MONGOL GENERAL:   We have won again. That is good! But what is best in life?

MONGOL WARRIOR:   The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons on your wrist, wind in your hair!

MONGOL GENERAL:   Wrong! Conan, what is best in life?

CONAN:                       To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

MONGOL GENERAL:   That is good.

-       Conan the Barbarian, 1982

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HAMLET:                     There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

-       (Hamlet, I.5)

The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

What is the purpose of life? We all wonder. If you are a philosopher looking to formulate a system, you need to answer that question and set it as its cornerstone. You might end up picking happiness, love, power, proliferation of good genes, or a more complex definition of some “highest good.” 

The object of philosophical inquiry is man, and he is approached with an attitude one might assume when dissecting a frog or reverse engineering a machine. The unique thing about philosophy, though, is that it produces the confounding phenomenon of a machine studying itself. Philosophers love to take things to a deeper level, but once you get to the deepest level you end up chasing your own tail.

Yet the pursuit of that deepest level of human purpose continues stubbornly. Today it happens in computer science with artificial neural networks, a technology that apes the cellular structure of the brain to achieve stunning successes in taking in visual images and outputting object labels. It can do the equivalent with auditory and other types of inputs. Artificial neural networks consist of information-relaying nodes that, in imitation of the brain’s neurons, are arranged in multiple layers communicating with each other. The lowest layer receives raw stimuli and then communicates to the next layer, which creates a reduced message passed on to the third layer, and so on, until the final layer derives an object name.

We say ‘apes’ for two reasons. First, the architects of neural networks replicate the structure of the brain without having a final mathematical model of how they work. The degree of complexity becomes a little too astronomical for classical analysis. The approach to improving the networks can be described as heuristic, which is to say, you play around with the knobs and levers through educated guesses and trial-and-error. This playing around comprises a vast and expanding field of research that is marked by highest levels of human ingenuity, but the fact remains that there is no classical algorithm for building a neural network. 

It is the heuristic design of artificial intelligence that creates unpredictability, legal challenges, and the fears of AI takeover. An article on this topic in MIT Technology Review says the following on the inscrutability of neural networks:

“The system is so complicated that even the engineers who designed it may struggle to isolate the reason for any single action… You can’t just look inside a deep neural network to see how it works. A network’s reasoning is embedded in the behaviour of thousands of simulated neurons, arranged into dozens or even hundreds of intricately interconnected layers.” [1]

Second, like apes appear to be warped replicas of humans, neural networks replicate the peculiarly human habit of categorizing stimuli. Neural networks recall Plato’s Theory of Forms: objects are imperfect instances of forms or “ideals”, which constitute the essence of the objects and exist in some transcendent realm. Neural networks, human and artificial, can be thus thought of as machines that translate from the realm of perceived objects to the realm of forms. 

In the early modern era, René Descartes formulated a famous definition of human essence when he wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” The aphorism has served as an inspiration for modern science, including artificial intelligence. No doubt that humans think, but we are still left to wonder: What is the goal of our thinking?

This question is where we take a turn to the philosophy of another René, namely, René Girard. Instead of positing a specific objective to the question of what humans desire, Girard’s mimetic theory achieves a breakthrough as it stops at the question and proclaims: “Humans desire. Humans are creatures that desire.”

Not answering the questions prevents us from pigeonholing ourselves into a “school of thought,” a social club, or a pagan cult. In ancient Greece, Socrates’ philosophy split into Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics, each school advocating its own distinct purpose of life, in competition with the others. Even before that, gods of the polytheistic pantheons of Greece and older Mediterranean civilizations may have represented differentiated ideals – Mercury for commerce, Ares for war, Aphrodite for love – with their cults serving as social clubs for those citizens who chose to dedicate themselves to a particular ideal (while more “generalist” citizens may go around and pay respect to each ideal in turn, following a busy calendar of holy days). 

It was similar to how today people choose football clubs, only with more meaningful distinctions. Or, how we have finance enthusiasts who hold prosperity as the highest ideal, outdoorsy types who love Mother Nature, people who practice sports because, like Spartans, they see life as a big battle, and so on. 

Defining the human as that which desires has surprising elegance and power. It opens new perspectives in philosophy, biology, and theology, and it brings them together to create a new and compelling vision of our origin. We already mentioned that in philosophy, it liberates us from the necessity to pick a restrictive definition of who we are. In biology, it creates the distinction between instinct and desire. Instincts are hardwired, to use a phrase common today – they are fixed, they are not learned, they do not include visions of a better future. A beaver may have an instinct to build a dam to later catch fish in the pond it creates, but it doesn’t daydream about becoming a better beaver once the dam is complete. The beaver is perfectly content with being the beaver that he is today.

Desire, on the other hand, is the strange thing that started the human. Here was an animal who looked at his surroundings and thought – in whatever primeval language he commanded – “I want something that is not here. There is something more than this; I want it, and I want to bring it about.” Desire involves visualization of an idealized future that requires the unique cognitive abilities of homo sapiens. It is characterized by a feeling of not belonging to the here and now and looking to escape it. Desire, in other words, is always a compulsion towards transcendence, for rising above the circumstances that define us. A biologist may even call it an instinct for transcendence. Desire is what makes humans feel like they are not at home in the world in which they, somehow, awake as animals. 

The distinction between desire and instinct can appear fuzzy because the two modes of pursuit are often after the same object. We have both an instinct to eat and a desire to eat. Unless we are starving, eating is not merely about the sustenance of the body, but about the joy we experience through the sense of taste, from receiving food, or from sharing our food with others. Joy is desire temporarily fulfilled, an encounter with transcendence that elevates us above the drudgery of everyday life. The instinct analogue of joy in the case of food would be merely the neural state of satiety and lethargy felt after a full meal. Similar distinctions can be made in pursuit of sex or various pursuits of perceived safety – here too, our instinctual prerogatives are still there, but they are buried under resplendent structures of desire, and we interpret our goals as matters of higher or lower being. 

Desire as pursuit of transcendence implies that what we are after is never an object, but, as Girard puts it, “all desire is desire for being." We desire objects because we think that they will bequeath us a higher state of being, but in truth, objects are only secondary. The question is then, not what do we want, but rather who do we want to be? In our desires we inevitably create a model for ourselves, a person who we will imitate. The opus of René Girard is called mimetic theory because its central claim is that all desire is imitated – “We desire according to the other.” Once we see that objects are secondary to desire, we are not forced to restrict human purpose to any particular object.

All desire is received from a mediator. There is a triangle here that consists of the desiring subject, a mediator whom the subject emulates, and finally, the object that the mediator either possesses or desires themselves, and that thereby becomes an object of desire for the subject as well. If we accept the idea of desire as the pursuit of transcendental being, then the mediator becomes a logical necessity. Without the mediator, we have only the subject pursuing an object, a fixed endeavour that is tantamount to animal instinct. As Girard puts it:

 “If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good.” (Chapter 1, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning)

It is important to note that mimetic rivalry over objects is not the same as the animal struggle over scarce resources. In the first, value of an object is generated by the “gaze of the other,” whereas in the second, values of resources are strictly in the resource themselves. There is no fashion among animals. Much human conflict is justified as a struggle over scarce resources; however, this does not account for the overwhelming and irrational destruction of war, the ultimate form of conflict, a destruction that is better understood as sacrificial catharsis. If war did not involve irrational passions of mimesis, it would take the form of what Clausewitz describes as “war by algebra,” a process that skips the violence part as unnecessary and truncates war to a perfectly reasonable and bloodless negotiation process. 

Sexual desire, of course, holds a special place in human society, having so much strife, customs, and art dedicated to it. Sexuality is so unique perhaps because, as a pursuit of the most intimate union with another person, someone who somehow “completes” us, it resonates powerfully with desire’s quest of filling the lack of being through the other. 

In its discovery of the primacy of the mediator in desire, at the expense of both the object and the subject, mimetic theory uncovers the shortcomings of many a modern doctrine. A most basic effect of civilization is to instill shame in desiring what others have; consequently, ideologies of the civilized modern era have a most persistent tendency to ignore the other and build themselves either around the object or around the subject. This blindness accounts for their failure to bring about the peace that they promise. Girard says this already in his first book: 

The vain romantic always wants to convince himself that his desire is written into the nature of things, or, which amounts to the same thing, that it is the emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi-divine ego. Desire is no longer rooted in the object perhaps, but it is rooted in the subject; it is certainly not rooted in the Other. The objective and subjective fallacies are one and the same; both originate in the image which we all have of our own desires. Subjectivisms and objectivisms, romanticisms and realisms, individualisms and scientisms, idealisms and positivisms appear to be in opposition but are secretly in agreement to conceal the presence of the mediator. All these dogmas are the aesthetic or philosophic translation of world views peculiar to internal mediation. They all depend directly or indirectly on the lie of spontaneous desire. They all defend the same illusion of autonomy to which modern man is passionately devoted. (Chapter 1, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel)

Machiavelli wrote at the dawn of the modern era. His ideas on the true objectives of princes provoked outrage in his time and still generate controversy. Machiavellian prince is either praised as pragmatic or condemned as cruel, but rarely is he deemed unrealistic. Machiavelli’s universe is modern in that consists of the prince as the subject and everyone else as an object to be manipulated. Yet, in the real world, one Machiavellian prince soon finds himself confronted with another Machiavellian prince. The subject-object dynamic dissolves and turns into the tragic confrontation of warring twins. The ancient ideas of tragic confrontation of brothers, of hubris and nemesis, are much simpler than modern treatises and manifestos, but they come closer to truth in encapsulating human strife.

Nietzsche, another bad boy of philosophy, likewise posits will-to-power as a prime human mover, and likewise imagines a single, ‘quasi-divine’ egoist manipulating the rest of humanity as a passive object. In reality, if you were to lock two will-to-power Zarathustras in the same room for two weeks, when you come back you would most likely find one, if not both of them dead. 

The same goes for any “subjectivist or objectivist” ideology, even those who do not directly oppose traditional morals. Both communism and ideological capitalism ignore mimetic desire and posit some form of mastery over the material world as an end-in-itself. The modern man, “so passionately devoted” to his autonomy, is always confused when conflict flares up in his egotistical little world. He does not acknowledge that he desires according to the other, and he cannot see when or why the other desires what he does. To him, the Devil doesn’t exist, as the saying goes, that’s the Devil’s biggest trick. 

It is not difficult to see how mimetic theory ties in with the religious ideas of the divine origin of man, and especially to those in the Book of Genesis. The mysterious capacity to label sensory phenomena – or “name” them, in Biblical jargon – a trait that is inseparable from intelligence – makes man an image of his Creator. His sense of not belonging to nature, and his desire to rise above it, correspond to the ideas of the Fall and Salvation, respectively. Furthermore, it is reasonable to think that the capacity to create idealized forms out of sensory data must somehow be connected to the sense that the world in which we live is not ideal and the consequent wish to escape it. Intelligence and desire are inseparable. 

Our desiring or idealizing nature convinces us with equal force that transcendence is something we do not possess and that someone else does, and it drives us inevitably to select a human model, a person whom we endow with a higher state being. We imitate the model’s behaviour, including the possession of objects that he has. Meanwhile, the model himself, if he senses our desire for his possessions, will see it himself as an affirmation of their transcendent value, and he will jealously cling to them. Competitive strife thus generates transcendence in objects in the eyes of men and leads them to pride and envy. 

An interesting article in the journal Contagion discusses “conflictual mimesis as the ‘scientific version of the doctrine of Original Sin.’” The history of humankind starts when man perceives God as a rival: 

“The serpent insinuates that God withholds something from humankind so that they may not be like God. By means of this distortion, God suddenly doesn’t seem to be the gracious giver of all life anymore. Rather, God appears as a rival to human beings, wanting to guard “his” position against “his” rivals.” [2]

Imitation of models is what makes us human; it is what allows us to connect with the other in the best way – through love. However, when models become rivals, we get every form of evil. The article quotes Girard on this point: 

“It [mimetic desire] is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.”

The “ambivalent nature of mimesis” can be summarized in what on its own sounds like a platitude: desire is the cause of all the best and all the worst in us. In Girard’s analysis, social hierarchies, laws, and religious ethics and rituals throughout history all have the common practical purpose of mitigating bad mimesis. They do so by differentiating individuals so that their desires overlap as little as possible. However, mimesis among humans always proves too powerful for mere rules and regulations, so that societies can never achieve perfect and permanent harmony. We cannot escape our sinful nature – without divine grace.

Girard’s theory and the scholarly output that derived from it is sometimes called “interdividualism” for the primacy it gives to the interaction between individuals. The label is too hard to pronounce to catch on, I think, but otherwise it has some merit. Not only is desire borrowed from others, but the ethereal state of transcendence itself seems to exist only via communion. We only see transcendence somewhere else, or if we feel it for a fleeting moment, we feel it in relation to others – perhaps through their admiring gaze, or from above, through being recognized by or feeling connected to our external, perhaps divine, model.  

How we go after transcendence determines whether we will do evil or good. For the evil option, we end up as rivals to our models and enter into conflict with them. Girard often describes how rivals stumbling blocks or “scandalons” to each other, obstacles that nevertheless fascinate us, causing us to repeatedly trip up over them. A whole society can become rife with this sort of conflict, which is then resolved through scapegoating of an innocent victim. This conflictual desire Girard calls “deviated desire,” and its supreme Biblical representative is Satan, the accuser who is forever causing people to turn on each other. Girard endeavours to interpret through deviated desire all the depths of madness and violence that man has shown himself capable of throughout history. 

For the good option, we can avoid coveting our neighbour’s possessions and choose models that can never become rivals. If you are religious, this model is God, or some vision of the divine; if you are a Christian – the model is Jesus Christ in the flesh. Religious devotion deals with the dispersion of rivalry. Archaic sacrificial rituals diffused mimetic strife within the community; otherwise, prayers and rituals tend to recognize the Divine as the supreme external model with whom there cannot be any rivalry. The relationship instead is primarily one of thanksgiving, or eucharist in Greek. 

To answer the question earlier – who do we want to be? – the answer is that we want to be like Gods. We want to achieve theosis. And there is a good way and a bad way to go about it.

The question remains, however, about the connection between mimetic desire and another, more visible distinguishing trait of the human animal – material civilization. First, we have already touched somewhat on how “good mimesis” contributes to civilization. For one, imitation appears to be related to intelligence at a neural level, so our imitative capacity allows us to learn, recognize patterns, and manipulate our material environment. Secondly, good mimesis enables us to love, admire, and to seek transcendence, inspiring us to create beauty and to modify our environment. 

Girard’s seminal works focus on the role that negative mimesis may have played in the birth of civilization. Specifically, he sees first humans as hominoids whose enhanced mimetic and intelligence faculties first and foremost gave them the unprecedented capacity for envy and slaughter of their rivals. The only way to escape extinction of the species was for individuals to unify their violent urges against a common enemy in a process that Girard calls the scapegoating mechanism. The enemy could have been a sacrificial victim or a rival tribe. This first form of unity was what enabled harmony, organization, and unified struggle that gradually produced every aspect of culture. Girard points to the Genesis account of Cain as the builder of cities, Romulus’ murder of Remus, and countless other myths that feature foundational murder as examples of ancient intuition that civilization is built on unanimous violence. 

Though mimetic theory provides very compelling arguments for the relatedness of the scapegoating, mechanism, desire and intelligence, the exact chronological and causal relationship between them remains obscure, like with other theories of origin. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard puts the scapegoating mechanism as the originator and evolutionary motor of intelligence itself, seeing the scapegoat as the first signifier and the origin even of language. 

The tantalizing question remains as to a singular event of human origin – at what point was our homo desiderius – the desiring human (?) – born. Unfortunately, it will not be answered in this essay. I refer you to the judgement of Pope Pius XII on the matter:

 “For these reasons the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”  (Encyclical Letter Humani Generis)

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MONGOL GENERAL:               What is it that humans desire?

CONAN:                                   Human is that which desires.

 Read more in the book Catharses.

[1] Knight, Will. “The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI.” MIT Technology Review, April 11, 2017 https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/ 

[2] Petra Steinmair-Pösel, Petra. “Original Sin, Grace, and Positive Mimesis.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Issue 14, 2007, pp. 1-12