Poetics (Aristotle) versus ethics and education (Plato)

With regard to the discussion of guardians in Plato’s State, Koller writes about Plato’s “intellectual shaping of the concept of mimesis”: “May the guardians [...] become μιμητικοί” [mimētikoí], i.e. actors? “With 395 b [...] a typically Platonic shift in the train of thought sets in. μίμησις, μιμεῖσθαι and its derivatives, which had previously been strictly technical terms for forms of representation, are suddenly given an ethical value. [...] [F]or the first time, the form of representation μίμησις [mímēsis] is confronted with the represented and the representation’s truth content is questioned.” From now on, mimesis is “‘only’” an “imitation”, in which the distance to the truth can be determined. Painting, for example, as a “reflection of the individual object”, which “in turn is only an image” of an “idea”, “has the greatest distance from the truth of the idea.”⁷¹ Koller summarizes: “With all [...] clarity, it becomes clear here that Plato is not concerned with poetics (in the Aristotelian sense), but with a theory of education.”⁷²

This brings us full circle to Trump. After all, the accusations repeatedly made against him are, on the one hand, that he lies (i.e. distorts the truth into its opposite),⁷³ and, on the other, that his language itself is too far removed from the truth (Plato with Koller) by becoming ‘mere sound’. These accusations, however—this constitutes the crux of the argument made here—are based on the Platonic model of mimesis, in which what was poetics before Plato and until Aristotle has now become ethics. Poetics, one could say, does not care about truth, or in Nietzsche’s words from The Gay Science: “For as Homer says: ‘Much indeed the singers lie!’”⁷⁴ In this sense, Trump is a singer and dancer, or a performer, against whom platonic, ethically motivated criticism, which is concerned with truth and language, slips away.

We cannot simply respond to Trump’s Teflon-like quality by asserting that politics is a practice that revolves around truth and arguments as well as—at least in Habermas’ idea of liberal democracy—discourse and deliberation. Of course politics is such a practice, although to varying degrees, depending on the historical point of view. In fact, Habermas himself has wondered whether his theory of the deliberative public sphere still applies in the age of social media.⁷⁵ Either way, non-linguistic political practices and performances should not be overlooked or even suppressed simply because they seem strange, incomprehensible or unappealing. If Trump is obviously as convincing as he is, but not convincing with arguments, then there must be an explanation beyond the argument. The thesis here is that such an explanation is, among other things, visible in Trump’s dancing.

Notes

1. ⁷¹Koller refers here (Die Mimesis in der Antike, p. 73) to the beginning of Book X of Plato’s State (595a-598d). Towards the end of this discussion it says with reference to painting: “Πόρρω ἄρα που τοῦ ἀληθοῦς ἡ μιμητική ἐστιν καί“; “So far from the truth is the imitation”; Plato: Πολιτεία. The State, in: Works in Eight Volumes. Greek and German, 4th volume. Edited by Dietrich Kurz. [...] German translation by Friedrich Schleiermacher, Darmstadt 1971, pp. 802 and 803 (598b).
2. ⁷²Koller, Die Mimesis in der Antike, pp. 17, 63f. and 17f.
3. ⁷³Cf. e.g. Haberman, Confidence Man, p. 91. Mary Trump notes that Trump also lies for the sake of making a story sound better: “As usual with Donald, the story mattered more than the truth, which was easily sacrificed, especially if a lie made the story sound better.” Mary L. Trump: Too Much and Never Enough. How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, London et al. 2020, p. 7.
4. ⁷⁴Friedrich Nietzsche: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in: Werke in drei Bänden, ed. by Karl Schlechta, vol. 2, München 2/1960, pp. 7-274, p. 94 (2nd book, no. 84).
5. ⁷⁵See Jürgen Habermas: Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik, Berlin 2022.