Philosophy Commons^™

"Everything Flows": The Poetics Of Transformation, Lawrence Kimmel

Philosophy Faculty Research

Plato famously dismissed art as thrice removed from reality, holding that mimesis is a copy of a copy, a distraction from the more serious affairs of truth. Two millennia have done little to remove this stigma of dissembling deceit leveled at art. Metamorphosis provides an alternative view of reality, and of the access of art to that reality, that I will consider in the remarks that follow. On the opposite view of things from Plato, Heralclitus, addressing the question of reality — of what and how things are — declared “IIαvτα Pηεl ”, Everything Flows: the idea that reality …