Page 10 - GALIET POETRY & Metaphor: Shelley IV

Galiet & Galiet
for that’s the quickest way of all. With it you can quickly make the sun, the things in the heavens, the earth, yourself, the other animals, manufactured items, plants, and everything else mentioned just now.6
In Platonic thought, poetic activity is, unequivocally, associated with mimetic activity, a pure repetition of things, which, in turn, repeats ideas or forms. The argument in Book X becomes the foundation of the poetics of disdain or contempt: since the poet is thrice removed or furthest from the truth, the poet is to be expelled from the city: the poet’s universe, imitation of imitation, is, in the best of cases, vain; in the worst, dangerous since he and his immoral, non-didactic art do not teach virtue. Because poetry’s beginning is founded upon sensible experience, it is a simulacrum: it becomes the image reflected upon the mirror, a vain repetition, pure inconsistency and element of distortion and delusion whose multiplicity becomes a menace to society. Simulacrum is the first figure of the theory of imitation, and we shall retain with it the negative character that Plato attributes to it. It always refers to a devaluated reiteration of the sensible world, of a mere product of the technical ability that is constructed in the margins of truth or of the ideas or forms and furthest from it: it supposes, therefore, the senseless proliferation of error. “None of our poets,” says Plato in the Phaedrus, 247c, “has ever yet sung of the supra-sensible realm, and none will ever sing of it as it corresponds.”
Expanding the Platonic sphere of thought, Plotinus, like Shelley, dignifies the place of art, though he never doubts its purely mimetic qualities. Plotinus refutes, in his Enneads V, 8 1-2, the previously cited passage in Phaedrus. He interprets (or corrects) Plato in an aspect that, in the end, becomes essential and that Shelley will defend: the artist “does not simply reproduce the thing contemplated,”7 she directly reproduces the ideas or forms. Plotinus, like Shelley, will confront Plato by arguing from the transcendental. From this conviction, art will not only be tolerated as a lesser copy of the real-sensible, but it will be highly valued as the space of mediation between the reality of the form or idea and the materiality of the sensible world: “Phidias did not model Zeus beginning from any sensible model, but from the form that Zeus would have taken had he decided to manifest himself.”8
The first consequence of this interpretation by Plotinus, and later by Shelley, is that art (techne) is not essentially different from nature (physis): it is not its deficient and superfluous reproduction,
6 Plato. The Republic. Trans. By G.M.A. Grube. Dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon. Book X. 596d. 266 7 Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. V, 8, I.
8 Plotinus. The Enneads. Trans. Stephen MacKenna. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. V, 8, I
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