Thank you very much for this comment, W.K. Brief thoughts on each of these excellent questions:
1. My focus is generally on mimesis as it pertains to desire—mimetic desire. How one generates an idea from one's environment or interaction with others is an epistemological question, but there are fascinating connections between mimetic desir…
Thank you very much for this comment, W.K. Brief thoughts on each of these excellent questions:
1. My focus is generally on mimesis as it pertains to desire—mimetic desire. How one generates an idea from one's environment or interaction with others is an epistemological question, but there are fascinating connections between mimetic desire and how one arrives at an idea. Many smart Girard scholars (like Dupuy) would argue that the idea of pure reason is fantasy and that all thought itself is mimetic. I disagree with him.
2. Hard to answer this question without getting into theological perspectives. In the Bhagavad Gita, desire created the universe. In Judeo-Christian theology, God's desire would be the "first desire"—desire being another word for love. If we extract ourselves from that and think about desire on the level of an individual human life, I would imagine the original desire of any one of us came from our parents.
3. I think the answer to this is usually Yes—I took on a job on Wall Street shortly after college and I can tell you that the primary reason was not the money (which was good). Today, many people seem to have attached their identities to politics, which makes it one of the most mimetic areas of life.
4. I believe it has to lead to some forms of asceticism if anything is going to change. But more often than not—at least if history is any guide—asceticism is forced on people rather than freely chosen.
5. I don't think Thiel is correctly reading Girard on everything, but what do I know. He certainly seems to me to be applying Girard's thought in an odd way by focusing so much on technology. I'm skeptical that this approach is the best way forward. I don't think humans are going to save themselves from themselves simply by building better technology or by having really smart people build new systems that supposedly "fix" mimetic desire or diffuse it better, that sort of thing. The only way out is through—and that means through each person.
Thank you very much for this comment, W.K. Brief thoughts on each of these excellent questions:
1. My focus is generally on mimesis as it pertains to desire—mimetic desire. How one generates an idea from one's environment or interaction with others is an epistemological question, but there are fascinating connections between mimetic desire and how one arrives at an idea. Many smart Girard scholars (like Dupuy) would argue that the idea of pure reason is fantasy and that all thought itself is mimetic. I disagree with him.
2. Hard to answer this question without getting into theological perspectives. In the Bhagavad Gita, desire created the universe. In Judeo-Christian theology, God's desire would be the "first desire"—desire being another word for love. If we extract ourselves from that and think about desire on the level of an individual human life, I would imagine the original desire of any one of us came from our parents.
3. I think the answer to this is usually Yes—I took on a job on Wall Street shortly after college and I can tell you that the primary reason was not the money (which was good). Today, many people seem to have attached their identities to politics, which makes it one of the most mimetic areas of life.
4. I believe it has to lead to some forms of asceticism if anything is going to change. But more often than not—at least if history is any guide—asceticism is forced on people rather than freely chosen.
5. I don't think Thiel is correctly reading Girard on everything, but what do I know. He certainly seems to me to be applying Girard's thought in an odd way by focusing so much on technology. I'm skeptical that this approach is the best way forward. I don't think humans are going to save themselves from themselves simply by building better technology or by having really smart people build new systems that supposedly "fix" mimetic desire or diffuse it better, that sort of thing. The only way out is through—and that means through each person.