Thanks again for this series. Martha Nussbaum's critique of Proust in her essay "Love's Knowledge" might offer an interesting perspective on Girard's moves here as well. For Nussbaum, Proust's Marcel distinguishes, perhaps similar to Stendhal, between the vanity of an intellectualist self-knowledge and the passionate truth of self-knowledge through the shock of suffering. Marcel thinks he knows he does not love Albertine, but he has mistaken for his true self his own deadening habits, which obscure his own fear and vulnerability, and the shock of loss clears those away and reveals his love. But Nussbaum argues that he has only revealed a different relationship with himself, that love and fear and envy are not distinguishable by the quality of their feeling alone but require some sort of further evidential context, and the centerpiece of her critique is an emphasis on time.
Nussbaum thinks, as I understand it, that in Proust, true knowledge -- which we might think of as direct access or an unmediated relation -- happens in an instant or in the eternity of that instant, but as such, it can only be a relation with oneself. For her, what feels like a revelation could always be a misunderstanding. All that can reveal the difference is time: time with others, time to doubt, time to trust and accept uncertainty. She uses Ann Beattie's "Learning to Fall" as the contrast here in a lovely way.
Not to say this reflects on Girard himself necessarily, but: this follows a similar authoritarian/egalitarian pattern as in the contrast between Girard and pragmatism. The response to mediation is mediation of a different sort, self-transcendence not through a self-obliterating (or "self"-obliterating) passion but through time with others, through duration, whether attending to others in loving care or deliberating alongside others in an endlessly self-revising inquiry. For the egalitarian, the uncertain self-transcendence of solidarity may be the answer. Maybe for the authoritarian, this is insufficiently certain -- or insufficiently self-regarding.
Note: it looks like the link for Part 2 is actually linking to Part 1.
Thanks for continuing the instructive Girard posts. I've been following to see if I can discern whether my puzzlement about Girard is on point or not. What puzzles me about the concept of mimetic desire is whether and how it can account for the element of mystery or inscrutability in desire––even when desire is most obviously mimetic. To take the example from Balzac in a previous post: the clerk who becomes enchanted by seeing someone's drawing room decor. The clerk will have seen dozens if not hundreds of drawing rooms across the years, so what can explain why his imagination and desire is ignited by that particular one and not the others (many of which signal just as plausibly things like class status or serenity or some other quality)?
I'm getting the impression, especially from this post, that Girard wants to use mimetic desire to enable a hierarchical schema of higher and lower psychic motives or moral traits. Desire can seem profoundly inscrutable (where does it come from? can it be altered? can we be deceived about it or is it the thing we can't deny or fully suppress even if we hide it?) It kind of looks like Girard means to take up the nearly inscrutable nature of desire as an occasion to distinguish nobler or more authentic kinds of subjects from more debased ones?
If so, it does seem in the neighborhood of Christian apologetics. If we let God locate all that is beyond human comprehension, we get a lot of leverage for comprehensively explaining humans. "Deviated transcendency" can be set off from "vertical transcendency." But maybe it is humans who are irreducibly mysterious, especially when we try to account for desire.
Finally, it may or may not be germane, but computer algorithms are probably the closest thing there is to a science of desire, at least as it operates in the arena of consumption. The premise and promise is that what we desire is completely predictable––not at all mysterious. Do tech disciples find human inscrutability as intolerable as theologians and priests?
“computer algorithms are probably the closest thing there is to a science of desire”
This misunderstanding is the entire basis of why our society is as whacked out as it has been in the last 60 years. Computers maximize a numerical goal according to a model of reality. It is only r*pe culture that keeps the motor running at this point on that particular royal scam.
It's quite possible I misunderstand algorithms and consumer desire. How r*pe culture is relevant, though, I have no idea––but probably don't need to know.
Girard’s solution to the problems of mediated desire also involve a reconfiguration of the imagination in a mystical experience that combines the religious and aesthetic. He calls the morbid preoccupation with the Other that he finds in the novels “deviated transcendency;” it is a result of a kind of idolatry brought on by internal mediation, we search for the divine in the world for nought. But this is just a kind of distorted analogy of the spiritual search: “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency.”
It seems like within this system is a hierarchy of values. Some have this ability (innately?) and others don't. Holy mother church knows something about power, order, and violence. What happens when the dispossessed claim the right to imagine and act not due to imitation but due to their own imagination of the good life for the many?
Doesn't this confuse questions about the *source* of desires with questions about the *specification* of desires?
Specification of desires: if I grow up in Japan, I will be hungry for rice; if in Italy, hungry for pasta, if in Dubuque, hungry for hamburgers. It should be uncontroversial that my hunger is given its specific and detailed form by my cultural context, my upbringing, the patterns and images around me, and my aspirations for imitation. When MacDonald's came to Moscow, the hunger for hamburgers was a clear case of mimetic desire, in a population that had previously hungered for borscht and blini.
Sources of desire: my desire to eat food -- described at that level of generality as "food" -- has nothing to do with imitation, and everything to do with the biological needs of an animal. When my dogs are hungry, they are not imitating anything, they just need calories. Likewise, my desire for sex is an evolutionary inheritance from way back before my ancestors had legs. My desire for status and acceptance is a built into the genetic hardware of a social creature that lives in social groups.
Of course, all of these genetically-sourced desires will manifest themselves in culturally-specified ways. I'll chase skirts if I grow up in one culture and kimonos in another. I'll seek status through military victory in one culture and through writing "theory" in another culture.
The observation that imitation has a role in the *specification* of desires is obvious and banal. The claim that imitation provides the *source* of desires is grandiose, exciting, and for the most part, false. Girard can thus play the game of motte and bailey, sometimes pushing forward the daring, ambitious thesis that imitation explains the *source* of desires, while retreating when pressed, or when looking for evidence, to the uncontroversial truism that imitation contributes to the *specification* of desires.
Aldous Huxley had some similar ideas as Girard in his Doors of Perception and chalks much of this up to how language structures thought based on previous human experience. While useful for survival, language also “petrifies” awareness. He suggests mystical experience unshackles oneself from those conceptions.
What does all this literary criticism have to do with the right's admiration for Girard? Perhaps it relates to the abandonment of realizing desires in the real world. This has the intended effect of leaving the real world unchanged. I await your further analysis in part four.
I think there is a sort of spiritual hierarchy that comes from this thinking that aligns with right wing ideology.
If only great artists and mystics can truly transcend and overcome mediated desires, then they are clearly superior. An elite priesthood even. Everyone should take communion from them that cannot access the mystical experience themselves
And it is quite seductive to think one’s own desires are based in something deeper while dismissing others stated desires as less-than-noble mimesis. “Of course I am not affected by mediated desires— that’s for losers.”
In the extreme, it eventually leads to a place of justified domination somewhat akin to Hitler’s Ubermensch. Those taking action in the world based on their own base desires rather mimetic ones are the Ubermench, and therefore they are justified in whatever they do. Meanwhile, pro-social desires can easily be discarded as mimetic ones being based in ‘being nice and polite’ nothing truly meaningful.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I think it makes sense. These so called Ubermenchen don't have original desires. They just think they do. King Solomon wrote that there is nothing new under the sun, and he was right. I appreciate your 2cents. Anytime.
I noticed that other people who commented contrasted mystical experience with mundane experience. Once again I do not see the political ramifications of this except insofar as there are none. The revelations inherent in good literature remain at the level of the individual. Thanks for liking and replying to my comment.
I've still yet to read the final volume, but my sense of the dynamic is this: Marcel's madeleine is pleasurable for him because its vivid re-creation of his memories is what drives him out of his lifelong hesitation to write. It helps him find the subject of his work and the style in which to approach it. I don't know if "the obstacle on which it stumbled" can really describe a specific episode in his memory coming from the madeleine because it helps him remember his entire childhood in the family's country home. The madeleine is what his hypochondriac aunt, who eventually never left her bed, used to give him as a boy. I don't think Marcel's joy is "transcendent" either; it's connected with his desire to create.
In terms of his writing, he is openly driven by his ego for recognition in his lifetime and for his artistic creation to transcend his death, but he also recognizes that great art is altruistic, and portrays the great effects other artists (a painter, composer, and writer) have had on him and other characters.
It's funny to hear you describe Girard as filled with aphorisms because Proust is the same.
My first thought was that Girard seems to be Kierkegaard with tenure, which might make sense. Alternatively, with a Moleskine (to allow for the journey of failing to become pure meme incarnate and settling for the admiration of the great works).
It probably really is as simple as Kierkegaard citing his Christian sources making him less popular, while Pascal’s transcendental meditation-y vibes are similarly content driven.
Consider this, ultimately: the right wants its memes of pop culture of Trump/Pepe running over Dems to be art instead of branding. The closer that actual scholarly Christian practice comes to the philosophy they reference, the less they like it. The goal, always, is to replace critical theory/aesthetic development with nostalgia, to reject the context of their mass-produced drivel and claim to be part of a new philosophical movement, rebuilt perhaps most of all from The Matrix and the Wachowski sisters.
I’m finally starting to get what people find in Girard --but for every question it answers I see so many questions arise. How does the social power of the sacrifice get transmitted? What is the object of everyone’s desire with respect to the sacrifice? I can see why a literature crops up just through the fact that once you take up the main framework, you end up with many other questions. (These ones might be easy to answer--I’m not familiar with the literature so I don’t know what questions arise, just that the framework is such that more new questions come up) I agree with the comment above that there must be brute desires, and their specification clearly comes from the social milieu one is in. The source of brute desires like thirst or hunger can’t be imitative. So maybe the question is ‘once you get past the brute desires, the presence of desires still seems limitless. Why don’t we stop desiring, once all our needs are met?’
This seems like an incredibly important question. But it’s only a question about certain kinds of people. There are many humans who --though they have different desires every day, and those desires may sometimes extend beyond needs, their desires are rather limited.’ But we still see human actions as going way beyond what would be a reasonable desire framework, where people strive for something in ways that involve a lot of risks for themselves in others when that striving is unnecessary. It looks irrational, really. It is irrational, if you think people should be striving for something like ‘their objective good’ and they risk their good for something that appears unnecessary. Why are they doing that?
So the theory probably makes more sense if you don’t accept the thesis ‘all desires are mimetic’ but instead ask ‘what is driving desires generally, what is the purpose of these desires?’ And for some of the desires, the purposes would be pleasure or satisfaction. You want to eat something that tastes good, or do something that is fun.’ That’s not especially mysterious. But maybe there’s another class of desires that remains mysterious, which are these desires which involve destructive or violent results. An explanation for these would be mimetic. But then wouldn’t the explanation of the mimesis be something about self-regard or social status? The reason these objects of desire become especially desirable is that they are associated with some kind of increase in one’s value --either in one’s own eyes or in the eyes of other people. So you desire these shiny rocks or this bevy of concubines or this particular title or this swathe of land--to increase one’s own social status. That’s mimetic in the sense that these particular objects of desire have become associated with increase of social status. That wouldn’t happen except in the context where they were understood that way. If there’s no institution of private property, then nobody’s status is increase that way and instead you have things like the potlatch where you give your stuff to increase your status. Certain cultures have devised means where massive acquisition is not possible because to maintain your social status you have to do something like have a giant wedding or a giant funeral that will bankrupt you.
I simply don’t find it plausible that ALL desire is mimetic but it is plausible that SOME desire is mimetic but is that the ultimate explanation for why we come to have certain desires when there is not another plausible explanation for our desires?
It surely cannot be the case that all desires are mimetic. Is the best explanation for our love of our own children that we mimic the love of children we have seen? Maybe Girard would say ‘oh, but you have children because you see others have them and you see that they desire them.’ Except that doesn’t explain the love of one’s children, because the satisfaction that comes from loving one’s children would not be present in anything that we were presented with as desirable. We learn that it is satisfying from seeing it satisfies others but it satisfies others because it is genuinely satisfying. It is desirable. So ultimately, seeing other people find satisfaction in it is is just alerting us to the fact it’s desirable, not *making* it desirable. Not anything can be desirable. I could not experience the same satisfaction by growing a cactus. If everyone decided to start growing cactuses instead of having children, maybe we would imitate them, but we would not have the same satisfaction.
It amazes me how similar some of these ideas are to earlier Romantic/Transcendental and also later psychedelic inspired mysticism of the early-mid 20th century. Its like Girard cleansed his ‘doors of perception’ via an artistic mystical experience in novel writing. Just like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley did with psychedelics a few generations later. And Thoreau and Blake did in losing themselves in nature and beauty a bit earlier
…coming back to this and realizing Rene Gerard wrote his theories in the 60-90s AFTER Huxley and Crowley showcased their mystical experiences and after much eastern philosophy had penetrated Western thought. Somehow missed that! In any case, it does appear a variation on many of the same ideas, albeit one that seems a bit snooty and self-aggrandizing
Thanks again for this series. Martha Nussbaum's critique of Proust in her essay "Love's Knowledge" might offer an interesting perspective on Girard's moves here as well. For Nussbaum, Proust's Marcel distinguishes, perhaps similar to Stendhal, between the vanity of an intellectualist self-knowledge and the passionate truth of self-knowledge through the shock of suffering. Marcel thinks he knows he does not love Albertine, but he has mistaken for his true self his own deadening habits, which obscure his own fear and vulnerability, and the shock of loss clears those away and reveals his love. But Nussbaum argues that he has only revealed a different relationship with himself, that love and fear and envy are not distinguishable by the quality of their feeling alone but require some sort of further evidential context, and the centerpiece of her critique is an emphasis on time.
Nussbaum thinks, as I understand it, that in Proust, true knowledge -- which we might think of as direct access or an unmediated relation -- happens in an instant or in the eternity of that instant, but as such, it can only be a relation with oneself. For her, what feels like a revelation could always be a misunderstanding. All that can reveal the difference is time: time with others, time to doubt, time to trust and accept uncertainty. She uses Ann Beattie's "Learning to Fall" as the contrast here in a lovely way.
Not to say this reflects on Girard himself necessarily, but: this follows a similar authoritarian/egalitarian pattern as in the contrast between Girard and pragmatism. The response to mediation is mediation of a different sort, self-transcendence not through a self-obliterating (or "self"-obliterating) passion but through time with others, through duration, whether attending to others in loving care or deliberating alongside others in an endlessly self-revising inquiry. For the egalitarian, the uncertain self-transcendence of solidarity may be the answer. Maybe for the authoritarian, this is insufficiently certain -- or insufficiently self-regarding.
Note: it looks like the link for Part 2 is actually linking to Part 1.
Thanks for continuing the instructive Girard posts. I've been following to see if I can discern whether my puzzlement about Girard is on point or not. What puzzles me about the concept of mimetic desire is whether and how it can account for the element of mystery or inscrutability in desire––even when desire is most obviously mimetic. To take the example from Balzac in a previous post: the clerk who becomes enchanted by seeing someone's drawing room decor. The clerk will have seen dozens if not hundreds of drawing rooms across the years, so what can explain why his imagination and desire is ignited by that particular one and not the others (many of which signal just as plausibly things like class status or serenity or some other quality)?
I'm getting the impression, especially from this post, that Girard wants to use mimetic desire to enable a hierarchical schema of higher and lower psychic motives or moral traits. Desire can seem profoundly inscrutable (where does it come from? can it be altered? can we be deceived about it or is it the thing we can't deny or fully suppress even if we hide it?) It kind of looks like Girard means to take up the nearly inscrutable nature of desire as an occasion to distinguish nobler or more authentic kinds of subjects from more debased ones?
If so, it does seem in the neighborhood of Christian apologetics. If we let God locate all that is beyond human comprehension, we get a lot of leverage for comprehensively explaining humans. "Deviated transcendency" can be set off from "vertical transcendency." But maybe it is humans who are irreducibly mysterious, especially when we try to account for desire.
Finally, it may or may not be germane, but computer algorithms are probably the closest thing there is to a science of desire, at least as it operates in the arena of consumption. The premise and promise is that what we desire is completely predictable––not at all mysterious. Do tech disciples find human inscrutability as intolerable as theologians and priests?
I don't think a priest or theologian would say they find the mystery of humanity intolerable
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-iron-triangle
“computer algorithms are probably the closest thing there is to a science of desire”
This misunderstanding is the entire basis of why our society is as whacked out as it has been in the last 60 years. Computers maximize a numerical goal according to a model of reality. It is only r*pe culture that keeps the motor running at this point on that particular royal scam.
It's quite possible I misunderstand algorithms and consumer desire. How r*pe culture is relevant, though, I have no idea––but probably don't need to know.
Let’s just say that privileged men can get promoted by making light of eating the apple of knowledge of good and evil and leave it at that.
This seems to be an important bit:
Girard’s solution to the problems of mediated desire also involve a reconfiguration of the imagination in a mystical experience that combines the religious and aesthetic. He calls the morbid preoccupation with the Other that he finds in the novels “deviated transcendency;” it is a result of a kind of idolatry brought on by internal mediation, we search for the divine in the world for nought. But this is just a kind of distorted analogy of the spiritual search: “Deviated transcendency is a caricature of vertical transcendency.”
It seems like within this system is a hierarchy of values. Some have this ability (innately?) and others don't. Holy mother church knows something about power, order, and violence. What happens when the dispossessed claim the right to imagine and act not due to imitation but due to their own imagination of the good life for the many?
On the basic idea of "mimetic desire":
Doesn't this confuse questions about the *source* of desires with questions about the *specification* of desires?
Specification of desires: if I grow up in Japan, I will be hungry for rice; if in Italy, hungry for pasta, if in Dubuque, hungry for hamburgers. It should be uncontroversial that my hunger is given its specific and detailed form by my cultural context, my upbringing, the patterns and images around me, and my aspirations for imitation. When MacDonald's came to Moscow, the hunger for hamburgers was a clear case of mimetic desire, in a population that had previously hungered for borscht and blini.
Sources of desire: my desire to eat food -- described at that level of generality as "food" -- has nothing to do with imitation, and everything to do with the biological needs of an animal. When my dogs are hungry, they are not imitating anything, they just need calories. Likewise, my desire for sex is an evolutionary inheritance from way back before my ancestors had legs. My desire for status and acceptance is a built into the genetic hardware of a social creature that lives in social groups.
Of course, all of these genetically-sourced desires will manifest themselves in culturally-specified ways. I'll chase skirts if I grow up in one culture and kimonos in another. I'll seek status through military victory in one culture and through writing "theory" in another culture.
The observation that imitation has a role in the *specification* of desires is obvious and banal. The claim that imitation provides the *source* of desires is grandiose, exciting, and for the most part, false. Girard can thus play the game of motte and bailey, sometimes pushing forward the daring, ambitious thesis that imitation explains the *source* of desires, while retreating when pressed, or when looking for evidence, to the uncontroversial truism that imitation contributes to the *specification* of desires.
It's a familiar trick, and a cheap one.
Great points.
Aldous Huxley had some similar ideas as Girard in his Doors of Perception and chalks much of this up to how language structures thought based on previous human experience. While useful for survival, language also “petrifies” awareness. He suggests mystical experience unshackles oneself from those conceptions.
What does all this literary criticism have to do with the right's admiration for Girard? Perhaps it relates to the abandonment of realizing desires in the real world. This has the intended effect of leaving the real world unchanged. I await your further analysis in part four.
I think there is a sort of spiritual hierarchy that comes from this thinking that aligns with right wing ideology.
If only great artists and mystics can truly transcend and overcome mediated desires, then they are clearly superior. An elite priesthood even. Everyone should take communion from them that cannot access the mystical experience themselves
And it is quite seductive to think one’s own desires are based in something deeper while dismissing others stated desires as less-than-noble mimesis. “Of course I am not affected by mediated desires— that’s for losers.”
In the extreme, it eventually leads to a place of justified domination somewhat akin to Hitler’s Ubermensch. Those taking action in the world based on their own base desires rather mimetic ones are the Ubermench, and therefore they are justified in whatever they do. Meanwhile, pro-social desires can easily be discarded as mimetic ones being based in ‘being nice and polite’ nothing truly meaningful.
My $0.02 anyway
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I think it makes sense. These so called Ubermenchen don't have original desires. They just think they do. King Solomon wrote that there is nothing new under the sun, and he was right. I appreciate your 2cents. Anytime.
This is also the thing I cannot figure out.
I noticed that other people who commented contrasted mystical experience with mundane experience. Once again I do not see the political ramifications of this except insofar as there are none. The revelations inherent in good literature remain at the level of the individual. Thanks for liking and replying to my comment.
I've still yet to read the final volume, but my sense of the dynamic is this: Marcel's madeleine is pleasurable for him because its vivid re-creation of his memories is what drives him out of his lifelong hesitation to write. It helps him find the subject of his work and the style in which to approach it. I don't know if "the obstacle on which it stumbled" can really describe a specific episode in his memory coming from the madeleine because it helps him remember his entire childhood in the family's country home. The madeleine is what his hypochondriac aunt, who eventually never left her bed, used to give him as a boy. I don't think Marcel's joy is "transcendent" either; it's connected with his desire to create.
In terms of his writing, he is openly driven by his ego for recognition in his lifetime and for his artistic creation to transcend his death, but he also recognizes that great art is altruistic, and portrays the great effects other artists (a painter, composer, and writer) have had on him and other characters.
It's funny to hear you describe Girard as filled with aphorisms because Proust is the same.
Sticking with glibness for the moment:
My first thought was that Girard seems to be Kierkegaard with tenure, which might make sense. Alternatively, with a Moleskine (to allow for the journey of failing to become pure meme incarnate and settling for the admiration of the great works).
It probably really is as simple as Kierkegaard citing his Christian sources making him less popular, while Pascal’s transcendental meditation-y vibes are similarly content driven.
Consider this, ultimately: the right wants its memes of pop culture of Trump/Pepe running over Dems to be art instead of branding. The closer that actual scholarly Christian practice comes to the philosophy they reference, the less they like it. The goal, always, is to replace critical theory/aesthetic development with nostalgia, to reject the context of their mass-produced drivel and claim to be part of a new philosophical movement, rebuilt perhaps most of all from The Matrix and the Wachowski sisters.
I’m finally starting to get what people find in Girard --but for every question it answers I see so many questions arise. How does the social power of the sacrifice get transmitted? What is the object of everyone’s desire with respect to the sacrifice? I can see why a literature crops up just through the fact that once you take up the main framework, you end up with many other questions. (These ones might be easy to answer--I’m not familiar with the literature so I don’t know what questions arise, just that the framework is such that more new questions come up) I agree with the comment above that there must be brute desires, and their specification clearly comes from the social milieu one is in. The source of brute desires like thirst or hunger can’t be imitative. So maybe the question is ‘once you get past the brute desires, the presence of desires still seems limitless. Why don’t we stop desiring, once all our needs are met?’
This seems like an incredibly important question. But it’s only a question about certain kinds of people. There are many humans who --though they have different desires every day, and those desires may sometimes extend beyond needs, their desires are rather limited.’ But we still see human actions as going way beyond what would be a reasonable desire framework, where people strive for something in ways that involve a lot of risks for themselves in others when that striving is unnecessary. It looks irrational, really. It is irrational, if you think people should be striving for something like ‘their objective good’ and they risk their good for something that appears unnecessary. Why are they doing that?
So the theory probably makes more sense if you don’t accept the thesis ‘all desires are mimetic’ but instead ask ‘what is driving desires generally, what is the purpose of these desires?’ And for some of the desires, the purposes would be pleasure or satisfaction. You want to eat something that tastes good, or do something that is fun.’ That’s not especially mysterious. But maybe there’s another class of desires that remains mysterious, which are these desires which involve destructive or violent results. An explanation for these would be mimetic. But then wouldn’t the explanation of the mimesis be something about self-regard or social status? The reason these objects of desire become especially desirable is that they are associated with some kind of increase in one’s value --either in one’s own eyes or in the eyes of other people. So you desire these shiny rocks or this bevy of concubines or this particular title or this swathe of land--to increase one’s own social status. That’s mimetic in the sense that these particular objects of desire have become associated with increase of social status. That wouldn’t happen except in the context where they were understood that way. If there’s no institution of private property, then nobody’s status is increase that way and instead you have things like the potlatch where you give your stuff to increase your status. Certain cultures have devised means where massive acquisition is not possible because to maintain your social status you have to do something like have a giant wedding or a giant funeral that will bankrupt you.
I simply don’t find it plausible that ALL desire is mimetic but it is plausible that SOME desire is mimetic but is that the ultimate explanation for why we come to have certain desires when there is not another plausible explanation for our desires?
It surely cannot be the case that all desires are mimetic. Is the best explanation for our love of our own children that we mimic the love of children we have seen? Maybe Girard would say ‘oh, but you have children because you see others have them and you see that they desire them.’ Except that doesn’t explain the love of one’s children, because the satisfaction that comes from loving one’s children would not be present in anything that we were presented with as desirable. We learn that it is satisfying from seeing it satisfies others but it satisfies others because it is genuinely satisfying. It is desirable. So ultimately, seeing other people find satisfaction in it is is just alerting us to the fact it’s desirable, not *making* it desirable. Not anything can be desirable. I could not experience the same satisfaction by growing a cactus. If everyone decided to start growing cactuses instead of having children, maybe we would imitate them, but we would not have the same satisfaction.
Fascinating, thank you!
It amazes me how similar some of these ideas are to earlier Romantic/Transcendental and also later psychedelic inspired mysticism of the early-mid 20th century. Its like Girard cleansed his ‘doors of perception’ via an artistic mystical experience in novel writing. Just like Aleister Crowley and Aldous Huxley did with psychedelics a few generations later. And Thoreau and Blake did in losing themselves in nature and beauty a bit earlier
…coming back to this and realizing Rene Gerard wrote his theories in the 60-90s AFTER Huxley and Crowley showcased their mystical experiences and after much eastern philosophy had penetrated Western thought. Somehow missed that! In any case, it does appear a variation on many of the same ideas, albeit one that seems a bit snooty and self-aggrandizing