“µίµήσις – imitation – mimesys”: Concept and Term in the Age of Modern

Abstract

Using the concept “mimesis” every historical period added something new to it, reinterpreted it until it paradoxically departed from its original semantic variant associated with the names of Plato and Aristotle. It is stated that the European aesthetics of the Modern period was enriched rather by “modernized” than authentic understanding of this concept. The so-called Roman classicism becomes the first stage of the receptive understanding of Plato and Aristotle’s concept. Then the this classicism is followed by the classicism of the XVII century and the classicism of the XVIII century, then goes Romanticism of XVIII–XIX centuries, and finally its new history is made in the XIX and XX centuries. Provided in the article guide marks show that “mimesis”, “imitation”, search for stable terminological basis for our intellectual, aesthetic and practical work is a contradictory and ambiguous process that requires consideration of many factors. The development of the concept “mimesis” in pre-Kantian, modern and postmodern periods as well as historical changes in the meaning of the very concept “nature” as environment (reality) and “human nature” is traced. Kant’s “transcendental idealism” became the basis of the new philosophy of nature. It became a basis for the romantic authors who actually only extended and specified the ideas that developed by Kant in the field of epistemology, and by Goethe in the realm of aesthetics. Transformation of the romantic idea about the inner human nature that changed the content of the concept “mimesis” is linked in the article with the name of S. Freud and his followers.