Gene Fendt

The social structures and thought patterns of the modern world are the fruits of the Enlightenment, which begins by eliminating final causal explanations in favour of purely material and efficient causes. The development and great technical success of Enlightenment procedures has, however, produced a cultural blindness about the good. Camus's novel shows us this cultural blindness through characters who themselves suffer from it; for modern man, it is almost a natural evil—we are born into it. Camus' hope must have been that the vision of the characters' incapacity might help break us from the same incapacity. What the cured life looks like Camus does not say; in the world of our plague, it appears as either odd or mystery.

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 social structures and thought patterns of the modern world are the fruits of the Enlightenment, which begins by eliminating final causal explanations in favour of purely material and efficient causes. The development and great technical success of Enlightenment procedures has, however, produced a cultural blindness about the good. Camus's novel shows us this cultural blindness through characters who themselves suffer from it; for modern man, it is almost a natural evil—we are born into it. Camus' hope must have been that the vision of the characters' incapacity might help break us from the same incapacity. What the cured life looks like Camus does not say; in the world of our plague, it appears as either odd or mystery.

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.

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.

Pamphilus’ introductory letter opens contradictory ways of reading Hume’s Dialogues. The first, suggested by Pamphilus' claim to be “mere auditor” to the dialogues, which were “deeply imprinted in [his] memory,” is the empiricist reading. This traditional reading could, and has, gone several ways, including to such conclusions as Philo forces upon Cleanthes, shocking Demea; e.g., that the design of the mosquito and other “curious artifices of nature,” which inflict pain and suffering on all, bespeaks an utterly careless and insensate, if not malign creator. Pamphilus' preface also opens a more philosophical reading implied in his consideration of the ancient literary form of dialogue. This second interpretive path suspects more design in writing, and more revealed in it, than the simple empiricist reading(s) allow. Dialogically elucidating the Dialogues confronts us with the limits of empiricism in moral and religious philosophy. Hume's last work, if read philosophically, exhibits the vacancy of empiricism.

Both Aristotle and Tolkien are authors of short works seemingly concentrated on one form of literary art. Both works contain references which seem to extend further than that single art and offer insights into the worth and purpose of art more generally. Both men understand the relevant processes of mind of the artist in a similar way, and both distinguish the value of works of art based on their effect on the audience. But Tolkien figures the natural human artistic bent as an elvish strain in us, and in his legends the elves are passing away to make way for the new—human beings. The legendary tales are an image of the natural pagan man giving place to the new man coming to be after Christ. This implies that what Aristotle called the mimetic nature of man—the source of all artistic play and work—is being given a new shape and orientation. Further, the master of those who know, in explicating catharsis, must have been reaching for something that exceeded his grasp and he did not know it. The aim of this essay is to explore the agreements (seeming and real) and disagreements (seeming and real) between what can be built up as each author’s general literary and aesthetic ideas—so, the relation between pagan and Tolkien’s Christian poetics. This will include evaluating where each is more or less adequate to the task of a general aesthetic, ending in an exploration of the purpose of art for the “new man.”

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.

Kant's famous statement (from the first Critique) that he found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith acknowledges a religious or theological telos to the entire critical project. This article outlines a series of relations of 'knowledge' to 'faith' in the architectonic repetitions with variation that plays from the first Critique through the Religion. Various deployments of 'truth' at each stage presume a kind of 'faith' or trust all the way along. These deployments are shown to follow a pattern which echoes that set out in Northrop Frye's understanding of literary modes descending from myth to romance to high and low mimetic and ending in the ironic. These modes describe realms of possibility and necessity, and their nesting in Frye's explication of literature is shown to be itself an echo of more formal theories of Tarski and Godel.

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.

Prefaced by an argument that the ancients understood mimesis as fundamental to being human, and art as therefore essential to human moral and intellectual development, this book starts from the problematic status of the (happily ending) Iphigenia in Poetics. How Aristotle must explicate tragedy to hold Iphigenia as the best thus sets up the exploration of comedy. Chapter two shows that comedy aims at the catharsis of desire and sympathy. This analysis is then applied in detail to Aristophanes’ Acharnians, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Stoppard’s Arcadia, exhibiting the cross-cultural application of the theory which Aristotle would expect.

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.

The absence of any discussion of the virtue of piety in Plato’s Republic has been much remarked, but there are textual clues by which to recognize its importance for Plato’s construction and for the book’s intended effect. This dialogue is Socrates’s repetition, on the day after the first festival of Bendis, of a liturgical action that he undertook—at his own expense, at the “vote” of his “city”—on the previous day. Socrates’s activity in repeating it the next day is an “ethological” mimesis of properly pious liturgy. In the course of that liturgy we find that piety is specifically discussed, but in a mirror, and darkly. The mirror of piety is the laws about stories of the gods. The absence is in the discussion of the best city, that is, one above aristocracy.

The thesis of this text is that representation and mimesis, and so reason and passion, are not opposed, but differ. Their presumed opposition leads to many false and therefore harmful ideas and practices, as Glaucon exhibits in his republic, but even these harmful ideas and practices exhibit not only that it is not possible to escape either mimesis or representation but also that the harm is precisely to develop a culture along the lines of a hegemonic structure wherein one is dominant and the other secondary—that is the point Plato exhibits in his Republic. Mimesis and representation are, in a more contemporary parlance, differing regimens of phrasal connection, phrase being a word that is as musical as it is grammatical. No ground can serve as a place of judgement between the two of them for all ground is the dust/blood/text of both. As Plato says, "all the arts of the muses are iconic and mimetic." It is more accurate, and therefore best, to see mimesis and representation not as differing acts, but as differing aspects or moments of every semiotic act—and every act is semiotic to a being for which any act is so.

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...

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.

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

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.