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The Divine Poet: Mimesis and Becoming Like God in Plato

This paper explores the deep connection between Plato’s ideal of “becoming like God” (homoiosis theoi) and his concept of mimesis. In the context of Plato’s critique of poetry, God appears as phutourgos, maker of the unique nature of a thing (ἡ φύσει κλίνη), whose original creativity is opposed to slavish re-production of an image ‘thrice- removed’ from the reality of the ideas. In contrast to the demiourgos, who produces not the couch itself, “but only some particular couch…” (596d), and the painter, who only imitates the appearance of a couch, God produces the essence or reality of the couch. The image of the phutourgos suggests, however, the possibility of a different kind of mimesis. In Plato, the doctrine of “Becoming like God” constitutes the telos of the philosophical life, made possible by the original relationship of the image to its divine paradeigma. By re-creating the world ‘in our own image’ we participate in the original creative act by which the cosmos and all that is in it are generated – and become, each in our own way, divine poets. All truly creative human endeavour can be viewed as divine poetry in this sense. In the Laws, the lawmakers declare themselves poets and tragedians, “artists and actors of the fairest drama”, who create in the polity “a representation of the fairest and best life” (Leg. 817a-d). In his defence of the gods, the Athenian defends things created by humans as existing “by nature or by a cause not inferior to nature” since they are “offspring of mind.” (884a ff., 890 d). Plato’s dialogues are themselves literary and philosophical artworks, which permit the reader to re-enact in a series of stages the unfolding of philosophical argument. As we learn in the Symposium, it is by “procreation in beauty” that love as desire of immortality is realized, and this may occur in the work of poets, craftsmen, lawgivers or philosophers.

Plato, mimesis, homoiosis, becoming like god, critique, poetry, phutourgos, demiourgos, ideas, creativity, telos, philosophy, image, paradigm, poets, artists, lawmakers, reenact, procreate, love, immortality

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