Rene Girard

All of a sudden I am seeing this name I know nothing about show up everywhere, enough so that young people with pretensions will be tempted to look wise and say "Oh sure, Girard.  I had to read him in college and I just loved his insights but I haven't really kept up with him. Oh there's a new book out about mimetic desire?  I'll have to get that.  That was one of the things he was known for" when they have in fact never heard of the guy before and are just guessing.  I was pretty good at that kind of treading water back in the day, but have come to accept that I have not only not read 50% of what I should, I haven't read 10%, and I can let it go. 

But from context of the references I was seeing I could tell I 'd bet I would like this guy and thus made guesses and then looked him up to see how close I had gotten.  He is mostly only known to academics but has been penetrating, well somewhere.  People I read, anyway. 

So in the spirit of Pierre Bayard's How To talk About Books You Haven't Read (which I actually have read, ironically, and wrote about in 2015), I give you Rene Girard, French philosopher of anthropology.

His idea is that as social creatures, we do not want things because we see them as objects and think "Oh, I think I would like that," but because we see other people using them and want to imitate their joy/satisfaction/prestige/whatever. The mind rebels against such accusations.  We like to think we are more independent in our thoughts, but we certainly see that this observation seems to be true for lots of other people and so...uggh, maybe it applies to ourselves as well.

I have counterexamples which immediately spring to mind WRT my own desires, so I am quite confident that Girard's observation is not entirely true about all of us all the time. Still, I admit that there may be far fewer exceptions to this than any of us would like to believe. It is part of our base personalities since childhood, after all, which we see when we are no longer children ourselves but observe toddlers who suddenly want a toy they were not interested in once another child picks it up from their pile of discards, or watches a 19 y/o girl start affecting the anti-fashions of the girls in their 20s who "couldn't give a fig about fashion"®. 

Tangent: I saw a teenager with her mother at the store today wearing a black cape and thought "When I was that age, I would have fallen in love with that girl on sight. Five years later I would have inquired after her with moderate interest. Now...she drains energy out of me just to look at her." 

It is not just that we want things because others have them, however.  That is only the simplified foundation of our desires. We are finely attuned to not only the type of people having the pleasure - are they the sort of people who are enough like us that we might have this pleasure as ell - but what type of pleasure are they having, and do we want that ourselves. We see people enjoying large family gatherings but know ourselves to be people who are not as drawn to many connections that carry implied obligations even if the temporary enjoyment of them is considerable. To take a physical example, we do not like holding babies for more than a few moments, or to be polite and declaring our solidarity with the rest of the cousins. We recognise that others want to get a fourth or fifth turn at holding the baby, but that is not us.

The idea came to him as a young man, and thus unsurpirisingly when one is young, because he fell in love.

When he was in early twenties, René Girard got his first glimpse into the structure of desire. During his university studies in France, he fell in love. After a short and intense period of courtship, he settled down into a stable relationship with his girlfriend. Then things changed in an instant. His girlfriend asked him if he wanted to get married.Right away, he experienced a decrease in desire. He quickly backed off. It wasn’t long before he ended the relationship.She accepted it, went her own way, and began dating other men.Then, suddenly, he was drawn back to her again. He noticed something that he found curious—and troubling. The more she denied herself to him, the more he wanted her.

He observed that she was both the object and mediator of his desire, and began forming a philosophy around this, Mimetic Desire. 

How French, I hear you saying. Yes, exactly.

Girard expands this outward to larger anthropological issues. If we want what others like us want, those desires will converge, and we - Our Selves or Our Tribe -  will tend to want the same thing that other selves or tribes want, in a self-reinforcing dance. This can lead to all sorts of animosity, even violence. But at this point I would actually have to start knowing something, so i pass it over to you, to decide whether you want any more of him or not.