explain theory of imitation according to plato?

Answer 1

In Book X of the Republic, Plato claims that art imitates the physical world. Creating art is basically an act of copying the physical world. But you may recall that Plato thinks our world of ordinary objects is just a shadow of reality – what's most real is the world of Forms (which ordinary people cannot experience directly). So a work of art turns out to be a copy of a copy of a Form. It is like making photocopies. The original document is the Form. Then a copy is made. This copy is what we experience as an object in the world. Then the artist comes along and makes a copy of this copy, so Plato would say that it is even more of an illusion than the physical world. Each copy is "further from reality" that what it was copied from. On Plato's theory, works of art are at best entertainment, and at worst a dangerous delusion.

Answer 2

Theory Of Imitation

Answer 3

Added to the fine response above, you should consider the image of the divided line at the end of the sixth book in the Republic. It is an image of the imitative quality of reality. The top half of the divided line stands for the intelligible and knowable, and the bottom half is an image of it . . . it is the visible and the perceptible.

Also, if each of these halves is further divided into two, the bottom part will be an image of the top part of the its divided line.

So, the top top part is the really real . . . the forms/ideas, which are known by intelligence or mind through dialectic. The bottom top part is difficult to name, but we might call it the hypothetically grasped, which we reach through thought.

The top bottom part is the everyday realm of particular things, which in themselves they are manifestations of the forms (the forms "show up" in them). We sense these things, and we can have opinion or trust regarding them. The bottom bottom part is the images of particular things, which are themselves images. These are the images of images that are addressed in the tenth book. Our faculty specific to this level is the imagination.

Intelligible:
Forms / Intelligence (noesis) [dialectic]
Hypothetically grasped? / thought (dianoia) [arts]

Visible:
Many things / trust (pistis)
Images / imagination (eikasia)

I hope that this helps.

Answer 4

I feel so bad at the awful quality of answers you got. Here's the best way to present it: We're able to look at all of the galaxies in our view and make measurements about them. The measurements told us that every single galaxy is moving away from us equally at a very fast rate. We then decided to look at only one of them ... know what we found? Every galaxy is also moving away from that one at a very fast rate. In fact, every galaxy we looked at has every other galaxy in the universe miving away from it at a very fast rate. What this tells us, is that space itself is expanding at a very fast rate. We looked more carefully and started getting exact numbers about how fast it's increasing and developed a math formula about its expansion. If we run that formula in reverse, the universe gets smaller and smaller until it ends up in a single point. We call that point the singularity. We don't know why yet, or where it came from, but one day the singularity stared to expand SUPER fast. We call that expansion ... the big bang. All the mass and energy in the universe were condensed into a single point, and then one day ... it expanded to form our universe. We have some ideas as to what happened, but no facts. It's still quite a mystery.

Answer 5

life is a blueprint according to plato - its all imitation