure from the impure, the authentic from the non-authentic […] Platonism is the philosophical Odyssey, the Platonian dialectic is not a dialectic of contradiction or the contrary but a dialectic of rivality (amphisbetesis) a dialectic of rivals and pretendents. The essence of the division does not appear in breadth, in the determination of the elements of a genre, but in depth, in the selection of the lineage." Deleuze, Logique du sens, Paris, Minuit, 1969, p. 293.

19 J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Paris, Minuit, 1985, pp. 74-75.

20 We must also understand the specific relationship of the Greeks with the optic and with the problem of the image "what an Ancient sees in a mirror is the thing itself but where it is not and as it is not […] if the image may be designated as a fantasm (and Plato expressed in The Republic the ontological difficulty it brings up) we cannot study it geometrically as such, since what it has is not to have physi cal existence". G. Simon, Le negant, l'être et l'apparence dans l'Optique de l'Anti quité, Paris, Seuil, 1988. That must be put in relationship with the Democritan idea (which Aristotle takes up) which considers that the movement of bodies comes from the fact that they are not in their proper place and continually try to go back to it.

21 Houdart de la Motte in his Réflexions sur la critique (1715) considers that be tween poetic art and science "there is always the same reasoning, always the same method," and Crousaz in his Traité du beau (1715) speaks as much of science as of eloquence or music.

22 The name is Baumgarten's, who published in 1750 an Esthetica, an epoch in which, for example, Buffon produced his first Discours d'histoire naturelle (1748) and Maupertus his Dissertatio inauguralis (1751).

23 Baumgarten, Esthetics, quoted by J. Chouillet, L'esthétique des Lumières, Paris, P.U.F., 1974, p. 17.

24 We find the best example in Schiller, in his Lettres sur l'éducation esthétique de l'homme (an example of a great influence on German esthetic philosophy): "The esthetic sense must please even for living things only as appearance, even for real things only as idea," 26th letter (my translation).