Kant and the decline of classical mimesis

This dissertation is concerned with articulating Kant's critical response to the classical doctrine of mimesis, which had dominated ethical and aesthetic treatises in Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century. In Part I, the testimony of Plato, Aristotle, and the post-Aristotelian discussions of mimesis in Latin antiquity is comprehensively reviewed. Part II is concerned with Kant's transformation of the three main strands of this "mimetic" tradition. In response to the doctrine of imitatio exemplorum--or the dogma of "following" exemplary ethical actions or aesthetic precepts--Kant offers the singular figure of the "genius," who is completely opposed to this "spirit of imitation," and thereby epitomizes a form of "exemplary originality" in the production of fine art. In response to the principle of imitatio naturae, or the "imitation of nature" which has occupied Kant's principal predecessors in aesthetics (Gottsched, Batteaux, etc.), Kant develops a comprehensive alternative: instead of an "imitation of nature," fine art offers rather an "emulous re-creation" (wetteifernde Nachschopfung) of nature, as the work of art literally seems to "compete" with natural appearance in the world of "outer sense," by offering man "another nature" that is in concert with moral ideas. In the service of resolving this competition between art and nature, in the Critique of Judgment Kant suggests that natural beauty bears a fundamental "affinity" with moral sentiments. Finally, in response to the doctrine of imitatio ideorum, or the view (arising from the Neoplatonic tradition) that beauty is an "imitation" of the Platonic ideas--Kant offers the "ideal of sensibility" that originates purely from the manifolds of appearance. Although Kant himself initially models his theory of the transcendental ideas on a revised Platonic model, in the Third Critique itself the "ideal of beauty" serves as an archetype generated out of the manifolds of phenomena, producing an "ideal of sensibility" which he had earlier rejected in the First Critique. On this basis, Kant claims that the Nachbild or "copy" is itself the requisite ground for the determination of the Urbild or "archetype," in essence inverting the traditional relationship of Platonic mimesis introduced in the Timaeus.;Kant therefore transforms the concept of mimesis for modernity, by redefining the primary elements of this classical aesthetic doctrine, as they are inherited by the eighteenth century. He does so principally through reflection on the relation of moral and aesthetic modes of imitation, so that any aesthetic expression is understood to impinge upon a higher, moral interest.