René Girard XVI: Existentialism
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
“The subject will always end up unearthing the insurmountable obstacle, which may be nothing other than the vast indifference of the world, and he will crash into it.”
- René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World
Existentialism has been in fashion for a long time now. The depressed hero undergoes an “existential crisis," a struggle with the meaninglessness of life. Some finger Dostoevsky as the father of existentialism, as his novels were the first to feature protagonists explicitly grappling with this sort of struggle. In the twentieth century, existentialism became more or less identified with high literature. Almost every great novelist dealt with the problem of the meaning of life.
Today, even specialists on the subject find existentialism hard to define (existentialism is fussy like that; it’s very emo). The strict definition would start with the school of Jean Paul Sartre, the man who coined the term, but the broader one would retrospectively include Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, in whose times the term existentialism did not exist. Later on, the parent stream of existentialism produced or influenced a myriad, it seems, of new schools of thought with names that only philosophy majors know. I am personally not up to date with those names and their minute distinctions. What all these little streams share is a pathos of struggle to find meaning, and often a rejection of a natural or somehow inherited system of values. So, let us go with that definition.
The struggle for meaning became the defining quest of the modern literary hero. It would seem as though man before modern times did not have this peculiar problem. Why? Some would say that the pre-modern man was protected by ignorance, a childish naïveté that allowed him to accept anthropomorphic myths as final and dogmatic explanations of causes. Others would say he was too busy battling nature and invaders. Yet others, in the manner of Nietzsche, would assert that the ancient man placed himself, his own subjective “will”, above pursuit of any meaning. He embraced the inscrutability of life as part of its sacred charm, and he took the silence of the universe as a challenge to a heroic struggle for self-expression.
The modern man, on the other hand, burdened by science as it were, and stripped by it of his old walking aids of subjectivity and religion, was now pushed out to stumble his way through the outer darkness of a faceless universe, through the void. But his legs were too weak, and his brain unfit for the task. Deprived of his former crutches, the human spirit could no longer muster the supposed blissful ignorance of the ancients, nor their supposed rejection of objectivity.
This narrative of the birth of the modern malaise is so widely accepted that it is difficult to step out of it. Yet, here we intend to do precisely that, and we intend to shine the light of mimetic theory on it. The working assumption is that mimetic desire is more fundamental to human behavior than is search for meaning, and hence that copied desire and mimetic struggle among individuals may explain the existentialist’s peculiar obsession with meaning.
To step out of the narrative, we can take existentialists at their word when they say that all meaning is constructed, and we can try to deconstruct the foundational myth they have constructed for themselves, as summarized above. In it, the hero is obviously the existentialist, while there are two discernible antagonists: the old dogmatist, and the new man of principles.
The hero is tragically exiled into the outer darkness, and he sets out on a brave quest for meaning. He is somewhat like Abram of the Chaldeans, who wakes up to the folly of his people and goes off wondering in search of the promised land. As for the Chaldeans, the old dogmatist is essentially an idiotic child who refuses to grow up and face the harsh reality of the world beyond his bedroom. The other Chaldean is the modern man of principles, a case of adolescent arrested development who realizes that Spider-Man isn’t real, but still enjoys losing himself in the world of comic books because it provides an ontologically comfortable universe. Nietzsche saw this character in the English, and this his how he puts it in the Twilight of the Idols:
“They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females a la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there.”
Nietzsche views the clinging to godless morality as effeminate cowardice. Once one realizes that Spider-Man doesn’t exist, the manly thing to do is to stop reading comic books:
“When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet... Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.” (Twilight of the Idols)
In existentialism, having solid principles comes to be identified with idiocy and weakness, while existential despair becomes the mark of a profound thinker. But isn’t “tolerance for ambiguity” a marker of intelligence? May be, maybe not, depending on how one defines ambiguity and tolerance for it. The fool or the simpleton – and we are assuming we belong to neither category – may think they know everything, or they may think that they know everything that they need to know, or they simply may not consider that question. One can turn the idea around and claim that the fool and the simpleton very much wallow in ambiguity, so much so that they are perfectly comfortable not spending their whole life in the intellectual pursuit of attempting to reduce it. The concept of “tolerance of ambiguity” itself seems to be a contraption of the existentialist mind, looking to romanticize its struggles.
Existential comfort is for women and children; existential struggle indicates mature men. Tradition and principles become the scapegoat blamed for human limitation, and the existentialists become the brave and virile leaders who will take the humanity to a higher and better place, towards transcendence. Existentialists produce the formidable enemy in the form of the void, and then place themselves as the warriors fighting to defeat it. The others have given up the battle and live in tolerable but unworthy enslavement of things like principles, mores, or morality.
Mimetic theory will predict an emergence of the double phenomenon between existentialism and its scapegoat, whom we can here call dogmatism for brevity. Indeed, existentialism does bear that out. For it, dogmatism is the problem with humanity, but lack of dogmatism is precisely that which is painful about the silence of the universe. This is why in its derivative forms, existentialism always ends up producing unhinged dogmatism, be it in the form of the totalitarian social doctrines of mid-twentieth century, or the hydra of identity politics of the early twenty-first. But we are digressing.
Existentialism is romanticism of the void. The more terrifying the void, the more glorious the existentialists are in their journey through it. The Englishman who loves comic books shows the shop-keeping pragmatism of his “race”: he does not like the void, so he escapes it with whatever means he can find. The existentialist, on the other hand, sets out to overcome the void, not with any concrete plan on how to accomplish the mission, but because the mission itself bestows him with heroism.
The existentialist fetishizes the void: he inflates its significance with his obsession. He has pride in the might of his adversary, and he strives to make others see it and admire his courage. This would explain the existentialist derision for systems of values. Existentialism is not revolutionary in the strict sense; it does not seek to abolish a particular system of values in favor of a better one. Rather, it derides the very concept of systems of values, whether religious or merely moral, as petty and devoid of transcendence. The derision is a narcissistic strategy; the existentialists want everyone to admire their grand struggle, and they feel threatened by those who are not interested.
If it wasn’t so, the existentialist would show at least empathy towards those who are trying to fill the void with a system of values. There are youths who, in their struggle to find a place in the world will explore various worldviews until they find the one that fulfills them, like our comic book-loving Englishman. There are also intellectuals who are open or at least tolerant towards different philosophies. There are also scientists who are acutely aware of the grand mystery of the universe but who, instead of despairing, joyfully focus on uncovering whatever messages they can uncover from it.
The existentialists, or at least the overtly atheistic existentialist like Sartre and those after him, have a decidedly different attitude. It is one marked by hostility to anyone who has settled on an absolute worldview. They will accept a system of values only under the condition that it comes out as a choice of an authentic individual, as a sort of an act of self-expression. Yet, as such, it is not a system of values at all. A system of values can never be subjective, because it can only exist as social consensus.
Like all romantic heroes who supposedly glory in lonely authenticity, existentialists in truth seek the gaze of the other. If they do not receive it, their narcissism is wounded. These would-be astronauts, apparently desiring to get onto some elite spaceship and fly off through the terrifying darkness of the cosmos, away from the embarrassing crib that is planet Earth, are in reality just another iteration of the mimetic human, desperate for the admiring gaze of those who they would derisively leave behind, and who are perfectly happy on their home planet.
The presence of the other in the existentialist struggle is confirmed in the literature of Dostoevsky and Proust, as explained by René Girard in his book Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Girard shows a disconnect between the novelists and their existentialist readers. The novelists depict heroes that indeed struggle with meaning, but they ultimately reveal the mimetic causes behind the struggle. In Dostoevsky, behind the underground man’s existentialist woes lies his frustration with colleagues who ignore him, while Proust’s characters are driven by snobbism.
However, most modern readers remain fascinated by the existentialist struggle, while they ignore the mimetic revelation. Literary critics often see Dostoevsky’s resolutions pointing to sin and repentance as peculiar sort of relapse from art into religion, conformism, or simply artistic laziness. In Proust, revelations of envy as the underlying motivator, such us when Madame Verdurin marries into the family of her archenemies the Guermantes, are processed as rebellious acts of free and authentic individual against oppressive bourgeois society.
The fetishization of the void among existentialist intellectuals may not be so much different than that found in literary heroes of Dostoevsky and Proust. How does one become an existentialist intellectual, anyways? All intellectual tradition is defined by preference for abstract objects over earthly desires. A young person with a habit and aptitude for study may easily sublimate his desires, frustrations, or failures in the sexual or social realm into a fixation on abstract principles or ideas. Specifically, ‘silence of the universe’ could easily come in to stand for a catastrophic rebuttal of desire in one’s non-intellectual life.
Before the modern era, contemplation of the abstract featured strictly external mediation of the divine, which could never be approached. The modern era changed that, in that it turned the bundled concept of nature-universe-god into an object, rival, and obstacle for human autonomy. This happened in parallel with social barriers weakening and proliferating rivalries and resentments among a growing proportion of society.
The defining modern project of contending with the universe did give birth to existentialism, in the sense that it turned the universe from the external model into an internal one. The ancient man was childish in the sense that it never occurred to him to contend with something that was so obviously above and beyond him, something that created him. The transition to rivalry, as always, produced so much frustration and despair, emotions characteristic of existentialism.
Like all mimetic struggle, existentialist struggle with the void eventually leads to a proliferation of warring doubles. The knight errands in the struggle for meaning seek to outdo each other. Already in the nineteenth-century novels of Dostoevsky, and even Turgenev before him, rejection of values by progressive fathers is copied by their sons. Of course, sons can only reject the values of their fathers, leading to a progressively more transgressive culture. Ultimately, a generation reaches a sort of progressive event horizon called nihilism. At that point, the only thing left to do is to start destroying everything and killing everyone, a sort of total suicide.
The generational progression towards more and more transgression of values repeats itself in cycles in the modern west. The cycle began in the nineteenth century led to communist revolutions and the two world wars. On a considerably less destructive level, one can also observe it in American pop culture: Hollywood and popular music both get more violent, sexual, and nihilistic from one generation to another. Yet, if one looks at the earliest forms of Hollywood and popular music, one can already discern the gradient of transgression that only needs to be consistently maintained to reach the early 21st-century levels. Elvis Presley was as transgressive in his time as hip hop is today.
Another end-result of existentialism stems from the impossibility of reaching its goal. The silence of the universe, the void, was chosen for the grand challenge it represents, and consequently the transcendence it promises to its potential vanquishers. However, the conquest is never going to happen, and the knight-errant will eventually become a mere masochist. His quixotic mission involves a stumbling block, a skandalon, over which he endlessly returns to trip over, again and again. There is nothing in the essence of the void itself that makes it a stumbling block; indeed, there is nothing in the essence of the void whatsoever. The scandal arises from the masochistic character of the mission itself, which seeks failure and pain as proofs of greatness of the ever-elusive goal.
Girard presents a fascinating take on masochism in his book Violence and the Sacred. Rather than some intrinsic preference for pain, it is a strategy for achieving the goal of any old desire: the experience of the transcendental. The masochist has an acute understanding that intensity of desire is proportional to the inaccessibility of its object, so he seeks humiliation and rejection on the hands of an inaccessible mediator of his desire, as indicators of transcendence of that desire. Girard sees sadism as a derivative of masochism; the sadist likewise associates pain with desire, but merely chooses to play the role of the other, of the inaccessible mediator. The sadist can never truly ascend to the role of this mediator, he can only role-play, because the mediator is imagined to be in a state of bliss, and as such he would have no obsession with pain, which belongs entirely to the experience of the lowly, desiring subject.
In the eternally silent universe, the existentialist sees an absolutely cruel, unresponsive master. At the heart of existentialism is man’s relationship with the universe, so that, although God is rejected, the universe is nevertheless personified. God is yet another mimetic double of the existentialist. The indifference of the universe is experienced masochistically: it offends the dignity of man while also signaling a certain insurmountable superiority of the inhuman. The existential response is the masochistic malaise based around the inadequacy of the lonely humanity, but also the derived sadism of Nietzsche, a call on humanity to usurp the cold mastery of the universe and become like it, to become super-human: heartless and cruel.
Through a big part of his oeuvre, Girard repeatedly undermines modern interpretations of ancient myths. These interpretations are broadly speaking existentialist: the fantastic stories are seen as expressions of the free human imagination, a sort of a creative “screw you” to a dead universe. In a scholarly tour de force, Girard reveals a grand thread that shows myths to reveal – or hide – archaic stories of collective crises and violence created by a contagion of desire and envy.
The ancients were not very existentialist at all. Their stories were preoccupied with the human, with desire and violence. That is certainly not to say that they were certain about the nature of the universe and man’s place in it. Far from it – one only needs to look into the various schools of Greek philosophy. However, the uncertainty was much more likely to engender fascination than despair. When we read stories of ancients committing suicide, it is generally not because they don’t see the purpose of life in general, but because one way or another their relationship to their community has been destroyed. Perhaps even modern suicides are more about broken relationships than many of us think, and much less about “existential angst”.
Existentialism is truly a modern malaise. Its model-obstacle, the silent universe, has no face, and as such it cannot be emulated, pleased, or vanquished. The void can only be chased forever in a masochistic hope against all hope that somewhere, at the end of all that pain, there is transcendence after all. In the meantime, one can take comfort in the fact that girls like desperados, even the ones battling the universe itself.
Read more in the book Catharses.
