While discussing about Plato’s theory of art as imitation, I remembered the movie Matrix. According to Matrix, nothing in this world is real because we’re all just living in a world full of deceptions...
Years ago, I couldn’t understand what this film was talking about and thought it’s just a smart movie for human brains to pop out. Like it's a movie not for those people intellectually challenged, and I thought I was one of them... Maybe because I haven’t stirred up Plato’s idea of ‘imitation’ yet but remembering what the film was, Neo played by Keanu Reeves, was weighing things and figuring out what’s real and not in this world. That across the emotions that we’re all celebrating lay the possibility that it’s all fraud and deception. Well according to Plato, the concrete world is a first-order imitation which is also imitated for a secondary class of objects and all the following existing forms are just imitations of the previous classes. Complicated huh? Well, it’s like this… Everything around us is an imitation of an imitation from the original perception. That we're three times scratched from the truth, which is hanging somewhere out there in outer space. And that just bothers me a lot, if it’s really true that we’re just imitations from the original, why do we keep on reinventing a lot of things and having this so called "new concept" if it's an imitative concept from the Supreme being? Is the word “innovation” really not applicable in reality? That if a picture copied by an artist from a maker’s work is an example of imitation, what’s the next cycle after that? Where did we all really came from?
Plato also opened another argument that imitation has bad effects. Yes, we enjoy the feeling of imitating other things but sometimes, it leads us to a bad habit and produces moral weaknesses. Plato discussed that the second-order of imitation/ the makers of the concept we have in mind produces good imitations for the welfare of the society. What triggers from the lack of their ordinary uses are those imitators coming from the third-order of imitation (painters, photographers, etc.) because they can only let people be delighted of the piece of artwork they've done through the artworks' appearances but still, people won't have the exact feeling even if they had been delighted with the appearances because no matter how it is imitated perfectly, the artworks' purposes are challenged.
For example, if a dressmaker made a beautiful red gown, a customer can enjoy the gown's features if she could see it personally and enjoy the gown's purpose as for clothing. If a photographer tries to get a picture of the gown and showed it to another customer, the other customer will just be delighted of the gown's appearance but will never have the exact feeling to the customer who had seen the gown personally because she couldn't try it on. So that's why, even if the gown is already imitated by the photographer, the purpose of the gown as a garment is still lacking because what the person can just enjoy is just its appearance.
But still, the picture of the gown can be more or less considered true depending on how it is close to the original garment...
Plato also opened another argument that imitation has bad effects. Yes, we enjoy the feeling of imitating other things but sometimes, it leads us to a bad habit and produces moral weaknesses. Plato discussed that the second-order of imitation/ the makers of the concept we have in mind produces good imitations for the welfare of the society. What triggers from the lack of their ordinary uses are those imitators coming from the third-order of imitation (painters, photographers, etc.) because they can only let people be delighted of the piece of artwork they've done through the artworks' appearances but still, people won't have the exact feeling even if they had been delighted with the appearances because no matter how it is imitated perfectly, the artworks' purposes are challenged.
For example, if a dressmaker made a beautiful red gown, a customer can enjoy the gown's features if she could see it personally and enjoy the gown's purpose as for clothing. If a photographer tries to get a picture of the gown and showed it to another customer, the other customer will just be delighted of the gown's appearance but will never have the exact feeling to the customer who had seen the gown personally because she couldn't try it on. So that's why, even if the gown is already imitated by the photographer, the purpose of the gown as a garment is still lacking because what the person can just enjoy is just its appearance.
But still, the picture of the gown can be more or less considered true depending on how it is close to the original garment...
Oh, the headache! This is really a head bang worthy…
Well Plato... I’m just wondering what my original self-look like? Haha. :) If how close am I to the truth?
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