Gene Fendt

This reading of Plato's Ion shows that the philosophic action mimed and engendered by the dialogue thoroughly reverses its (and Plato's) often supposed philosophical point, revealing that poetry is just as defensible as philosophy, and only in the same way. It is by Plato's indirections we find true directions out: the war between philosophy and poetry is a hoax on Plato's part, and a mistake on the part of his literalist readers. The dilemma around which the dialogue moves is false, and would have been recognized as such by Plato's contemporaries. Further, it is intrinsically related to a false, but popular, view of language. So the way out of the false dilemma of the dialogue is the way out of the war between philosophy and poetry, and also makes one see what is false about the view of language which makes such war plausible.

This paper aims at interpreting (primarily) the first six chapters of Aristotle’s Poetics in a way that dissolves many of the scholarly arguments conceming them. It shows that Aristotle frequently identifies the object of his inquiry by opposing it to what is other than it (in several different ways). As a result aporiai arise where there is only supposed to be illuminating exclusion of one sort or another. Two exemplary cases of this in chapters 1-6 are Aristotle’s account of mimesis as other than enunciative speech (speech that makes truth claims, or representation) and his account of the final cause of tragedy in itself as plot, vis a vis its final cause as regards the audience, which is katharsis. Confusions arising from failure to see the otherness of representation and katharsis leads to an overly intellectualist understanding of the purpose of tragedy.

The usual interpretation of Republic 10 takes it as Socrates’ multilevel philosophical demonstration of the untruth and dangerousness of mimesis and its required excision from a well ordered polity. Such readings miss the play of the Platonic mimesis which has within it precisely ordered antistrophes which turn its oft remarked strophes perfectly around. First, this argument, famously concluding to the unreliability of image-makers for producing knowledge begins with two images—the mirror (596e) and the painter. I will show both undercut the argument they introduce. Secondly, Socrates repeats the “three removes” argument three times. Each has its own object and philosophical axis. The “bed” argument (596a-598d) concerns the ontological status of images vis-à-vis human makers and the divine idea. The bit and bridle,” 601b-601d) emphasizes the epistemological status of image-making as beneath the human maker of bridles (having correct opinion) and the human user, who knows. This second takes away the ontological distinction which was the point of the first. Thus, any human being could be in any of the three positions—user, maker, imitator. This dance might bring one to doubt the conclusion that the imitator has “neither knowledge nor right opinion” (602a). Plato leads into his concluding psychological and moral argument (602c-605c) after a third variation of the 3 removes. This last gives us the image of the flute player (601d-602) as the one who knows and so can order the flute maker. We will conclude by considering what it is this flutist could know, and given that his art is itself a mimesis, who the imitator of this imitative artist could be. Thus attention to the differences among these examples opens a defense of the arts, which reverses many of the claims made against the arts within the ostensible “Platonic” argument.

The purpose of this paper is to show the agreement of Camus and Aristotle on the cultural function of the art community, in particular their criticism of what should be called barbarian or nihilistic practices of art. Camus' art and criticism have been frequent targets of modern critics, but his point is and would be that such critics have the wrong idea of the purpose of art. His answer to such critics and the parallelism of his ideas with Aristotle's criticism of barbarian culture, show that the real issue between Camus and his critics is cultural.

This paper answers the questions ‘what is the Merchant of Venice?’ and ‘how may it accomplish its purpose?’ I argue that the usual treatments of this play are inadequate and show how the play is a comedy through which the passions appropriate for the good human being are engendered. What is raised and ridiculed are our own temptations to lesser joys and less sweet uses mimetically roused in us by the action and characters of the play. What is whetted but left unsatisfied is our higher love for justice. Thus the play provides a catharsis (purification) of desire and sympathy.

Camus himself called The Plague his most anti-Christian text, and most theologically oriented readings of the text agree. This paper shows how the sermons of Fr. Paneloux—an Augustine scholar--as well as Dr. Rieux’s mother present an Augustinian picture of love. This love opposes the passionate concupiscence for possession of things with the divine love which wishes for the constant conscious presence of the beloved in the light of the good. Such is possible for us, as Augustine exhibits and helps us practice, if one reads the world as it really is—temporal signs of the eternal goodness, wisdom and presence of God—which Augustine discovers “too late.” While the doctor describes Oran as a city “without intimations” many elements of the text intimate otherwise. In such an Augustinian sacramental reading the “problem of evil” disappears.

In a very literarily complicated setting, Frater Taciturnus sets a remark about Hamlet not being a Christian tragedy. After unpeeling that literary setting and noting that Taciturnus' remark aims more at Jacob Börne than at Shakespeare, the paper shows how Frater Taciturnus' remark calls into question the religious project of a certain danish author. For, Taciturnus' primary concern is to show that religious drama is not possible, or at least "ought not be." This general law applies to Hamlet as well, and if Shakespeare was attempting a religious drama he a) shouldn't have because such a thing is essentially undramatizable, and b) failed because he did not begin (which would be possible) by showing the hero's religious presuppositions. Frater Taciturnus himself has given considerable thought to the extent and the manner in which the religious can be represented; in fact the letter to the reader is his proof of how perfectly his own narrative, "Guilty/Not Guilty," was constructed with precisely these problems in mind. The play is not the thing that Taciturnus is really interested in, nor is he interested in the playwright's intentions, he considers that the play's the thing that catches out Börne's misunderstanding of the religious, and it is this field—in particular, that area where the religious life and literary art intersect, that is the brother's interest and forte. But if Taciturnus is correct in his criticism of Börne, it should be impossible for S. Kierkegaard to produce a religious authorship as well.

Plato’s dialogues are self-defined as works of mimetic art, and the ancients clearly consider mimesis as working naturally before reason and beneath it. Such aview connects with two contemporary ideas—Rene Girard’s idea of the mimetic basis of culture and neurophysiological research into mirror neurons. Individualityarises out of, and can collapse back into our mimetic origin. This para-rational notion of mimesis as that in which and by which all our knowledge is framed requires we not only concern ourselves with Socrates’s arguments and distinctions, but also see how the dramatic interaction of the characters is working (or not) on/in the characters, and consider how watching the interaction, hearing the parables and myths, and thinking through the arguments and interactions is meant to effect us. That Plato creates mimeses means he aims at passional conversion not merely argumentative worth, since mimesis aims to (and does) work on the passions.

This paper aims at interpreting (primarily) the first six chapters of Aristotle’s Poetics in a way that dissolves many of the scholarly arguments conceming them. It shows that Aristotle frequently identifies the object of his inquiry by opposing it to what is other than it (in several different ways). As a result aporiai arise where there is only supposed to be illuminating exclusion of one sort or another. Two exemplary cases of this in chapters 1-6 are Aristotle’s account of mimesis as other than enunciative speech (speech that makes truth claims, or representation) and his account of the final cause of tragedy in itself as plot, vis a vis its final cause as regards the audience, which is katharsis. Confusions arising from failure to see the otherness of representation and katharsis leads to an overly intellectualist understanding of the purpose of tragedy.

This paper attempts to explicate the philosophical and theological premisses involved in Fr. Paneloux’s second sermon in Camus’ The Plague. In that sermon Fr. Paneloux says that the suffering of children is our bread of affliction. The article shows where one must start in order to get to that point, and what follows from it. Whether or not the argument given should be called a theodicy or a reductio ad absurdum of religious belief is an open question for a philosopher, but the argument is shown to cohere with the traditional belief in God’s omnipotent goodness.

This paper's aim is threefold. First, I wish to show that there is an analogy in section nine that arises out of the interaction of the interlocutors; this analogy is, or has, a certain comic adequatic to the traditional (e.g. Aquinas's) arguments about proofs for the existence of God. Second, Philo's seemingly inconsequential example of the strange necessity of products of 9 in section nine is a perfected analogy of the broken arguments actually given in that section, destroying Philo's earlier arguments. Finally, I raise the question of the designer's intent in creating such a humourous piece

Camus is defined by many as an absurdist philosopher of revolt. The Plague, however, shows him working rigorously through a well-known division between ancient and modern ethics concerning the relation of reason, feeling and happiness. For Aristotle, the virtues are stable dispositions including affective and intellectual elements. For Kant, one’s particular feelings are either that from which we must abstract to judge moral worth, or are a constant hindrance to proper moral activity. Further, Kant claims “habit belongs to the physical nature of the determination of the will,” which seems to imply habit cannot be a moral determination at all. A related disagreement regards virtue and happiness. Aristotle’s happiness is “an activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” For Kant and other moderns, happiness is an ideal of imagination, “a maximum of well-being in my present, and in every future, state,” all the elements of which “are without exception empirical.” Thus happiness seems more the constant counterweight to moral action than its fulfillment. Kant and Aristotle agree, however, in their judgment of many characters and actions, as is illustrated in The Plague. The novel provides realistic insights into a philosophical agreement between these supposed oppositions. In particular, I show how both philosophers would agree in their judgements concerning both the relative goodness and relative happiness of Joseph Grand and Raymond Rambert. The illustration of this agreement proves Camus is valorizing a traditional ethic.

This paper reads through some contemporary literary critical problems and theorizing about textuality to Augustine's Confessions, to the enrichment, if not the ecstasy of both contemporary and medieval thinking. It shows that Augustine is both aware of much that passes as new in theorizing about language, and that his text is argumentatively and rhetorically structured to set difference at play. Like Augustine's writing, this article is a performance piece: besides arguing, it acknowledges; beside demonstration, it questions; besides telling, it shows; it would not be called a study of textuality in Augustine, but a performance of textuality with (in) Augustine.

Euthyphro is frequently dissected for its philosophical dilemmas regarding god’s love’s relation to holiness, and whether justice is a part of the holy or the converse. But how can we understand it as a literary whole? This paper exhibits five ways in which it can be so understood: Euthyphro is the subjectivist patsy (both a literalist and divine command theorist) playing against Socrates’ natural law-like moral objectivity; the dialogue is elenchic because the dilemmas are true; the dialogue is elenchic, but the dilemmas are false; the dialogue produces a double irony; the irony is in the existence of the dialogue.

This paper explicates the relationship of innate corruption and natural goodness in Kant's Religion against a background of mistaken arguments and interpretations by Goethe, Allison, and Gordon Michalson, among others. It also argues that the only argument that can be given for the claim of innate moral corruption is a kind of ad hominem; it shows that Kant is giving such an argument, and argues that that argument is valid in its place. It concludes by saying that if this explication is true then it is a mistake to read Kant as a despiser of the body.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Mimesis: Culture, Art, SocietyGene FendtMimesis: Culture, Art, Society, by Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf; translated by Don Reneau; 400 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, $45.00 cloth, $18.00 paper.The purpose of this book is to develop “a historical reconstruction of important phases in the development of mimesis” (p. 1) from a brief discussion of its pre-Platonic Greek significance through contemporary thinkers. It is, then, not strictly a philosophical text, as are most of the texts and authors the book takes up. It is, however, a significant effort in the history of ideas, and as such it is shot through with traces of the traditional tropes, shaping power, ideology, and even social relations of that discipline, particularly as it is practiced in the venerable school of German scholarship. That is, the structure, tone, and argument of the book are shaped mimetically. This book’s problematic is, then, not simply historical, as Republic’s problem with the poets is not simply philosophical. Rather, both books partake of mimesis, even while each one aims to criticize or set forth the concept’s historical development.Let this stand as notice of a deep philosophical problem with the method of historical criticism. In fairness we should note that the authors are not unconscious of their difficulty here: “The fact that mimesis cannot be represented without the use of mimetic processes poses the fundamental problem of theory formation in reference to our object. What is the relation between the representational and the represented world? Is the representation of representation structurally equivalent to simple representation?” (p. 21). The authors hope to moot the power of those questions, if not the questions themselves, by attending “first of all to representations of mimesis found in texts best selected for that purpose and only afterward begin to offer considerations of a more generalizing nature” (p. 21). Their reasoning and choice of texts here is the traditional trope of the discipline: a mimema. Among other things, this methodos requires that the authors treat Girard as developing a “literary critical examination of [mimesis in] nineteenth and twentieth century novels” (p. 359n1) and a “new ordering of nineteenth century social relations” (p. 235), rather than, as he claims, a comprehensive anthropological thesis. At least, this method requires treating the former as essential, and the latter as less justifiable, for if Girard’s anthropological thesis about mimesis were justifiable a history of the idea of mimesis would be merely a heresiology. This problem can be restated mutatis mutandis for such thinkers as Plato and Augustine, whose theses—if they have theses—about mimesis are deeply anthropological.Two further questions arise early on and remain at the end. If, as the authors hold (and show), “the concept of mimesis necessarily loses its intellectual centrality with the rise of rational thought,” so much so that “the field of art, which comes to be regarded in the process as autonomous, undergoes a complete and fundamental restructuring” (p. 3), must we not begin to [End Page 199] suspect—as recent philosophers like Derrida attempt to show—that there is a dialectical relationship between the intentional, truth-functional relations of modern rational thought and the mimetic, unformalizable and “ambivalent” (pp. 2–3) processes of mimesis? Rather than conclude that “the question what is mimesis? is one which demonstratively leads to error” (p. 309), does it not begin to seem that intentional representation, as most visible in science, and mimetic assimilations, as most obviously effective in art, are together the necessary dialectical elements of culture, art and science? While it seems that the rise of rational scientific thought pushes mimesis to the social fringes of the arts, isn’t scientific activity and writing still just as much subject, and just as much a product, of the power of mimesis as art? Similarly art is just as bound as science to “probability” or “the convincing impossibility,” to recall Aristotle. This idea is not entirely foreign to the book; it appears subliminally as a plausible explication of the work of theorists like Benjamin and Adorno (pp. 267–93).The third difficulty is a question about selection. As in Auerbach’s renowned precursor, Wulf...

In Augustine's Confessions we can find two arguments against drama. One of them is entirely Platonic, echoing the problems raised in Republic 2 and 3 that representations of evil encourage moral turpitude. The other, which can be found in Republic 10, is much more visible in Confessions, and Augustine is more perspicuous than Plato in laying out the difficulty; it has to do with the immoral effect of suffering grief at staged sufferings, where we are moved neither to escape the suffering nor to aid the sufferer, but to enjoy the suffering. Socrates had pointed out that letting suffering have free rein in us, as we do at a play, corrupts even the better sort of man (605c), but Augustine shows us that even the self-control we might exercise at a play is morally questionable. Like the arguments in Republic, Augustine's anti-poetic arguments raise serious problems about the status of the text in which they are found. The problems raised are both logical, on a par with the self-referential problems of Russell's theory of types, and moral, for the books themselves have the culpable nature each wishes to cast out from the republic and the soul: their narratives include representations of evil, and Augustine's book--if not Plato's--stages a suffering at the reading of which we might well be grieved.

Why would an empiricist look at a poem? And if he did, what could he find? This paper begins with Hume's programmatic statement for literary renewal based on the empirical principles set forth in the first Enquiry, and raises the question about the worth of poetry according to those principles. There is little "abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, or experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence" in poetry and so "commit it to the flames." The second Enquiry allows that since disputation among men is based on the passions, poetry might have a place as a means to speak to the affections, to inforce particular sophistries close to our hearts. The second half of the paper defends poetry on grounds opposed to the premises of empirical science. Specifically, whereas in science knowledge is power, in the arts knowledge is suffering, or,where science aims at mastery and ownership, poetry relates us to that in being which is not ours. This view is explicated by use of King Lear.