Deviated Transcendence
Deviated transcendence is a form of false transcendence that seeks transcendence in the wrong places—it is an immanent transcendence, like looking for God within the confines of one’s own fishbowl. It comes from an inner void that opens up when human desire seeks its fulfillment in places other than its divine and metaphysical origin. Real transcendence is metaphysical in nature. According to Robert Hammerton-Kelly, who wrote a beautiful tribute to René Girard on his 70th birthday, “the void drives us to seek fulfillment from our fellow human beings, whom we mistakenly believe to possess the ontological fullness that we lack. Thus we fall into a war of desirefor empty prestige and hollow pre-eminence. Deviated transcendence is what leads groups caught in a mimetic crisis to turn to the scapegoat mechanism, which is a form of deviated transcendence. It makes everyone caught up in the mechanism feel as if some transcendent power was at work to bring them peace; in reality, it was a function of their own violence and the false transcendence of their group psychology which makes them feel, subjectively, as if they have achieved something without having truly achieved anything at all. Deviated transcendence is the reason that humans undertake strange diets and rituals—religious-like acts, even among the most secular of people—looking to transcend the paradigms of their existing metaphysical situation by any means possible.
Cancel Culture
So-called “Cancel culture” could be thought of as a modern-day form of bloodyless scapegoating—a scapegoating mechanism which, having lost its power because it has been exposed by Christian revelation, is a victim-making machine. No sooner than one person get cancelled and hashtags start trending on social media then another scapegoat is sought. Cancelled victims only have the power to unite people for a day, and in some cases only a few hours. Cancel culture is the equivalent of a modern day social stoning. Cancel culture is addressed in a hilarious set of cartoons here, in the blog Mimicking Machines: Mirror Neurons & Mimetic Theory And from Alex Danco’s blog post on mimetic theory: Coming back to the online world, we seem to be iterating through progressive cycles of a modern sort of anger: “outrage culture”, “cancel culture”, or whatever you want to call it, which has some recognizable characteristics of scapegoating that we talked about earlier. Our instinct to blame is strong, and we target that blame into specific people or groups of people as a way to protect our own community. It’s especially strong when that blame is justifiable to everybody in your peer set, and singling out a particular person as being worthy of outrage can provoke a definitive wave of pile-on mimicry among your group. They, after all, have just seen you successfully earn praise for casting blame on someone, so the instinct is strong to join in. The internet lets this mimetic behaviour scale far faster and far broader than ever could before. People get “cancelled”; modern-day sacrifice, basically.
Mimetic Appetite
Mimetic appetite is a way to describe the power of mimesis as a kind of passion, to take a category from classical metaphysics. According to Thomas Aquinas, humans and the rest of creation have appetites that drive them toward their telos, or ultimate ends. Humans, though, are more complicated than any other kind of being because they have three different kinds of appetites. Inanimate and vegetative beings have natural appetites; animals have both natural and sense appetites; and God and angels have intellectual appetites. Only humans have all three. The mimetic appetite, it could be argued, would be a kind of fourth appetite—something unique to humans which drives their desires not only due to the intellect but a power of imitation which makes them want what other people want. Different people can have differing levels of mimetic appetite. Often times the mimetic appetite in a person can be so strong so as to override their intellectual appetite. There is a general mimetic appetite that every human person has. But there can be specific mimetic appetites for certain things—for instance a mimetic appetite for marriage, in which the desire of men and women to get married is mutually reinforcing. In Thomistic metaphysics, the function of the passions is not to decide upon a course of action but to respond to stimuli and prompt the human person to act according to the face value of those stimuli. Then the passions defer to the judgment of reason because only the rational appetite can command human action and because the sense analysis concludes that acting on a certain prompting of the passions is not conducive to final happiness. In the mimetic appetite, though, as conceived by some Girardians, this principle would not hold. The intellect itself may be more or less mimetic depending on the strength of the mimetic appetite. The passions respond to intentional objects—not objects considered in themselves (material objects). For instance, the passion to steal a purse is not focused on the object of a purse itself; the object of that action is to take, secretly, another person’s property for one’s personal enrichment. The purse, as an object in and of itself, is not the important thing.The purse could be blue, gold, or orange. It could contain $100 or $500. These facts are somewhat incidental to the intentional object of the action. In the case of the mimetic appetite, the intentional object is apparently the acquisition of some object that is mediated by a model; the real intentional object is the acquisition of some quality of being that the imitator presumes is possessed by the model. The object is merely an accident in this pursuit.
Positive Mimesis
The idea that there is such a thing as positive mimesis is a somewhat controversial one. Girard himself used the term “mimesis” (derived from the Greek) rather than “imitation” partly to disambiguate it from mere imitation. Mimesis is something that is usually, but not always, hidden. It easily and often leads to some sort of conflict. There is no doubt that there is a positive form of imitation—for instance, the imitation of virtuous people, the imitation of artistic masters for art students, or the imitation of Christ for Christians. The imitation of love, as in a healthy marriage, is another example of positive imitation. The current debate is whether “positive mimesis” is the best term for this. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who never writes specifically about mimetic desire and seemed to have more of an individualist version of desire than Girard, nevertheless refers to “emulation” — “the desire for a thing which is generated in us from the fact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire” (Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 27, Scholium). Notre Dame professor Ann W. Astell has a commentary on something that could be called positive mimesis with her essay “Saintly Mimesis, Contagion, and Empathy in the Thought of René Girard, Edith Stein, and Simone Weil.” The question of what to call the positive manifestations of mimetic imitation is an open one. Is there a better term than “positive mimesis”—like “emulation”? Others, like author Luke Burgis, has suggested that some imitate in a way that simply contains less of the negative mimetic components, and that they are anti-mimetic. This does not mean a lack of imitation, but a lack of the negative aspects of mimesis. In general, positive imitation, or positive mimesis, is thought to involved decrease envy, rivalry, and resentment. The model does not become an obstacle and scandal to the one imitating. They are pursuing a good which is not scarce or which will cause conflict.
Mimetic Decelerator
Things that decrease the speed and intensity of mimetic escalation and contagion: social distancing, human-centered technology design, and most long-standing cultural rules, prohibitions, and taboos. For the most part, democractic capitalism—at least when functioning well—has acted as a decelerant to mimetic violence to the extent that it has channeled mimetic desire into value-producing activities.
Mimetic Accelerator
Things that increase the speed and intensity of mimetic escalation and contagion: social media, addictive technology design, and the imprudent removal of necessary constraints such as long-standing cultural rules, prohibitions, and taboos. Certain forms of laissez-faire libertarianism act as mimetic accelerants.
Misrecognition
In mimetic theory, misrecognization refers to the tendency of people or groups caught up in the throes of mimetic desire to have their perception distorted and to misidentify people or things as the cause of their problems, as in the scapegoat mechanism. Girard uses the hard-to-translate French term méconnaissance. It means something like misrecognition, miscognition, or misreading in English. Philosopher and Girard scholar Paul Dumouchel translated it as misknowing.[2] “Misknowing” can sound like an oxymoron—if we know something, how do we “mis”-know something? But in mimetic theory, the relationship between knowing and wanting is precarious. Misrecognition is an important concept in mimetic theory because it represents the relationship between desire and knowledge. The extent to which we want something to be true determines our relationship to the truth. Consider the case of someone who holds a repugnant moral position—for instance, the support of Nazi ideology—whose misrecognition of the issue increases the more he gains true knowledge about the state of affairs. He bends all of that knowledge to his own ends. The phenomenon of misrecognition is at the heart of ideology. [2] For more on méconnaissance, I highly recommend Dumouchel’s book The Ambivalence of Scarcity and Other Essays.
Thick Desire
Less mimetic desires which have had time to form and solidify over many years or during a formative experience that is at the core of a person’s life. Thick desires are more likely to have meaning. The core motivational drives revealed in Fulfillment Stories can help a person identify and cultivate thick desires.
Thin Desire
Thin desires are rooted in ephemeral, superficial things. They’re fleeting, mimetic desires that dominate most of life when it is lived unintentionally and easily infected by news, opinions, temporary emotions, and other less-permanent things.
Motivational Pattern
The pattern of cover motivational drive revealed in Fulfillment Stories. A person’s motivational pattern is the thread that runs throughout all of their Fulfillment Stories which, on the surface, can seem unrelated and unconnected. The motivational pattern is the hidden thread of motivational energy that has been running through a person’s life.