Catharses: Essays in Applied Mimetic Theory

By George Boreas

This collection of twenty-three essays brings into one volume two years of studying, researching, and writing on René Girard's mimetic theory. The author applies the theory to popular questions to reveal the hidden but fundamental role of mimesis in our lives and to give the reader new and empowering perspectives. The aim is to reproduce the catharsis that Girard's own work provided to so many of his readers: expulsion of the ignorance of imitation in our desires, origins, and culture.

 

Girard's rigorous theories are brought to bear upon current and popular topics in the spirit of affirming and building upon his legacy. Each essay was written to stand alone and be accessible even to readers with minimal familiarity with Girard's work. Yet, each ventures unique analyses and many offer original takes on new questions.

 

The essays were originally posted online in a series, receiving an enthusiastic reception. Here, they are presented after being extensively edited, expanded, substantiated, and organized into a coherent whole consisting of five parts: philosophy, history, sociology, politics, and psychology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George Boreas
• Release date: May 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201193065

George Boreas

eorge Boreas is a Canadian expat living in Shanghai, China. He was born in the Balkans. He has a professional background in engineering and business, and he now teaches economics. He moonlights as as an amateur boxer and a writer of short stories, novels, and essays on René Girard's mimetic theory.

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PART I: Philosophy

1

Truth in Literature and the Dramatic Arts

René Girard is famous for developing the theory of mimetic desire. At its core is the simple idea that we imitate the desires of others. Our physiological needs fulfilled, we look to people we admire to inform us about what it is we should be after. So far, you wouldn’t think there’s a great revelation here, right?

But the theory goes deeper, and deeper. One of its big claims is that the process of imitating others, labelled mimesis, is a fundamental aspect of life, and not only human life, but also animal. There is talk about mirror neurons and the essential role of imitation in intelligence and the building of skills and knowledge.¹ Infants learn with marvellous speed by imitating the environment around them, and especially by imitating their parents. The process does not involve merely making decisions or judgements; it is much deeper than that. Decisions and judgements are epiphenomena of the more fundamental process that is mimesis.

As adults, we like to think that we make autonomous decisions. As modern men and women, we are obsessed with the idea of originality. To Girard, these are delusions.

I can get on board here. I happened to have read countless university admissions essays. It is amusing to witness the obsession of applicants to appear original, induced, to be fair, by the expectation of academic admissions departments. Yet, in their very attempt to be different, the applicants become essentially indistinguishable from each other.

We have all seen countless commercials offering products that would enable us to be unique. We fall for them without noting that the commercials are broadcast to millions. When we walk into a fast fashion store, we look for the shirt that will make us stand out, forgetting that there will be thousands of shirts of that same design sold that season.

We have seen countless TV shows and films depicting dramatic heroes as authentic individuals battling the slavish conformity of the masses. Thousands of us then imitate those heroes. And we inevitably fail. Through our failure we can arrive at two conclusions: either we just don’t have what it takes, or what we were striving for reveals itself to be somehow fraudulent.

To the delusion of authenticity specifically from literature and the dramatic arts, Girard dedicates his first book, whose original French title translates directly to Romantic Lie and Romanesque Truth.² He calls the delusion, well, the romantic lie. He contrasts it with the romanesque truth, which is revealed only in the highest form of literature, all of which is unified in that truth. Romanesque truth is basically the revelation of the romantic lie. The process of revelation is what provides high catharsis to the reader.

In the dramatic climax of a romanesque novel, the hero does not finally acquire the object of his desire. Strictly speaking, such an acquisition cannot happen. The happily-ever-after does not exist. A romanesque novel starts with the hero setting off for the object of his desire. As the plot unfolds, he is assailed by the perfidious nature of that object. He faces disappointments, betrayals, rivalries. Finally, he undergoes some kind or other of spiritual collapse. It is in this collapse that he encounters the truth: it was his desire itself that was his undoing. His desire was not what he thought it was. It was not authentic. It was not really after the object, but after something else, something intangible. His desire was neither sovereign nor noble.

The desire of the hero springs from a suppressed yet humiliating sense of his human inadequacy and a proportionally frenetic need to overcome it. The hero is facing the spiritual void, the existential problem; he is longing for purpose; he is dealing with his mortality. He is longing for the divine. The degree to which he assuages it with mimetic desire measures the degree of what we call his vanity.

To another French essayist, Rémi Brague, the modern mind is defined precisely by how it decides to respond to the problem of this metaphysical inadequacy. The modern age was born with the modern project: to make man autonomous. The autonomy is to be wrested from nature, from social bonds, and from the divine. Man was to become the measure of all things, rather than an object of measurement that may or may not come up short, or inadequate.³

While Brague reveals the problem of modernity in the light of classical philosophy, Girard puts the lie to the modern idea of human autonomy from the perspective of his mimetic theory. Girard does not oppose man’s autonomy as a bad metaphysical choice for the solution to the problem of inadequacy. Rather, he claims that the modern man deludes himself when assuming that he is, can be, or even wants to be independent. All literary work that believes in and promotes this delusion is labelled romantic in Girard’s narrow and negative sense.

At the heart of the romantic delusion of autonomy lies the mistaken belief that we genuinely desire objects. In truth, objects are secondary to our desire to be the kind of being that, in our mind, the possession of that object signifies. And the image of such a being we cannot create for ourselves ex nihilo; rather, we always find someone else, our model or mediator, whom we imitate. As part of that, we imitate what we perceive to be the model’s desire; we strive after the same ephemeral object we think they possess or are striving after themselves.

The modern project is the project of achieving human autonomy in all fields: political, spiritual, artistic, technological. In parallel to the historic success of technology as a means of achieving autonomy, we see the development of the romantic lie in literature and dramatic arts. Our entertainment is there to bolster our belief in our authenticity, though this function is crumbling in the age of social media, when we are becoming increasingly aware of the paradox of learning authenticity by imitating celebrities who themselves imitate, or act, for a living. The romantic lie is what we are talking about when we talk about how fake Hollywood is. Girard’s theory allows us to articulate our critique with much greater eloquence.

I am not sure when this modern genre of the authentic hero started, but Girard describes chivalric fiction as already widespread and popular in the sixteenth-century Iberian Peninsula, thanks in no small part to the invention of the printing press. It was this first incarnation of pulp or genre fiction that was read by the first romanesque hero, Don Quixote. Many consider Don Quixote the first modern novel, and Girard agrees for the specific reason that it is the first instance of the romanesque revelation in the novel form. Don Quixote is presented as delusional precisely because he suffers from the romantic lie, and at the end of the novel he undergoes a conversion and recognizes his folly. Specifically, he denounces his erstwhile model, the fictional hero Amadís de Gaula, as what can be called, in Biblical terminology, a false idol.

Cervantes’ famous work is the first instance of romanesque truth in a modern novel. However, Girard argues that, in a less explicit form, it plays a central role in classic Greek tragedies. To Girard, the tragic conflict stems from protagonists who are self-assured about their authenticity or uniqueness, and whose self-assurance produces a blindness, the tragic fault, that causes them to come into conflict with others who challenge that authenticity.

The tragic problem is a problem of differentiation. Think Oedipus undifferentiated from his father Laius, and from Tiresias, a rival prophet; think of King Pentheus usurping the turf of the god Dionysus in Bacchae; think of the struggle to differentiate two slain brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, in the play Antigone.

Girard argues that Greek tragedy constitutes a partial revelation of archaic myths, which, in his analysis, originated as coverups of a foundational murder. From his second book, Violence and the Sacred, and onwards, Girard deals with ancient and primitive societies extensively.⁴ He builds a theory that places mimetic desire at the origin of culture. He believes mimesis plays a central role in the foundational murder, which had been famously introduced by Sigmund Freud.⁵ Girard reinterprets the foundational murder and takes it much further as a hypothesis. There are nevertheless similarities with Freud’s theory. For example, like Freud, Girard connects the foundational murder to sacrificial rituals.

René Girard sees sacrifice as the universal method of regulating violence. He traces the root of all collective violence to what he terms mimetic crisis, a social state in which the mimetic desires of all have escalated a web of rivalries to a pitch, and there is the imminent danger that an endless and devastating chain of violence will break out. The danger was much greater in primitive societies, which did not have a single, overpowering source of authority to deliver conclusive justice through a legal code. Instead, such societies were liable to endless tit-for-tats in the form of blood feuds or inter-tribal warfare.

During ancient mimetic crises, it often happened that citizens, pent up with violent urges ready to be unleashed, would fix their wrath on a single victim. They would vent their violence on the victim by coming together to murder him. This process of scapegoating is itself mimetic: just as they imitated each other’s desires, individuals now imitate each other’s preferred evildoers.

The scapegoat must be someone outside any group with a means to retaliate for the murder, so that the murder may be the final word on vengeance.⁶ Furthermore, involvement of the whole of society is required for the murder to produce unity. For the murder to have a purging effect, the participants must be convinced that the victim is guilty – ignorance (méconaissance) of the victim’s true role as what we today call a scapegoat is necessary.⁷

The selection of a single scapegoat has the tremendous practical value of re-unifying the society and imbuing conflict with collective meaning, with a story that later becomes instituted as a myth. The mimetic crisis that triggers the murder is itself likened to a general collapse of differentiation, a plague-like state of affairs in which citizens’ roles are jumbled, the authority differential collapses (when degree is suffocate in the words of Shakespeare’s Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida), and individuals become monstrously alike in their hatreds, violence, and covetousness. The murder of the scapegoat restores differentiation by redistributing social roles and making citizens work in harmonious unison.

After the murder has been committed, the citizens find themselves marvellously relieved of wrath and in harmony with each other. Girard explains that such an event was seasonally re-enacted by primitive societies through the ritual of sacrifice, for the purpose of maintaining the peace that came the first time around. The sacrificial victim, whether human or animal, took the place of the original victim of the mob. The original victim for its part typically became deified.

Girard argues that this scapegoating mechanism, which he later called the victimary mechanism, is foundational to all human culture. Eventually, he ends up tackling the significance of Jesus Christ as the final sacrificial victim, the Lamb of God to end all mimetic strife. His views are not challenged by the Catholic Church.

NOTES

1 Garrels, Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire.

2 Girard’s first book was Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque,published byGrasset in1961. The English translation, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure,came out in 1966.

3 InRémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man.

4Girard’s second book, La Violence et le Sacré,was published in French in 1971. It was translated to English by Patrick Gregory in 1977 at Johns Hopkins University Press.

5 Freud, Totem and Taboo, Ch. 4, Sect. 5.

6 Girard, Violence and the Sacred,p. 16.

7 Scapegoat originated in the English language as the translation for a sacrificial goat in the King James Bible. As described Leviticus 16, the priest would ritually lay the sins of the community on the goat and the animal would then be cast out into the wilderness. Because this and similar rituals have come to appear as irrational to us moderns, the term scapegoat has come to mean an innocent victim.

2

Homo Desiderans

MONGOL GENERAL: We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?

MONGOL WARRIOR: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons on your wrist, wind in your hair!

MONGOL GENERAL: Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?

CONAN: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

MONGOL GENERAL: That is good.

- Conan the Barbarian, 1982

What is the purpose of life? we all wonder. Any philosophy needs to set its answer to that question as its cornerstone. One may end up picking happiness, love, power, propagation of good genes, or a more complex definition of some highest good. 

The object of philosophical inquiry is man, and that object is approached with an attitude one might assume when dissecting a frog or reverse-engineering a machine. The unique thing about philosophy, though, is that it produces the confounding phenomenon of a machine studying itself. This peculiarity pushes the philosopher to take things to an ever-deeper level, setting him on a trajectory that often recalls a dog chasing his own tail.

Yet the pursuit of that deepest level stubbornly continues. Today it happens in computer science with research in artificial neural networks, a technology that apes the cellular structure of the brain to achieve stunning successes in taking in visual images and outputting object labels. It can do the equivalent with auditory and other types of inputs. Artificial neural networks consist of information-relaying nodes that, in imitation of the brain’s neurons, are arranged in multiple layers communicating with each other. The lowest layer receives raw stimuli and then communicates to the next layer, which creates a reduced message passed on to the third layer, and so on until the final layer derives an object name.

I say apes for two reasons. First, the architects of neural networks replicate the structure of the brain without having a mathematical model for how they work. The degree of complexity becomes too astronomical for classical analysis. The approach to improving the networks can be described as heuristic, which is to say, you play around with the knobs and levers through educated guesses and trial and error. This playing around comprises a vast and expanding field of research that is marked by the highest levels of human ingenuity, but the fact remains that there is no classical algorithm for building a neural network. 

It is the heuristic design of artificial intelligence (AI) that creates unpredictability, legal challenges, and the fears of AI takeover. An article on this topic in MIT Technology Review says the following on the inscrutability of neural networks:

The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action.… You can’t just look inside a deep neural network to see how it works. A network’s reasoning is embedded in the behaviour of thousands of simulated neurons, arranged into dozens or even hundreds of intricately interconnected layers.¹

Second, neural networks replicate the peculiarly human habit of categorizing stimuli. Neural networks recall Plato’s theory of forms: objects are imperfect instances of forms or ideals, which constitute the essence of the objects and exist in some transcendent realm. Neural networks, human and artificial, can be thus thought of as machines that translate from the realm of perceived objects to the realm of forms. 

In the early modern era, René Descartes formulated a famous definition of human essence; I think, therefore I am. The aphorism has served as an inspiration for modern science, including AI. No doubt that humans think, but we are still left to wonder: What is the goal of our thinking?

This question is where I turn to the philosophy of the other René, namely, René Girard. Instead of positing a specific objective to the question of what humans desire, Girard’s mimetic theory achieves a breakthrough, in my view, as it stops at the question and defines humans as the creatures that desire.

Not answering the questions prevents us from pigeonholing ourselves into a school of thought, a social club, or even a cult. In ancient Greece, Socrates’ philosophy split into Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics, each school advocating a different purpose of life, in competition with the others. Even before that, gods of the polytheistic pantheons of Greece and older Mediterranean civilizations seemed to have represented differentiated ideals – Mercury for commerce, Ares for war, Aphrodite for love – with their cults serving as social clubs for those citizens who chose to dedicate themselves a particular ideal, while more generalist citizens may go around and pay respect to each ideal in turn, following a busy calendar of holy days. Today, we still have finance bros, fitness freaks, foodies, etc.

Defining the human as that which desires has elegance and power. It opens new perspectives in philosophy, biology, and theology, and it brings them together to create a new and compelling vision of our origin. I already mentioned that in philosophy, it liberates us from the necessity to pick a restrictive definition of who we are. In biology, it creates the distinction between instinct and desire. Instincts are hardwired, not learned. They do not include visions of a better future. A beaver may have an instinct to build a dam, but it doesn’t daydream about becoming a better beaver once the dam is complete. The beaver is perfectly content with being the beaver that he is today.

Desire, on the other hand, is the strange thing that started the human. Here was an animal which looked at its surroundings and thought, in whatever primeval language it commanded, I want something that is not here. There is something more than this; I want it, and I want to bring it about.

Desire involves envisioning an idealized future that requires the cognitive abilities of homo sapiens. It is characterized by a feeling of not belonging to the here and now and looking to escape it. Desire, in other words, is always a compulsion towards transcendence, for rising above the circumstances that surround us. Desire is what makes humans feel like they are not at home in the world in which they, somehow, awake as animals. 

The distinction between desire and instinct can appear fuzzy because the two modes of pursuit are often after the same object. We have both an instinct to eat and a desire to eat. Unless we are starving, eating is not merely about sustenance for the body, but about the joy we experience through the sense of taste, from receiving food, from sharing our food with others, etc. Joy is desire temporarily fulfilled, an encounter with transcendence that elevates us above the drudgery of everyday life. The instinct analogue of joy in the case of food would be merely the neural state of satiety and lethargy felt after a full meal. Similar distinctions can be made in pursuit of sex or various forms of perceived safety – here too, our instinctual prerogatives are still there, but they are buried under resplendent structures of desire, and we interpret our goals as matters of higher or lower being. 

Desire as pursuit of transcendence implies that what we are after is never an object, but, as Girard puts it, all desire is desire for being.² We desire objects because we think that they will unlock for us a higher state of being, but in truth, objects are only secondary. The question is not what do we want, but rather who do we want to be? In our desires, we inevitably create a model for ourselves, a person who we will imitate. Girard’s opus is called mimetic theory because its central claim is that all desire is imitated – we desire according to the other. Once we as philosophers see that objects are secondary to desire, we are not forced to restrict the purpose of humanity to any of them.

All desire is received from a human mediator. There is a triangle here consisting of the desiring subject, a mediator whom the subject emulates, and the object that the mediator either possesses or desires, and that thereby becomes an object of desire for the subject as well. If we accept the idea of desire as the pursuit of transcendental being, then the need for a mediator becomes clear. Without the mediator, we only have the subject pursuing an object, a fixed endeavour that is tantamount to animal instinct. As Girard puts it:

If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good.³

It is important to note that mimetic rivalry over objects is not the same as the animal struggle over scarce resources. In the first, the value of an object is generated by the gaze of the other, whereas in the second, the value of a resource is strictly in the resource itself. There is no fashion among animals. Much human conflict is justified as a struggle over scarce resources; however, this does not account for the overwhelming and irrational destruction of war, the ultimate form of conflict, a destruction that is better understood as sacrificial catharsis. If war did not involve irrational passions of mimesis, it would take the form of what Clausewitz describes as a kind of war by algebra,⁴ a process that skips the violence part as unnecessary and truncates war to a perfectly reasonable and bloodless negotiation process.

Sexual desire, of course, holds a special place in human society, having so much strife, customs, and art dedicated to it. Sexuality is unique perhaps because, as a pursuit of the most intimate union with another person, someone who somehow completes us, it resonates powerfully with desire’s quest of filling the lack of being through the other.

In its discovery of the primacy of the mediator in desire, at the expense of both the object and the subject, mimetic theory uncovers the shortcomings of many a modern ideology. A most basic effect of civilization has been to instill shame in desiring what others have. Consequently, and ironically, ideologies of the civilized modern era have a most persistent tendency to ignore the other and build themselves either around the object or around the subject. This blindness accounts for their failure to bring about the peace that they promise. Girard says this already in his first book, Deceit Desire and the Novel (Chap. 1): 

The vain romantic always wants to convince himself that his desire is written into the nature of things, or, which amounts to the same thing, that it is the emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine ego. Desire is no longer rooted in the object perhaps, but it is rooted in the subject; it is certainly not rooted in the Other. The objective and subjective fallacies are one and the same; both originate in the image which we all have of our own desires. Subjectivisms and objectivisms, romanticisms and realisms, individualisms and scientisms, idealisms and positivisms appear to be in opposition but are secretly in agreement to conceal the presence of the mediator. All these dogmas are the aesthetic or philosophic translation of world views peculiar to internal mediation. They all depend directly or indirectly on the lie of spontaneous desire. They all defend the same illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted.

*

Machiavelli wrote at the dawn of the modern era. His ideas on the true objectives of princes provoked outrage in his time and still generate controversy. The Machiavellian prince is either praised as pragmatic or condemned as cruel, but rarely is he deemed unrealistic. Machiavelli’s universe is modern in that it consists of the prince as the subject and everyone else as an object to be manipulated. Yet, in the real world, one Machiavellian prince soon finds himself confronted with another Machiavellian prince. The subject–object dynamic dissolves and turns into the tragic confrontation of warring twins. The ancient ideas of tragic confrontation of brothers, of hubris and nemesis, are much simpler than modern treatises and manifestos, but they come closer to the truth in encapsulating human strife.

Nietzsche, another bad boy of philosophy, for his part posited will-to-power as a prime human mover, and, like Machiavelli, imagined a single, quasi-divine egoist manipulating the rest of humanity as a passive object. In the real world, if you were to lock two will-to-power Zarathustras in the same room for two weeks, when you come back you would probably find one or both of them dead or maimed.

The same goes for any subjectivist or objectivist ideology, even those that do not directly oppose traditional morals. Both communism and ideological capitalism ignore mimetic desire and posit some form of mastery over the material world as an end in itself. The modern man, so passionately devoted to his autonomy and busy on his heroic quest to achieve it, is always confused when conflict flares up in his egotistical little world. He does not acknowledge that he desires according to the other, and he cannot see when or why the other desires what he does. He is therefore always surprised and indignant when the conflict with the other flares up. To him, the Devil is not supposed to exist, but as the saying goes, that’s the Devil’s biggest trick. 

It is not difficult to see how mimetic theory ties in with the religious ideas of the divine origin of man, and especially those in the Book of Genesis. The mysterious capacity to label sensory phenomena (or name them, in Biblical jargon) – a trait that is inseparable from intelligence – makes man an image of the Creator. His sense of not belonging to nature, and his desire to rise above it, correspond to the ideas of the fall and salvation, respectively. Furthermore, it is reasonable to think that the capacity to create idealized forms out of sensory data must somehow be connected to the sense that the world in which we live is not ideal and the consequent wish to escape it. Intelligence and desire are inseparable. 

Our desiring or idealizing nature convinces us with equal force that transcendence is something we do not possess and that someone else does, and it drives us inevitably to select a human model, a person whom we endow with a higher state of being. We strive to imitate the model’s behaviour and obtain his possessions. Meanwhile, the model, if he senses our desire for his possessions, will see it as an affirmation of their transcendent value, and he will jealously cling to them. Competitive strife thus ascribes transcendence to objects in both our eyes and our model’s and leads us both of us to pride, envy, and jealousy. 

An interesting article in the journal Contagion discusses conflictual mimesis as the ‘scientific version of the doctrine of Original Sin.’⁵ The history of humankind starts when man perceives God as a rival: 

The serpent insinuates that God withholds something from humankind so that they may not be like God. By means of this distortion, God suddenly doesn’t seem to be the gracious giver of all life anymore. Rather, God appears as a rival to human beings, wanting to guard ‘his’ position against ‘his’ rivals.

Imitation of models is what makes us human; it is what allows us to connect with the other in the best way – through love. However, when models become rivals, we get every form of evil. The article quotes Girard on this point: 

It [mimetic desire] is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.

The ambivalent nature of mimesis can be summarized in what on its own sounds like a platitude: desire is the cause of all the best and all the worst in us. In