Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Deceit, Desire, and the Literature Professor: Why Girardians Exist (2012)

arcade.stanford.edu

22 pointsshrikant15 comments

One of the big problems with Girard is that "needs" for survival--oxygen, water, food, body temperature--are most certainly not mimetic. I don't need to breathe oxygen just because I saw someone else do it first. These "needs" are on a spectrum--for example, not eating for 3 days may not kill me, but surely I would desire to eat if I did (and not because someone else made eating "cool".) Any desire an infant (not yet capable of observing others) might have in response to pain/pleasure stimulus is not mimetic. Or Hellen Keller whose senses are impaired, etc. So it's a rather flawed premise.

Understood metaphorically, the "thetan hypothesis" might be partly true. It belongs with other psychoanalytic theories which, while out of vogue today, probably contain some truth.

With regard to Girdard, there's a broad pattern here where prominent thinkers realize something and then interpret everything in light of that realization (the article gets into this but I don't think satisfactorily). Obviously thinkers are making an error when they univerisalize their idea -- but that's what makes them great thinkers: they give us a new, strangely plausible way of looking at the world. People who are skeptical rarely make waves (unless they take their skepticism to extremes).

I'm not sure where this leaves us. Maybe every "great thinker" is a mountebank? I'd be more kind than that. It's probably good to have these highly idiosyncractic worldviews floating around, even if they're always partly false. Perhaps they cause us to reexamine the world or act as useful tools for us to navigate life with.

> People who are skeptical rarely make waves (unless they take their skepticism to extremes).

That's another case of "universalizing their idea".

> I'm not sure where this leaves us. Maybe every "great thinker" is a mountebank?

Almost certainly every "great thinker" who tortures the evidence to make it fit their theory is a mountebank, whether or not their views have some utility. Girard's total lack of honesty with his "evidence" makes him a mountebank.

> Understood metaphorically, the "thetan hypothesis" might be partly true. It belongs with other psychoanalytic theories which, while out of vogue today, probably contain some truth.

Abstracted into a sufficiently broad metaphor, almost anything can be partly true. But in this case, abstracted to the extent where it starts to make sense, there's none of the original thetan hypothesis left in the mix. You'd just toss out the thetan part and go with the metaphor part at that point.

> I'm not sure where this leaves us. Maybe every "great thinker" is a mountebank?

Maybe! To me, it seems like the problem usually starts with the followers. The great thinker makes a case, it's persuasive enough, then other people take the idea and turn it into a worldview, or an industry. Sometimes you find a philosopher with enough charisma or force of will to start their own cult, but more often than not it's someone at the margins of the original movement who latches on and makes it their thing. A student, a lover, a family member, a random billionaire, whatever.

Every time I think "oh Jean-Yves Girard".

Besides being perhaps the logician of note of the 20th century (against considerable "competition"), he's become an important philosopher in the 21st. I think he realizes he's become a philosopher, although it would seem (from private correspondence) that he doesn't find philosophy all that important, let alone that he's such an important one.

The recommended book-length treatment of Girardian ideas is "The Phantom of Transparence". The TED talk version is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3pgZxU-Cg

I often tell people to watch the video even if they don't know one "euh" of French. There's something about the energy in it that already conveys so much.

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I can't honestly evaluate the other, minor Girard because of the homonymy. It's unfortunate.

I don’t necessarily hold Girard to be correct, but I do find immediate flaws in the reasoning. I only desire to swim because someone taught me to swim (at considerable effort). I only know who Zooey and Ann are because they have been presented to me in the media.

It’s clear that humans have sensations like hunger or thirst that are purely individual, but that doesn’t imply that the desires for things that interact with those sensations arise individually?

The author discusses whether Girard was using a literary device when saying "all desire is memetic", and actually meant the weaker form "some desire is memetic" - and then dismisses the possibility, as the weak form is obvious and doubted by no one.

And it is certainly the case that some desire to swim is not memetic, otherwise no one would be able to swim, just like some people's desire to teleport cannot possibly be memetic, because it doesn't exist.

In a way, Girard's theory exists in parallel with Sapir-Whorf's, except with desire instead of language, in that its strong form imply new concepts cannot emerge - and like SW, that strong form doesn't hold up to evidence, while the weak form is trivially true.

> just like some people's desire to teleport cannot possibly be memetic, because it doesn't exist.

In general I agree with your criticism, but on this point I think you are off. The desire to teleport could be mimetic - I could learn it from someone else's desire, not from their reality.

You could indeed - and I could have been a lot clearer; that bit was just to point out that at least someone in the fairly recent past must have had an original desire. Or, at least, I do not know of any medieval text lamenting the lack of teleportation.

Apologies for pedantry, but point of order:

mimetic /mĭ-mĕt′ĭk, mī-/: adjective. Relating to, characteristic of, or exhibiting mimicry

memetic /mē-ˈme-tik/: adjective. Of or pertaining to memes; pertaining to replication of concepts.

Oops! Thanks much for the correction.

What? I can desire to swim without someone teaching me to swim. I only CAN swim because I was taught.

You can also theoretically learn to swim without anyone teaching you, or without having ever seen anyone else swim.

>He’s thinking, say, about the time I watched Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill just because my good friend Lanier recommended it to me. Fair enough; I did watch that movie just because Lanier recommended it to me, and because I trust his judgment. But then it turned out to be one of the worst films of all time,

I was enjoying this article until I found out the author has terrible taste.

I think Girard's Christianity may have influenced his thinking.

I also think that, as far as Capitalism is concerned, this may be the perfect framework to understand human beings.

I'd love to expand on these ideas but my brain isn't playing nice today.

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