1979/01/01 by Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamín, Knut Tarnowski · 95 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Aesthetics #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Doctrine #Epistemology #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies #Philosophy #Psychology #Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices #Similarity (geometry) #Sociology
paper · doi:10.2307/488010
published in New German Critique (17), 65 (Duke University Press)
openalex publication_date 1979/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/17
Insight into the areas of the similar has a fundamental importance for the illumination of large areas of occult knowledge. Such insight, however, is to be gained less by demonstrating found similarities than by reproducing processes which produce such similarities. Nature produces similaritiesone need only think of mimicry. Human beings, however, possess the very highest capability to produce similarities. Indeed, there may not be a single one of the higher human functions which is not decisively co-determined by the mimetic faculty. This faculty, however, has a history, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically. With respect to the latter, it is in many ways formed by play. To begin with, children's games are everywhere interlaced with mimetic modes of behavior, and their range is not limited at all to what one human being imitates from another. A child not only plays at being a grocer or a teacher, but also at being a windmill or a train. The question which matters, however, is the following: what does a human being actually gain by this training in mimetic attitudes? The answer presupposes a clear reflection on the phylogenetic importance of mimetic behavior. To determine this, it does not suffice to think, for example, merely of what the concept of similarity means for us today. As we know, the sphere of life which once seemed to be ruled by the law of similarity used to be much larger. It was the microcosm and the macrocosm, to give but one version of the many found by the experience of similarity over the course of history. It can still be maintained today that the cases in which people consciously perceive similarities in everyday life are a minute segment of those countless cases unconsciously determined by similarity. The similarities which one perceives consciously, for instance in faces, are, when compared to the countless similarities perceived unconsciously or not at all, like the enormous underwater mass of an iceberg in comparison to the small tip which one sees projecting above the waves. These natural correspondences, however, assume their decisive importance only in light of the consideration that they all stimulate and awaken that mimetic faculty which responds to them in human beings. Here one must recall that neither the mimetic forces nor their objects, i.e., the mimetic objects, have remained the same, unchanged over the course of time. In the course of the centuries the mimetic force, and then with it the