Transcript of Girard Lecture II | Mimetic Desire and Original Sin

0. Introduction

David Perell: In many parts of culture, children are led along a path of prestige, where they’re told to ace their tests no matter how tedious so they can attend an elite university no matter how incompatible, in order to work a prestigious job no matter how trivial.

Prestige sometimes provides the necessary motivational force to achieve our goals, but even when doing so, often pulls us towards the wrong goals – dating the “right” person who is wrong for us, living in a fancy neighborhood that’s beyond our means, befriending influential people who we don’t actually like – and it’s no coincidence, I think, that the Latin word for prestige translates to “illusion” or “mirage”.

What I found most fascinating about this lecture is that it provides a comprehensive theory to help us distinguish between authentic desire and social validation in order to wean off the drug of prestige.

Girard helps us see the extraordinary extent to which society is motivated by prestige. It’s like the arrow in the FedEx logo that you might have learned about as a kid. One second, you don’t see it. The next, it’s with you for eternity, and you wonder how you went blind for so long.

So I hope you find this lecture as illuminating as I do.

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Johnathan Bi: After our first introductory lecture, we’re now ready to dive into Girard’s theory proper. We’re gonna spend two lectures, this one and the next one, in understanding Girard’s psychology, after which we’re gonna spend four lectures understanding how these psychological forces drive human history and manifest quite differently in different historical circumstances.

In this lecture, we are focusing on understanding the dominant psychological forces within one individual. It’s going to proceed with the gradually zeroing in on the most powerful and explanatory forces in human psychology. Within the realm of all human behavior, we’re going to focus on mimetic behavior. Within the realm of mimetic behavior, we’re going to focus on mimetic desire. And within mimetic desire, we’re focusing on metaphysical desire.

This tripartite narrowing down is not an arbitrary bias, it’s not a blinded ignorance about the other parts of human psychology like reason and appetite, but it’s a surgical focus on the most unique, explanatory, and powerful elements within human psychology. Mimesis, mimetic desire, metaphysical desire is what differentiates humans from animals – what makes us social creatures – and importantly the key motor responsible for driving human events in history, and that is why Girard focuses on them.

These components within human psychology, however, are also what render us evil and fallen. There’s something necessarily perverse within these key motors of human motivation that allowed Girard to begin painting an anthropology of the Cross – his project to explain and describe Christian phenomenon through cultural, psychological, and social language. After I describe these three psychological components then — mimesis, mimetic desire, metaphysical desire — I will describe Girard’s argument for why metaphysical desire is none other than our original sin. And how we can interpret original sin in purely psychological language. Let us first then begin with understanding mimesis.

1. Mimesis

Johnathan Bi: Mimesis can be best understood under the light of David Hume. In his A Treatise on Human Nature, Hume develops a concept that becomes foundational to Scottish moral philosophy: sympathy. Sympathy is the human capacity to understand others by co-experiencing their emotions in one’s own mind. In order to emphasize just how foundational and inevitable Hume took this capacity to be, Hume employs the very famous metaphor of two violin strings setting each other in motion. When you put two violin strings together, as you flick one, a similar frequency of vibration will translate into the other. 

This is how Hume describes it. I quote:

As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another and beget correspondent movements in every human creature.

What is relevant in this analogy for Girard, is the observation that there’s a species of human behavior – and for the lack of a better term, I apologize, I use “behavior” here to connote the broadest possible sense of behavior: whether it’s experiences, judgments, actions, intentions, values – there’s a species of human behavior that proceed from copying an external instance of said behavior. Indeed, this logic that Hume identifies in sympathy – the carrying out of an external behavior – is none other than the logic of mimesis. What is different is that unlike sympathy, which only traffics in emotions, mimesis spans the entire gamut of human behavior.

I like this metaphor because, first, it describes humans as naturally social creatures prone to a form of co-vibration. Just as strings on a violin aren’t independent, neither are we. Mimesis is the fundamental capacity to gain access to the subjectivity of others as well as to reproduce objective cultural forms – so in other words, mimesis constitutes us as social beings.

Second, I like this analogy because it clearly paints mimesis as a tendency. Just as strings next to each other are inclined to co-vibrate, so are we in ingesting our cultural environment.

The third reason that I like this analogy, then, is because mimesis here is also clearly painted as a capacity, not a deterministic faculty that we are obliged to always follow. This metaphor leaves room for agency because the violinist can always, when plucking the first string, pluck the second string differently, or hold the second string steady so that it does not co-vibrate. In the same manner, mimesis itself does not rob us of our agency, and we have some degree of freedom to choose who and what to imitate, whom to extend sympathy to.

David Perell: What evidence is there for mimesis?