“Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature.”
-Aristotle
Precisely. Imagine how infants try to imitate the people close to them, their parents in particular. Uttering the ‘ma-ma’ and ‘pa-pa’. Following their parents or siblings do the ‘close-open’ hand/s or point a finger or clap their hands. This process of imitation of what they notice around them continues until they become old.
If Plato views imitation negatively, Aristotle thinks otherwise. For him, imitation is good and it is in imitation that we learn.
Children in particular slowly become part of the ‘real world’ once they have acquired the things they have to learn. And the only way they acquire these things is through learning from their parents, siblings, relatives, and other older people. In addition, one would know that a certain individual belongs to a particular culture because of the way he or she speaks, acts, thinks, etc. And how someone speaks, acts, and thinks are patterned through their upbringing or background. Most of the time, children tend to speak, act, and think alike with their parents. Probably because parents are supposedly the most influential individuals to a child. Even some grown-up children tend to idolize or look up to their parents.
But for me, it is not only in imitation that we acquire learning. There are times as well that we learn from our own discovery and ingenuity. That is when we try to be different, to have our own world, and still we could learn a lot from being independent from imitation.
