Abstract
Do people confuse a real object with its symbol represented as its artistic, literary, or computerized imitation? Surely not – or not in the strict sense of the word, but things are more complicated than we may presume. Plato already worried about the dangers of artistic mimesis, in book 10 of the Republic. In this paper, I suggest that, indeed, modern neuroscience confirms that our brain may be confused by symbols, through mimetic associations and transferences (e.g. Lakoff and Johnston, Metaphors We Live, 1980; cf. Sapolsky’s chapter “Metaphors We Die By,” in Behave, 2017; Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, 1980). Furthermore, our fascination with mimetic fictions has become deeper lately, and it can lead us into transferring our humanity to the pursuit of an artificial mode of life. Here I would like to emphasize the features of the mimetic worlds (which I take very broadly to include art, fiction in all its variety, social media, video games, computer simulations) that fascinate us to the point that we forget the real world. Coherence, emotional involvement, and a state being in the flow, all may entrap us inside mimetic worlds. The solution, in my view, is not simply to lament our addiction to the mimetic forms and disengagement from our mundane life, which many of us already, do but rather to re-glamorize our existence and our fellow-humans.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Mimesis, Fiction, Value Transference, Human Life
