Mimetic Desire | René Girard's Mimetic Theory

lecture two mimetic desire and original sin 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 gerard 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 after our first introductory lecture we are now ready to dive into gerard's theory proper we're going to spend two lectures this one and the next one in understanding gerard's psychology after which we're going to 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 precede this lecture 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 memetic behavior within the realm of memetic behavior we're going to focus on memetic desire and within the desire we're focusing on metaphysical desire now 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 and history and that is why gerard focuses on these three forces 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 allow gerard 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 gerard'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 the mises mimesis can be best understood under the light of david hume now in his treaties 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 end quote what is relevant in this analogy for gerard is the observation that there is 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 trafficks in emotions mimesis spans the entire gamut of human behavior now i like this metaphor because first it describes humans as naturally social creatures prone to a form of co-vibrations 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 the mises constitutes us as social beings second i like this analogy because it clearly paints mimesis as a tendency now just as strings next to each other are inclined to co-vibrate so are we ingesting our cultural environment the third reason 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 what evidence is there from amisus that's a really good question and i think like most answers to the question what evidence is there in this part of gerard's argument the first response is always an interpretive one gerard always presents to us an interpretive or hermeneutical proof that's to say he's saying something like just grant me this one hypothesis just humor for me for now just go on this path that i'm taking you down and let me show you the broad kaleidoscope of phenomenon that this concept alone can make sense of the convincingness of mimesis is not grounded on some empirical fact but a broad range of phenomenon that it alone illuminates now that's not to say there is no empirical evidence whatsoever to back up gerard's claims think to the american psychologist i believe his name is andrew meltzov i think who observed that infants as young as 40 minutes would naturally mimic the experimenter's facial expressions with surprising accuracy now of course it was the first time that one of these babies saw someone make a silly face or stick their tongue out but the inclination to imitate was intuitive and innate now perhaps another set of empirical evidence if you have a taste for things like that that you can look at are mirror neurons now these are neurons that fire both when you observe an action as well as when you perform that similar action so this lends to the idea that there's some real biological basis to the idea that doing and observing the same behavior are somehow intimately connected now after touching upon the plausibility which is your question of mimesis let's go to its significance why is this a significant thing to focus on i think the significance of mimesis is that it is an authority that provides normative certainty now i'm trying to use the perennial distinction here between descriptive and normative phenomena space and time length of this chair color of your a bit too dark navy suit proof of a theorem i can gain certainty of all of these things through my own investigations but when it comes to normative phenomena what is the good what is the beautiful how should i treat people a primary but not exclusive way to be certain that we are right is mimesis now this is a conclusion that gerard doesn't have to add on but naturally follows from our definitions on mimesis after all if mimesis is a capacity and tendency to naturally extend into the subjectivity of others internalizing their values then surely having the same value internalized bolsters our confidence now let me give you a few examples and let's start with the most local one recognition there's a chinese phrase that goes man would travel a thousand miles to meet he who understands him i think this is a statement and sentiment that we can all relate to especially if we have very peculiar and odd interests that only a few friends share i think it's so liberating and affirming to just find one other person who likes the same weird stuff that you do because you feel so much more assured in your own interests and that's what this chinese saying is trying to get at i've seen a lot of this in in writing online because i was somebody who got really obsessed and passionate about things growing up and i always felt like i was a lunatic for having these interests i was interested in airplanes and golf and all these sorts of things so intensely but i felt like i was crazy like i was the only person right who was interested in these things and the way that i found affirmation with writing on the internet was i would share my ideas i'd put out my intellectual frequencies in the world and all of a sudden i'd attract people who were interested in these same ideas and now i went from feeling like an outcast to feeling affirmed in my passion for things yeah that's precisely right and the exact type of example that we should be thinking about gerard's explanation of the phenomenon that you describe described here of why it's so important to find people who affirm our values is that we can't help but through mimesis to internalize the positions of those around us and when those internalized values are aligned with our own then we feel legitimized in the example of writing online that you gave but when those values disagree then i think we feel a conflict within ourselves a deep alienation i mean just think about the inverse case right about the story that we probably know too well whether it's the artist with parents who disapprove of art or perhaps a queer gendered kid with conservative parents it is a normative catastrophe because what they know to be true through their own experience is in some sense invalidated by the voice of others whom they can't help but internalize through mimesis now let's move on to the next set of examples let's turn up the mimesis a notch instead of mimesis among pairs recognition there is mimesis that can happen through groups and that is prestige prestige is an inflated sense of normative certainty based on the opinions of others right when a majority of a social group that you're in believes that this is good or this is beautiful through mimesis we slowly start to take on those positions as well and i do think that our everyday notions of prestige already have an understanding here of mimesis when we say something is prestigious we are perhaps also saying that on its own grounds it does not deserve the values we attribute to it that there is some kind of surplus value there and gerard would say that that surplus value comes not from the object but our peers valuing it and us digesting that through mimesis but we can even dial this one up a notch going from recognition to prestige and pushing it even higher all the way to the sacred think about a sacred person a sacred place or a sacred object like the relics of a saint that have infinite normative value gerard believes that this is nothing but turning up the dial of mimesis if the prestigious object has a disproportionately large amount of value relative to its intrinsic value then the sacred object has an infinite amount of value compared to its intrinsic value think about it like this how much value does the relics of a saint hold to a disbeliever nothing zero right it's nothing more than a pile of bones but for someone living in a society where everyone else treats the relics as holy then they would appear indeed to take on that infinite degree of value gerard's point is that this infinite value really comes from others and not the objects themselves so even the sacred even the fundamental building blocks of gods are created by unanimity bolstered through mimesis what gives gods their infinite value and power for gerard is none other than unanimous belief in their infinite value and power i think this is easy to see with religions that no one believes anymore everyone today would agree that for the egyptian gods or think about raw not only was their normative status bolstered but their very existence is propped up by unanimity all of these different mimetic phenomena recognition prestige sacrity tell the same story the normative values we hold for us to be truly confident in them must be bolstered by the normative value of others internalized digested through mimesis we need to lean on others in order to gain certainty human values then for gerard if you allow me the analogy to currencies are less like you know traded cattle that has intrinsic value and more like fiat currencies holding value mostly because others believe that they hold value as well let's just pause then at the cataclysmic consequences which flow out of this one idea giving mimesis such a central place in gerard psychology pulls the rug underneath modernity and its cherished philosophical assumptions how can we believe reason thus if at the end of the day we need confirmation from others for normative certainty how can we follow our own authentic desires and passions if every part of our psyche is so helplessly external in its origin how are we individuals if what defines us is that we're co-vibrating social animals we will have to spend the rest of gerard's social historical and political theory unraveling the copernican consequences of mimesis being the key normative authority of course the mises is not the only authority to grant norman of value the opinions of others isn't the only way we decide for ourselves what is good what is beautiful what is just and how we treat others right we can't invalidate positions through experience and certainly we can use reason to some capacity as well gerard's claim is that mimesis is the strongest and in some sense necessary authority after all i find it quite humorous that those who wield reason best who claim to be the most independent philosophers seem to travel in packs for 2 000 years of christian theologians affirming similar values 2 500 years of buddhist philosophers agreeing on a rough cosmology the current academy and it's heavily progressive leaning or most humorous of all that pack of enlightenment philosophers who believed in reason so well it seems like that the belief in reason itself needs to be grounded on unanimity even for those best trained in reason reasons still prove somewhat impotent more acting as a spokesperson a defensive lawyer for intuitions that are actually grounded on mimesis and even if we were to find that rare individual who is able to pull away from the memetic orbit and bring forth new positions not shared by anyone well i would wager that we will soon find that his lack of certainty his terrible alienation without any memetic support will soon drive him crazy as is common with the great artists and intellectuals like van gogh or nietzsche this then is why gerard within the entire realm of human behavior chooses to focus on memetic behavior behavior which imitates an external instance which sets up a co-vibration between us and others mimesis is both the strongest and necessary authority for us to hold normative values it more than any other faculty decides what we think of as beautiful as good what laws we think about are just and what sexual relations we think of as legitimate or depraved and even what we should strive to be like now within the realm of memetic behavior gerard's focus is heavily partial as well he primarily concerns himself with memetic desire types of memetic behavior that are acquisitive instances where i upon observing a model desire an object have that desire ignited in me as well now there's a whole other sphere of memetic behavior that has nothing to do with desire the taking out of accents cultural mannerisms which while the medic is going to be of little interest to gerard because he's interested in explaining the psychological motor behind history and these instances in the mises do not have a strong enough motivational force to be relevant gerard focuses on memetic desire and he delineates two species of desires within mimetic desire the desire to be which he terms metaphysical desire and the desire to experience which he terms physical desire metaphysical desire is directed at what objects say about me physical desire is directed at the experience confirmed by the qualities of the object let me give you a few examples now i can pursue sex for the experience and what i would be after there will be pleasure or intimacy i can also pursue sex for being what having sex with a certain person says about me this is a real psychology right this is the psychology of the don juan or the coquette for these people sex is no longer about sex but trying to prove something core to their identity it's about being and not experience another example the one i gave already in our introductory lecture is that i can buy a car for the experience and that would be its gasps mileage or the trouble it saves me from not walking anywhere or i can buy a car because i want to be known as a certain type of person a reductive but hopefully illuminating way to put it is that physical desire aims at utility whereas metaphysical desire aims at identity now of course gerard suggests that any specific instance of memetic desire always contains both aims the experiences we hope to enjoy and the being we aim to enhance each varying in strength depending on the specific desire we're trying to investigate that is to say we probably buy cars both concerned with what it says about us as well as its gas mileage and trunk size we probably choose sexual partners for immediate pleasure but also for our being the degree to which being an experience motivates us is different from person to person and even time to time in fact they're in some sense competing for real estate now certainly the boundary between experience and being is not so clear like who we conceive ourselves to be colors our experiences as much as our experiences if ever so subtly shape our self-conception if i conceive of myself as a trained assassin versus if i conceive of myself as a holy man then my experience of murder will be radically different now on the converse if every day i kill which is an experience that's going to shape a very specific type of self-conception but just think about how drastically different these experiences are pursuing a profession because the work is engaging versus doing a job because it is the cool job dating a person because you like spending time with them versus because you like being seen with them or going to travel to a place because you actually enjoy the place in the culture and are interested versus just going to the next hot new locale where you want to be seen clearly the distinction that drought has drawn between experience and being while muddy is nonetheless meaningful especially at the extremes gerard here has a systematic preference for the desire to experience and a systematic suspicion for the desire to be to the extent that i am doing an activity not for its own sake but for what it says about me our motivations for gerard are perverse now hopefully through examples i've just given traveling to be seen at the right place dating a person you want to be seen with or taking a job because it's the right job we can understand gerard's intuition here metaphysical desire the desire to be shows itself to be a prideful snobism you were talking about the don juan figure earlier and what you've been saying reminds me of romance where there's two different kinds of romance and a lot of times and you see this in the trophy wife phenomenon yeah people love the other person not for them but because of what it says about them where what happens is that person becomes an object it becomes an object that makes them look good that makes them feel feel wealthy or powerful or anything like that and i contrast that in relation to say true love and true love is much more authentic and what true love is is loving the other person not for what they say about you but loving the other person because of just who they are yeah i think that's a great example again you should always come back to romance when you're reading gerard that's primarily the domain where a lot of these memetic desires play out and i think your specific point was also very accurate that there is a sharp distinction between metaphysical desire which is a perverse egotistical concern for the self and physical desire which primarily is a concern for experience in and of itself and on that note i think a strength of gerard's account of desire is to have a more reasonable picture of what authentic desire means now the romantic capital romantic not the smaller that you just mentioned the romantic view of desire is that the strength of desire is correlated with its authenticity right think romeo and juliet the authenticity of their love is thought to be indicated by the strength of the love and how much they are willing to sacrifice for each other gerard says nay if the strength the desire comes from a desire to be that's not authenticity that's vanity after all we do strongly desire luxury goods we do strongly desire the right job we have a passion a all-consuming obsession to date the right person but so often as soon as we obtain these things we find them unsatisfying the teenage passions which romeo and juliet embody so often fizzle out after the initial excitement for gerard then to have authentic desire you need strong physical desire for the object in and of itself and that only comes with sufficient experience authenticity is not only about the strength of the desire but about desiring things activities people for their own sake to be authentic then we need to find ways to calm our metaphysical desires so we aren't so concerned with what objects have to say about us and gain enough experience to nurture and ground a strong physical desire or let me try this and frame this another way i've often found that snobbism vanity prestige anyone who cares too much about status is often a dead giveaway of their amateurity in a specific field of not having enough experience in a specific domain let me give you a concrete example you know i've had many friends who when they were younger aspire to be entrepreneurs because it's all the rage these days right every kid or many kids want to be entrepreneurs and of course it starts out as almost entirely a metaphysical desire all vanity and snobbism and how could it not because they didn't have any physical desire for the act of entrepreneurship because they never really experienced it what pulls them isn't the act of entrepreneurship but the aura surrounding the entrepreneur of what it means to be an entrepreneur and if you've met young aspiring entrepreneurs you know exactly what i'm talking about they're the most snobbish prideful people because they're motivated by desire to be and i don't feel bad about saying this because i was one of them now as some of my friends got more experience in the space of building companies a portion of them genuinely developed a desire for the act of entrepreneurship itself strategic planning hiring raising money executing and waned off their metaphysical desire the arc then towards authenticity is building up enough experience of the object so you can desire it for its own sake and be less concerned with what it says about you metaphysical desire giving way to a physical desire interesting i always thought that memetic desire means that you exclusively desire something for how it impacts your being and not for the object at all but but you're saying that there's also physical desire that is directed at the object but i thought that gerard's point is that the only objects we desire for themselves are water shelter sex and food and that's it i know exactly where you're coming from and the passages in gerard that you're pointing or gesturing at but no i think that's a reductive but all too common interpretation of gerard i think far from thinking that all desire is just a desire to be and objects don't matter to us at all which is a completely implausible view right think about it i think gerard fully recognizes as he must contributions of the object in forming our desire it's just implausible to say that when we're buying a car the experience the object itself does not matter at all now if gerard spills more of his ink on the desire to be it's because he's trying to course correct from this exaggerated romantic notion of desire as spontaneous and sprouting solely for the object itself gerard himself fully admits that within mimetic desire there's a strand of desire physical desire that does aim at the object itself but if physical desire aims at the object itself how is it a species of memetic desire yeah this is a very good question which is quite a technical answer physical desire is indeed directed at experience which is primarily determined by the object itself but it's not independent from the normative values we hold which of course is still affected by mimesis let me give you a clear example take the object of premarital sex if i happen to hold the normative position that premarital sex is bad because god said so then my experience of sex would be quite different than if i held a normative position that the goal of life is leisure because our normative positions are governed through mimesis so too are our experiences and even physical desires so then if even physical desires are memetic in the way that you've described are there non-memetic desires gerard would probably say that as humans we are interpenetrated by mediators even when we do not realize it so perhaps the first gulp of breath that a baby takes is truly non-memetic at all but i think apart from that we will find traces of mimesis contained in all of our actions even the action as animal and basic and necessary as replenishing ourselves drinking water i think we can call in mind and sometimes do if unconsciously how our favorite athlete drinks gatorade right that's what the purpose of those commercials are for to implant that model of drinking inside your head so the answer directly to your question is that there exists a spectrum of desire with increasing degrees of mimesis under this interpretation mimesis is not everything but everything is memetic that is to say mimesis is not the core mechanism behind every psychological phenomenon but it permeates all of our psychological faculties now just as gerrard chooses to focus on memetic behavior in all of human behavior and the medic desire within the set of all memetic behavior so too will he spill his ink disproportionately on metaphysical desire between the two strands of memetic desire metaphysical desire will drive gerardian psychology in history and it is this drive that we must understand if we are to understand the dominant aims of man it is only now after this tripartite zeroing in mimesis the medic desire metaphysical desire do we have the core gerardian drive properly in view metaphysical desire the desire to be is going to do all the heavy lifting in george's theory because he reasons as humans our strongest drive is to obtain a type of being now one way to understand what gerard is getting at with the term being is the idea of self-conception it's about our identity our ego the core of our character and who we conceive ourselves to be for example the disproportionate allure of fine dining is perhaps better explained not by the quality of the food but by the type of social standing we conceive ourselves to have when we are served in such a delicate way what's important maybe less so the experience but the self-conception that is generated from this experience about how it flatters our ego and bolsters our identity now another way other than self-conception to approximate this idea of being is spirit when we say someone is very spirited think about a classical hero like achilles when we say that achilles spirit is wounded we don't mean that their physical body has been harmed what we aim to capture with the idea of spirit here is that his status prestige his honor his pride has been heard this is also what plato tried to capture with his use of spirit the part of our soul that craves honor in conscious distinction to the reasoning and repetitive parts of the soul that aims at truth and human appetites respectively from now on then i will use these terms being spirit self-conception interchangeably whichever is the best fit to capture this set of phenomenon that we're trying to describe so then the question is right what type of being what type of spirit what type of self-conception do we all yearn for can we say something more about what humans are really after i think we can if we read gerard closely and i think it breaks down into three related ends first gerard thinks that a fundamental although hidden goal of every human subject is to become real to exist now the existence and reality that gerard thinks you and i want is very different from the reality of tables and chairs of the cameras and tripods and boom mics what we want is a social existence a social reality have you heard the phrase uh like pics or it didn't happen of course yeah or if it's on instagram did it really happen there's a trend i think an unfortunate one where people consider their social media presence is more important more real than their real lives for example taking an entire vacation just for the production of a few pictures now what a person who is uttering such a phrase pics or it didn't happen instagram or didn't happen they're not saying that if they didn't post a picture of them going to hawaii then they really didn't go to hawaii what they are saying is that what really matters what has real significance is not the physical act of going to hawaii but the social act of being recognized as having gone to hawaii clearly then there's a social reality that each person is seeking that is very different from the spatial temporal reality of just tables and chairs and the tsar for that reality is at once and the same the desire for attention for prestige to stand out this reminds me of the matrix which follows the theme of humans being unknowingly trapped in simulated realities and that movie is inspired by a book by john baudrillard called simulacra in simulation and in the book baudrillard shows how we're increasingly replacing the real thing with simulations and so what he's saying there is that the simulations they become more real than our real lives spectacle and images they they transcend they take over reality and my favorite example of this in terms of how it plays out is video games where you have people who they don't care about their bodies they're overweight but they care so much about their video game characters they must have perfect clothes they must be ripped and jacked and it's the matrix in real life these simulated realities that are taking hold in society yeah those are great examples matrix balls vr on these video games and i think what is the consistent thread between the examples you gave in my original example of instagram is that there's a set of rules and customs about what really constitutes reality and legitimacy that is distinct from mere physical existence and reality and this social reality that we've described is precisely what gerard thinks we're after to be real that is the first end of being now this instagram example that i just gave is also revealing because what is attractive about instagram and i think perhaps photography at large is that it eternalizes an instant that you are able to take one moment of your life and capture advertise and derive value from it through time and thereby increasing its importance in its reality the second and closely related end that gerard takes us in wanting men is to have persistence we want our identities to last through time and again i think we can see this desire to persist manifest in many many ways whether it's through progeny whether it's through books companies nations a park bench with your name on it the chinese emperors and the perennial fascination with immortality everywhere we look in human society i think we can identify this as a key drive of humans to be permanent to be immortal now the third and last fundamental end of all humans is self-sufficiency gerard's idea of self-sufficiency will look nothing like what we are used to when we think of self-sufficiency we tend to think of like the homesteader right he's self-sufficient because his physical needs are satisfied he has his plow and his animals and his cows and his ducks and his chickens and he can live the way he wants through his own means gerard's understanding of self-sufficiency expands the set of needs that need to be addressed from the physical to the social he gives an example of a coquette a seductive woman who plays her suitors on a leash to satisfy her desires and egoistic impulses the ideal of self-sufficiency is to have so much power for gerard over the physical and social world that all our needs not just hunger and thirst but also social admiration acceptance belonging can all be addressed with a snap of our fingers whereas it may be difficult for the homesteader to satisfy his desire for recognition the coquette can bathe in surplus admiration by simply texting one of our many enamored suitors perhaps a good way to understand this drive towards self-sufficiency then is nietzsche's will to power a desire to exert influence on the world according to one's own self-conception to mold and shape the lived world around us to be hospitable to our ends and desires under this light the self-sufficiency that the gerardian subject seeks often manifests as a form of domination as ultimate forcefulness as being the sole locus that determines one's lived world this is perhaps the same sentiment behind louis xiv's utterance let's i and the state that his ends and desires solely determined and are satisfied by the nation indeed the canonical examples that gerard gives of yearning for this type of self-sufficiency are generals like klauschwitz carl von klauschwitz of the 19th century and intellectuals like holder lin who in their own way are out there to conquer the world gerard thinks that we all to some extent are after this exaggerated form of self-sufficiency but to be clear gerard doesn't think we all want to be kings or rule the entire world but that in our social world like the coquette we need to be the ones in control not unlike nietzsche's will to power this drive towards self-sufficiency can motivate a plethora of activities that seemingly aren't about power at all let's say i'm in early retirement with nothing to do with sitting on my kids school boards i might be debating nomenclature arguing over what's allowed to see in senior prom enforcing mass policies because that is the channel for me to exert my will and on the other hand if i'm an aesthetic if my self-conception is one of other worldliness and renunciation than fasting what appears to be giving up my power can be a way for me to exert my will nonetheless because i'm shaping the world according to my own self-conception to summarize then pack tightly perhaps a bit too tightly if i'm honest within metaphysical desire are really three desires aimed at making ourselves real persistent and self-sufficient i must again emphasize that all three ideals are highly abstract to gain social attention to have one's identity last in the cultural zeitgeist and finally to exert one's power their abstraction makes them incredibly malleable and capable of powering a wide array of cultural phenomena i can gain social attention by discovering a particle or going on a murdering spree i can have my name last by having children or by writing a famous play i can exert my power by conquering all of europe or by fasting of course insofar as the type of power i want to exert is a form of aestheticism what all humans are really after are specific relations with the social world how we achieve those relations can take upon a whole kaleidoscope of concrete forms from the world historic to the mundane but make no mistake even when motivating quite mundane activities these ideals take on an exaggerated form rather than reality persistence and self-sufficiency perhaps it's a bit more accurate to think of us as wanting glory immortality and power therefore i invite you to understand this being we all want to obtain as summarized in one single phrase we want to exist in great measure gerard believes that this ideal quite intuitively is unachievable and compared to the glory immortality and power we all unconsciously strive towards our day-to-day existence really pales in comparison we yearn and strive to be real to be persistent and self-sufficient but deep down we develop a suspicion through lived experience that we are not so we develop this rashly by recognizing our mortality we develop this intuitively through the rapidity of which we adopt and dispose of identities we develop this emotionally in times of despair when we are vulnerable and dependent we develop this physically if we ever lose control of our environments such as in a car crash and so the distance between this glorious ideal and our lived experiences as meat sacks plagues us always with a deep existential shame a lack in the very core of our being gerard's psychology then with metaphysical desire at its center is a deeply deeply deeply pessimistic one we are motivated by an ideal we can never achieve what really drives us day-to-day is an unpleasant force we are almost like children who have disappointed our overly ambitious parents chasing and impossibly burdensome expectation this lack this drive to render ourselves whole to exist in great measure to enhance our being to bolster our identity to fulfill our self-conception i'm trying to get at what gerard is saying from as many angles as i can these are the driving forces of metaphysical desire and the key motivational faculty of all humans but how do we achieve this being after all it's so darn abstract metaphysical desire takes on forms as a pursuit of objects in the broadest sense of the term i wanted to climb everest building a unicorn company studying an ivy league wanting a particular car dating sally instead of susan enjoying a fancy restaurant this should not be a foreign concept to our this worldly achievement-focused consumer society we want to acquire objects to bolster our identity and the way we go about choosing objects is imitating individuals whom we consider to already possess this fullness of being celebrities parental figures entrepreneurs an outstanding co-worker we take on their desires as our own the objects they value as the objects we too strive for the faulty logic here being that it must be the acquisition of these objects that grant them the fullness in being gerard's central thesis is that what often appears to be a subject pulled towards an object due to the intrinsic value of that object is really the subject wanting to acquire that object to be like a model what we are really after isn't the object but the being of the model put differently we want objects because what they say about our identity vis-a-vis models there's one thing that you should take away from gerard's observations on metaphysical desire is this whereas we think of desire as unidirectional from subject to objects it is actually triangular proceeding from subject through model and then to object the strength of our desires then often have little to do with the objects themselves but with our relationship with the model our own sense of lack and their fullness in being now because what is at stake in metaphysical desire is our identity it is the strongest drive in the human motivational repertoire it's quite obvious when we are motivated by such a drive because we become obsessed and compulsive and we think that achievement that getting the object that metaphysical desire yearns for will fully transform us now in different stages of our lives metaphysical desire usually directs us towards a limited and discreet set of objects for me in my own life first it was a specific toy and then it was a weapon in world of warcraft and it was dating a person that was getting into the ivy league etc etc gerard's point is that in every period of life we are always oriented towards something that there are these objects in each period of life that take on a disproportionate weight such that you define progress as inching towards the object and whenever it slips away from you your heart just thuds and you feel existential despair you are totally enamored and caught up with the object this reminds me of the world of celebrity advertisements i remember seeing kanye west close right first time and what happened was i walked in and i saw them on the rack and i thought they were ugly i didn't think that they looked comfortable it didn't look like they would even fit well they honestly looked like they belong in the five dollar section sales rack at the local marshals but then i started seeing ads for the jesus brand and the same clothes that i once shunned now seems so inviting to me so appealing and what i realized in that moment is that clothes aren't just about functionality which is what i'd always thought clothes were but but also about the person that they make you become i think that's exactly the right types of examples to think about when we're talking about metaphysical desire and mediation celebrity advertisement is exactly what you should have in mind but i just want to be clear here this also happens with a much closer circle as well it doesn't have to be someone as glorious as a celebrity but the values of a parent the desires of the coolest kid in school the taste of the most popular co-worker these two have the same type of gravitational pull but on the topic of celebrity advertisement the one line that gives it all away from me is the slogan of michael jordan's sneakers when he sells his sneakers he says be like mike what it's promising you isn't just a product it's not a utility but the being and prestige of michael jordan so that you too can have a small piece of that as well it's not jump like mic it's not score like mike the advertisement doesn't promise you the most important thing about basketball shoes whether it's the lightness or the fit or the bounce or the grip it's promising you something you want so much more be like mike you know as this example shows it's not just any object from the model that gains this allure it has to be close it has to be proximate it has to be unique to the model in short we have to think that the object is core to the model's being this is what gerard has to say let me give you a quote the object is to the mediator what the relic is to a saint the rosary used by a saint or his vestments are more sought after than a medal just simply been touched or blessed by him the value of a relic depends on the closeness to the saint it is the same with the object in metaphysical desire gerard's point here is that metaphysical desire only directs itself to the objects we think are core in some sense to the model's fullness of being after all when we want to be like mike we don't run out and shave our heads balls we go and buy basketball shoes even if being bald is just as a quality of michael jordan as wearing his shoes now of course i've been using objects in the widest sense possible here going far far beyond mere presention and consumption take something as a intimate as romantic or sexual interest after all what could be more private and valuable in and of itself than love or sex yet even in this domain we aren't freed from mediators our desires aren't our own gerard here would point to dostoyevsky's famous book the eternal husband the eternal husband tells the story where a protagonist admires his don juan friend and is clearly immediate by him the protagonist clearly considers this don juan as having a fullness of being so much so that the protagonist brings his new wife to this casanova don juan figure in hopes that he would seduce her in hopes that he would show his desire for her and by doing so validate the protagonist's own decision of marrying his new wife now granted this may be an exaggerated case of mediation but gerard would say that we all experienced a tampered yet nonetheless similar version of this in our own romantic lives after all it's all too common for us to find a previously unappealing partner attractive when we've learned that there's plentiful new competition dostoyevsky's eternal husband then is but a mere exaggerated form of what many of us do really experience in our day-to-day romantic lives now if even in the extremely personal and intimate domain of love and sex our desires are heavily informed by those of others then the externality of desire is even more true in less personal domains the career a political orientation aesthetic tastes or something as innocuous as writing style the way that intellectuals write gerard in some of his essays tells us that clarity is not fashionable these days i think what he's saying here is that there's been a succession of incomprehensible writers in the past few hundred years perhaps hegel and adorno chief amongst them who've added great prestige to writing obscurely and as a result many contemporary intellectuals also eject clarity to be more similar to their models and clearly the domain of mediation expand beyond consumption and spend the whole scope of the human condition the implications of this phenomenon that our desires are triangular more due to the people associated with the objects than the objects themselves ripple across gerard's theory i will highlight four qualities of metaphysical desire that warrant it being the dominant object of analysis in gerardian theory first metaphysical desire is extremely malleable and it explains the varied presentations of human culture its malleability lies in the abstract nature of its ideals reality persistence self-sufficiency based on who our mediators are these ideals can take form in a kaleidoscope of ways if i grew up with a don juan as a father perhaps my desire takes the form as a desire for sexual conquest if i spent my childhood with philosophers perhaps my desire manifests as desire to write treaties if i was educated in imperial japan perhaps my desire takes on the shape of a desire to die for the emperor metaphysical desire is the desire that can be through mediation morphed into almost any concrete desire even stronger than metaphysical desire explains the most puzzling parts of other cultures the parts where people seem to go against their own interests their own appetites and their own experience take this as an example we look quite puzzlingly at early christian aesthetics with self-imposed celibacy castration and mutilations we are also confused by aristocrats who refuse certain tactics in war that would grant them certain victory because these taxes are ignoble those in the future perhaps will puzzle at our modern elite who seem to work harder the richer they get instead of using it to enjoy leisure these phenomena are hard for an external observer to decipher because they seemingly go against the individual's immediate central interests however they become readily understandable under the light of metaphysical desire a malleable and more powerful force in our motivational repertoire that is fundamentally not concerned with experience appetite and interest narrowly construed but our being now the second quality of metaphysical desire is that it is powerful insofar as we are motivated by it we start to lose our agency the idea is quite simple the force of metaphysical desire is so strong because so much is on the line we aren't after just a momentary experience but what an object says about us that will echo through time our spirit our being our self-conception is at stake and thus i think it becomes quite easy to identify when we are primarily motivated by metaphysical instead of physical desire the former almost always manifests in a compulsive form i'm thinking about the fervorous religious rituals of pagan societies the rush to buy buds on the heights of the tulip mania or the rush to buy internet companies in the dot-com bubble metaphysical desire underlies most activities that we feel like we need to do to date someone live in a neighborhood hold a specific job go to a specific school without which we can never feel whole if we have that sense of need that's a good symptom a good indication that we've been taken over by metaphysical desire however even if we are able to obtain the objects metaphysical desire so desperately wants us to have we will still not feel whole third then metaphysical desire is deceitful it results in an unending series of failures this fullness of being will always elude us now the reason that metaphysical desire is deceitful is simple what metaphysical desire aims at an object and what it really wants being aren't even the same type of thing we are oblivious that this intense desire we feel for the object is because of the model instead we consider the object to be extremely desirable because of its intrinsic qualities after all when i watch jordan's commercials i gain a direct desire for jordan's shoes i don't go consciously thinking that i only like these because they're associated with michael jordan this triangular root is hidden from us now think back to the example of romance when we find a previously uninteresting prospect suddenly become attractive as soon as we find that a formidable rival desires them well nothing about the prospect has changed yet our desires have increased many fold clearly then such an increase in desire cannot be pointing at anything intrinsically real from the object since the object has not changed at all indeed the strength of metaphysical desire is not correlated to any qualities of the object and takes upon a reality of its own based on the desirability of the model and i think kanye's hundred dollar white t-shirt that you just gave is a great example of this and i think i don't know if you'd agree that it wouldn't have mattered if you had sold white t-shirts or blue boxers or red socks it would be equally alluring because the objects don't matter and if the objects don't matter then clearly the objects will not be able to satisfy our deepest desires and i think this is quite plausible when you speak with people who've had metaphysical desires believing that after they do x they will be fulfilled getting a job dating a person buying an object it almost always ends in disappointment this is why we so often lose interest in objects after acquisition they do nothing to change our being and we start seeing them for what they truly are just objects yet because of how malleable metaphysical desire is when we are inevitably disappointed we don't see through the lies of desire we simply conclude that the object we just had was not the right one and go on the chase for other new objects how many times in your life have you heard something like this getting into an ivy league is fine and all but you know what will really make me happy 10 million dollars or getting a car that car i was just so excited about three days ago that's nothing you know what would really make me happy that house that i don't yet have or maybe a total 180 making money having a house having nice cars that's all necessary but what will really give me lasting satisfaction is being a world renowned actor because of how malleable metaphysical desire is people don't renounce desire itself and simply direct it towards the next set of objects that have maintained their lure and so they go on one wild goose hunt after the other to your point about cars and houses one of the weirdest things about the human condition is the way that we think that buying something one thing is just going to satiate us forever in high school i was a big passionate golfer and i wanted new putters the same one that phil mickelson had and it was gonna make me feel like phil nicholson was the odyssey number nine putter and i remember being so excited for this thing to arrive as if it was just gonna take care of my golf game forever and i got it i was super excited three days later didn't mean much to me anymore i want a new driver i need a tiger woods driver and so i get that thing and it was this cyclical repetition of wanting something being so excited getting it feeling this emptiness and even though i can laugh about the story even though i feel it all the time i get that same disappointment i still desire things all the time perhaps what you're saying is that even if you rationally know that getting this new set of drivers or whatever set of objects you're desiring now it will not fundamentally transform your being you still can't but help desiring that next set of objects you have not obtained yet drives me crazy i think gerard has a really great metaphor to describe this phenomenon metaphysical desire is compared to a mirage with a seductive promise the place you were just at well that's not it that's not it don't worry but just a few more steps and i will give you that which will replenish your entire being and quell your thirst once and for all metaphysical desire is a mirage that leads us on one wild goose hunt after the other what makes all of this so much worse than is the last quality of metaphysical desire it is ungovernable that is to say the metaphysical desire does not fall under the jurisdiction of reason this ungovernability sends from its deceitfulness if i desire something physically there's something concrete that i can point to reason can examine it it can weigh its trade-offs and potentially tame or redirect it but the goal of metaphysical desire however is abstract and elusive furthermore this pursuit of the being of the model is always hidden from the subject disguised as a passion for the object reason does not even know where to begin much less be able to quantify and weigh it but even if we had rational understanding of our predicament as your club example and you're buying sprees shows the ungovernability also stems from the strength metaphysical desire tends to have such strength as to override the dictates of reason the platonic ideal of the reasoning part of the soul holding the reins of the spirited part of the soul gerard thinks is an illusion the spirited part of the soul when it is inflamed is the strongest part and commands reason think about instances of anger reason does not direct us but merely becomes a spokesperson for the spirited side of us while pretending to be its steward if nietzsche says he who has a why can bear with almost any how then we must add to him he who needs a how can make up almost any why in so far as through mediation you need to obtain some object the how the reasoning part of your soul becomes this lawyer who comes up with reasons the why metaphysical desire then is the key focus of gerardian psychology because it represents a motivational force that is infinitely malleable exceptionally strong continuously deceitful and often ungovernable it is a flexible powerful dynamic and compulsive force that is responsible for humanity's greatest achievements most terrifying disasters and just about everything notable in between let's pause and reflect on the territory we've already traversed today gerard's psychological project is to identify the key psychological motors of man within the realm of human behavior he focuses on memetic behavior because it is the key normative authority within that he focuses on memetic desire because it carries with it an acquisitive force and within that memetic desire is shown to have twin components a desire to experience physical desire and a desire to be metaphysical desire metaphysical desire sees us chasing for objects not for their own sake but for what they say about us for the self-conception they confer and the fullness of being we expect to receive upon their acquisition it is this drive which gerard sees as the dominant force within our motivational repertoire if you will metaphysical desire malleable powerful deceitful and ungovernable renders us compulsive chasing one shiny object after the other all while being led on by the false promise that salvation is just around the corner we will always be disappointed if and when we obtain the object caught in a perennial and repeating trap of tragedy and farce these negative consequences are only for when we're motivated by metaphysical desire only though right yes that is right and thanks for drawing the clarification here everything we've said so far today only relates to people primarily or solely motivated by metaphysical desire of course we can choose basketball shoes based off of their price and utility instead of their prestige of course we can choose romantic partners based on our taste and not the opinions of others and of course we can form our own philosophical beliefs independently of intellectual fashions this is the distinction i try to draw right between physical and metaphysical desire only when we are primarily motivated by the latter to gain a fullness of being are we subject to this terrible fate if we are primarily motivated by physical desire then we are indeed quite sober and are after the object for the object's sake now of course the next important question that we need to answer is what determines the proportion of metaphysical desire versus physical desire how do we not give ourselves over fully to models there's going to be way too many answers here how much experience do you have to ground your physical desires whether you are approximate to any specifically alluring models whether you've received the right type of upbringing whether you have been disrespected and humiliated but i will highlight the root cause of metaphysical desire the degree to which we experience metaphysical desire is one to one correlated with our pridefulness and i think the idea is quite straightforward metaphysical desire is the desire to be glorious to be immortal to be dominant and powerful we've discussed how these are exaggerated ideals that can't really be achieved whose exemplars are the napoleons and achilles of the world and so to even think that this type of being is obtainable by us requires an unreasonable arrogance or pridefulness because we all experience metaphysical desire then gerard sees all humans as prideful creatures now with this intuition in place we're ready to construct gerard's anthropology of the cross his project of explaining all of christian phenomena in cultural psychological and social language and it all starts with this one claim metaphysical desire is the root of all sin now a canonical christian position held by thinkers like saint augustine state that pride is the root of all sin because it closes us off from god humility exalts and pride debases as i've just argued metaphysical desire reveals above all one's pridefulness it shows a fundamental hubris of thinking that we can possess such a heightened degree of being with this simple translation then we can say of course leaning on augustine as gerard himself often does that metaphysical desire is the root of all sin now let's take off our augustinian training wheels and let me try to give this argument in a more direct fashion if we are to re-examine this notion of being that we are after we will find that it is nothing but the core metaphysical qualities of the christian god we desire to be the most real well what could be more real than god a popular move in christian theology conceives of the universe as a gradation of being with god as the most real entity the fundamental substratum that grounds all we desire to persist through time to be eternal well that's even easier god is the alpha and the omega he spans all time we desire to be self-sufficient to have power over ourselves in all existence well what is that if not describing god's omnipotence the desire to be turns out to be the desire to be the most real the all-lasting the all-powerful what we are really after are really core metaphysical concepts ontology reality temporality persistence and causality power metaphysical desire upon examination under christian spectacles reveals itself to be a desire to be the capital g god of course there is another entity in christian cosmology who is defined by their desire to be god and that is the fallen angel satan who dared to rebel against god metaphysical desire then is literally the satanic drive to rival god in his metaphysical splendor and what could be more sinful than that but metaphysical desire isn't just the root of all sin it is also our original sin let me read you genesis 3 4-5 and the serpent said unto the woman ye shall not surely die for god doth know that in the day you eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened and ye this is the key line shall be as gods knowing good and evil end quote satan here is the model adam and eve the subject and god the object before this moment humanity was content being a servant of god yet through our imitation of satan we too acquired the satanic drive to be like god metaphysical desire then we can say was formed at this very instance at this point we too yearned for a fullness of being that was only reserved to god at this point we became prideful and simultaneously the acquisition of this ideal the birth of this pride brought us to our lowest depth a deep shame genesis 3 7 and the eyes of them both were opened and they knew that they were naked before our original sin without the desire to be we were content in eden even in our nakedness we only feel shame when we compare our petty human existence to the glory of god which we now all yearn for by establishing this relationship between metaphysical desire and original sin hopefully our listeners can now appreciate the full psychological philosophical theological significance of metaphysical desire and why we have done this tripartite zeroing in from the mises to mimetic desire to metaphysical desire this relationship should also give us a hint at how pervasive gerard takes metaphysical desire to be we may be able to tame it such that it's manageable or even maybe unnoticeable but we should eject any delusions that any of us can fully escape from it altogether just as no christian asks do i sin but only how do i sin gerard thinks we are always if only subtly plagued by this rebellious tormenting impulse metaphysical desire then is the most pervasive unique and consequential force that drives us as humans and that is why gerard focuses on it what could be more damning what could be more emblematic of the fallenness and depravity of man that our core motivational nexus is a satanic heritage inherited to the original sin that is a terrifying thought we've only just begun to scratch the surface of gerard's terror [Music] you

Channel: Johnathan Bi

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Length: 70min 14sec (4214 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022