on this day 2015: philosopher, literary critic, and anthropologist René Girard walked out of life.
Over a career that spanned more the six decades and saw the publication of more than 30 books, Girard set forth a theory of mimetic desire and scapegoating that led to his recognition as one of the prophets of our time and led him to be hailed by some as the Darwin of anthropology.
Girard argued that desire, in distinction from physiological needs, is largely mimetic. Because we model our desires on those whom we aspire to emulate, we are continually transforming role-models into rivals as our desires converge on shared objects. This dynamic pattern tends everywhere towards an eruption into violence, which is also mimetic and which, once kindled, threatens to spread like wildfire in a grassland and consume entire societies. As a solution, argued Girard, societies everywhere settled upon the “atomic theory” of sociology: to wit, the scapegoat mechanism.
In many cases, the only solution to the threat of holocaust is to polarise all blame onto a single individual or minority incapable of retaliating in a substantial way and which yet (assisted by the inclination of a mob caught in the throes of violent passion to suspend all critical thought) could plausibly be regarded as the sole cause of all the strife. The scapegoat was thus, paradoxically, often regarded as a semi-divine being because of his ability, through sacrifice, to effect the magical and apparently divine transformation from animosity to unanimity. Of course, the unanimity is a factitious one, and hence it is one that must be continually renewed with the blood of new victims.
Girard argued that MYTH is designed to conceal the scapegoat mechanism and rationalise it through one-sided accounts narrated from the perspective of the persecutors. TRAGEDY, he suggested, is a myth through which the perspective of the victim is beginning to shimmer through the veil of myth:
“In tragedy everything alternates. But we must also reckon with the irresistible tendency of the human spirit to suspend this oscillation, to fix attention on one extreme or the other. This tendency is, strictly speaking, mythological in nature. It is responsible for the pseudo-determination of the protagonists, which in turn transforms revolving oppositions into stable differences.”
REVELATION, suggested Girard, as exemplified in the Gospels, by contrast, is a narrative in which the black magic of sacrifice of innocents is laid bare and raised up on a cross for all to see. As Girard writes in The Scapegoat:
If the Gospels talk about the same event as the myths then they can: not fail to be mythic, according to the ethnologists, who have overlooked something. One can talk about the same murder without talking about it in the same way. One can talk about it as murderers talk or one can talk about it not as any ordinary victim talks but as does this incomparable victim that is the Christ of the Gospels. One can call him an incomparable victim without any sentimental piety or suspect emotion. He is incomparable in that he never succumbs in any way, at any point, to the perspective of the persecutor-neither in a positive way, by openly agreeing with his executioners, nor in a negative way, by taking a position of vengeance, which is none other than the inverse reproduction of the original representation of persecution, its mimetic repetition. This total absence of positive or negative complicity with violence is what is needed for a complete revelation of its system of representation and the system of every representation apart from the Gospels themselves. This is true originality; it is a return to the origin, a return that revokes the origin as it reveals it. The constant repetition of the origin that characterizes the false originality of innovations is based on the concealment and camouflage of that origin.
Girard is largely unparalleled among modern intellectuals in the his theory is also a moral injunction:
Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. I am not aware of my own, and I am persuaded that the same holds true for my readers. We only have legitimate enmities. And yet the entire universe swarms with scapegoats. The illusion of persecution is as rampant as ever, less tragically but more cunningly than under Guillaume de Machaut. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere…
on this day 1994, Gilles Deleuze walked out of life
In what is considered his magnum opus, Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze challenged the classical notions of identity and similarity. Against Aristotle’s view that “...with the straight (εὐθει) we recognize both itself and the crooked (καμπύλον),” Deleuze asserted the priority of difference. Identities are constituted not by self-sameness but by other-difference.
In a 1980 work, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze, together with his co-author, Felix Guattari, set forth the paradigm of rhizomatic thinking in opposition to the tradition of hierarchical thinking. According to their metaphor, rhizomatic thinking consists in interconnected through decentralized, non-linear and no-hierarchical relations of ideas like the root system of plants. Obviously, root systems are neither of these things and thought also cannot be any of these things and still be effective but I suppose the metaphor can be fruitful in some respects.
Deleuze also emphasized the concepts of “becoming “and of “nomadism,” both of which suggest that transformation rather than fixed identity is the essence of entities. Of course, something must remain the same, in some sense, as a condition for our perception of its changing just as it would be impossible to tell the time if the numbers on a clock face moved along with the hands. This sameness, of course, need not consist in material sameness, and in fact, cannot possible so consist in the case of any living organism, as both Plato and Aristotle were keenly aware. But, again, I suppose the argument from Deleuze can be useful as a corrective in respect to certain habits of thought.
on this day, 1873 was the birthday of philosopher G.E. Moore.
Moore was a seminal figure in the logical positivism movement in the early 20th century together with the likes of Russel and Wittgenstein and Frege (though the latter two eventual grew out of the movement and repudiated its reductionistic tendency).
“Moore’s paradox” concerns the apparent absurdity inherent in a first-person assertion in the present-tense of a sentence like:
“a storm is brewing, but I do not believe that a storm is brewing.”
Moore held that such a statement can be true, logically consistent, and not obviously contradictory and thus presents a sort of logical enigma.
But a statement like this only seems to contradict itself insofar as it is regarded abstractly, prescinded from the speaker of it. When the statement is taken concretely in this sense, the contradiction is obvious. There is nothing remarkable about making a contradictory statement whereas the contradiction will become evident if you try to think it, mean it, or believe. These activities bring the first-person intentionality to the fore and make manifest the contradiction.
The tendency of logical positivism to overlook the actual dimension of experience, which is inherently first-person, is a deficiency it shares with the general scientific research program and guarantees that it can at best provide models of truth but never relate to it directly.
In any case, G.E. Moore was regarded as a morally upstanding individual, admired by everyone who came into contact with him.
Each person must ask what his relationship is to the scapegoat. In other words, if I don’t have one, I will find some to whom I will assign this role.