Page 39 - GALIET METAPOIESIS AND TRUTH IV+

Galiet & Galiet
than a simulacrum or image, ειδολων of the thing: that is, they are the shadows projected in the cave’s wall. Aristotle, however, elucidates on the problem of mimesis to be a problem of poetics or creative arts. The poetic arts 3⁄4 epic poetry, tragedy, comedy, dithyrambic poetry, flute and lyre music 3⁄4 in general are modes of imitation.143 The artist or imitator represents, above all, good or bad actions with human agents144 there being many types of arts as modes of imitation of the various class of objects.145
Many modern philosophers consider imagination to be a faculty distinct from representation and memory, though, in some way, it is linked to both: to the first one, because imagination combines elements that have been sensible to representation; to the second, because without remember these representations, one could not imagine anything. In The Advancement of Learning or De Augmentis Scientiarum (II,1), Bacon posits that memory, imagination and reason are three faculties of the rational soul: memory is the foundation of history, reason of philosophy, and imagination of poetry. Descartes also affirms that it is necessary to resort to all the benefits that the understanding, imagination, sense perceptions and memory can provide to grasp knowledge.146 Though understanding is the only faculty that can perceive truth (as Plato too posits), it needs the assistance of all the other faculties.147 In his edition of Regulae, F. Aluie148 notes that Descartes, from the Commentarii Conimbricenses (a manual in La Fleche Jesuit College) makes a distinction between two senses: common sense and imagination; the first, working like a ‘seal’ that “presses figures or ideas arising from the external senses beneath a pure and incorporeal form” and the second, “the place where they are impressed as if in wax.” Descartes identifies “common senses” with “imaginative potential.”149 Moreover, for Descartes, imagination creates conscious images, different from sensation whose images do not need conscience. Imagination is a representation of images. This representation is necessary to facilitate the various modes of ordering the ‘presentations’; without the representations made possible by the imagination, understanding as noesis would not be possible.
143 Aristotle. Poetics. I 1447 a 14-16. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
144 Aristotle. Poetics. II 148a 1-2. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
145 Aristotle. Poetics. III 1448 to 18-20. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
146 Descartes. Regulae. XII. Descartes. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Regulae XII. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane. Second Meditation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.
147 He seems to be arguing that it is not necessary to demote imagination as unreal; that is, it is not necessary to release the ladder used for ascension explained in page 4 of this essay, first paragraph.
148 Descartes. Oeuvres philosophiques, 1618-1637, Volume I, 139 Note 1. Descartes. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane. Second Meditation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.
149 Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. Second Meditation. 247. Descartes. The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane. Second Meditation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911.
•39•