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By Root 1029 0

Plato a memorable anecdote about a man named Leontius, who had arrived in Athens and was walking along the North Wall of the city when came upon some corpses lying at the feet of an executioner. He wanted to look at the dead bodies but at the same time was disgusted with himself and turned away. Leontius struggled with himself and covered his face. Finally, overpowered by his desire, he opened his eyes wide rushed up to the corpses, saying to his eyes, “Look for yourselves, you wretches, take your fill of the beautiful sight!” Some people who have driven past a traffic accident will know what Plato is talking about. From Platonic point of view, much of the violent entertainment offered dramatic forms—from the theater of the Greeks to the violence and animal passions of today’s entertainment media—is a lot like what Leon-tius could not resist gawking at. For Plato, the arts at their worst are bad the soul because they engage and reward its basest elements.

Aristotle’s attitude toward the arts is very different. Much more than Plato, he respects the in dependent integrity and variety of the arts and their capacity to give us insights into the human condition. For Aristotle, cultural investigation inevitably involves a tension between nomos, law— and also, more broadly, the human cultural tradition—and phusis, the natural world, including human beings with their peculiarly human psychological nature. In most of his philosophical inquiries, Aristotle, as the original naturalist, comes down on the side of phusis as providing the principles. In his great work on drama and poetry, the Poetics, shows himself to be intimately aware of the history and conventions arts of his culture. An adequate explanation for him unites both nomos and phusis. All art for Aristotle is mimesis, imitation of some sort. Even melody and rhythm essentially imitate human emotion, as even more clearly do the arts that use words, marble, or paint.

He regards the human interest in representations—pictures, drama, poetry, statues, and carvings—as an innate tendency. Rather than simply asserting this, he argues for it:

For it is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis develops his earliest understanding); and equally natural everyone enjoys mimetic objects. A common occurrence indicates this: we enjoy contemplating the most precise images things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as forms of vilest animals and of corpses.

Human beings are born image-makers and image-enjoyers. Evidence for Aristotle can be seen in children’s imitative play: everywhere children in imitation of grown-ups, of each other, of animals, and even machines. Imitation is a natural component of the enculturation of That is from the creative side: from the experiential side, human beings enjoy experiencing imitations, whether pictures, carvings, stories, or play-acting. From an Aristotelian perspective, something like child’s fascination with a doll’s house with its tiny kitchen, pots, pans, table settings, or with a model train with its signals and switches, to be reduced to a desire for adult power, nor is it just a way to learn how to cook or to control a locomotive. There is a bedrock delight in the represented world just by itself, which also becomes a means, along with dolls and other figures, for further games of make-believe.

A standard objection to any mimetic theory of art insists that it is not repre sentations per se that are valued by human beings but rather the things represented—the content of representation. Aristotle ingeniously answers this argument by pointing out that we are captivated to see rep-re sentations of objects that would disgust us in real life. Thus a person afraid of snakes or spiders can be captivated by a marble carving of snake or a gold brooch in the intricate form of a spider. And while the sight of an insect crawling over ripe fruit might disgust us in the kitchen, find a fly on a pear meticulously represented in a seventeenth-century Dutch still life can be a source of delight.

Unlike Plato, Aristotle writes with a clear sense