Month: January 2014

The Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard, Part 2/3

(This is a continuation of a summary description of Mimetic Theory that I began in Part I. Make sure you read that first. If you would like to read all three parts in a single post, click here.)

THE SACRIFICIAL CRISIS
It is clear that mimetic rivalry is an incubator and accelerator of human violence. Mimetic forces left unchecked by external societal checks would result in contagious spasms of violence. Remember that the strong mimetic tendency in humanity is biological and preconscious rather than a product of human deliberation. Therefore the origin of any general disorder caused by the propagation of mimetic rivalry would be generally mysterious, while its effects are obvious and dangerous. The societal checks that we take for granted (police forces, manners, etc.) have a history (more…)

Links to a Few Favorite Essays

A cold, grey, drizzly day in Augusta, Georgia today — a day that reminds me of my six months spent in the Aleutian Islands in 1990. The gloom was unrelenting. Soldiers stationed there during the Second World War often developed the “Aleutian stare,” eyes set at a thousand-mile focus as if looking through things. But I actually liked the Bering Sea environment — I think I was the only one of my squadron mates who did — for the simple fact that it was a great place to read.

As a balm for the gloomy days that face you, here are some links to some of my favorite essays, an off-the-cuff selection limited to what is available online:

(more…)

Education and the Liturgical Formation of Desire

I want to write on the “liturgical” character of Plato’s education program as laid out in the Republic, particularly Book VII. My thinking on this subject has been shaped primarily from three sources:

1) Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formations by James K. A. Smith — the first volume in a projected trilogy called Cultural Liturgies;
2) “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” an essay by Simone Weil;
3) Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi.

This post will be rather longer than usual, but I hesitated to divide up these confluent sources of inspiration, since their ideas overlap in interesting ways — with each other and with Plato’s thought. (I will relate Girardian mimetic theory to these later.) Such moments of agreement (homologia) are often a first sign that one may be on to something… (more…)

The Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard, Part 1/3

(This is the first of three connected posts. If you would like to read all three parts in a single post, click here.)

The Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard is a chief source of insight for me both personally and academically. Since my book project will make constant use of Girardian ideas in interpreting Plato, I think its necessary to unpack this subject a little for the uninitiated  so that what I write later can make sense. For those who are already initiated in Girardian thought, I lift up my interpretation to your critical review in gratitude and humility so that you can help me distinguish between Girard’s theory and my interpretation of the same. This will take a few posts to get through, but here is a first attempt: (more…)

How to be Slothful and Productive at the Same Time

My defining sin is sloth. I am pretty good at avoiding sins of commission — although I certainly have my share — but it is the sins of omission that really get me. By sloth I don’t exactly mean laziness; I mean what the medievals called acedia, a condition perfectly consistent with constant activity. In Dante’s Purgatorio, for instance, the slothful are found running nowhere in particular in a restless frenzy. This restlessness is closer to the essence of sloth than true rest is. As Samuel Johnson writes: “It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.” And: “There is no kind of idleness by which we are so easily seduced as that which dignifies itself by the appearance of (more…)

The Question as Commitment

Class starts for me today — a class in Ancient Greek Philosophy. My reading list includes the Platonic dialogues Republic and Phaedrus, Presocratic fragments (with an emphasis on Heraclitus and Parmenides), selections from Aristotle’s Physics, De Anima, Ethics and Politics. University policy dictates that I begin with a preassessment exercise. Mine consists of a pair of questions to which I have students jot down brief impressionistic answers:

1. Socrates preferred to teach by means of questions — why do you think he may have had this preference?
2. Which is easier — to attain knowledge or self-knowledge? Why?

Clearly these questions don’t admit of tidy or even correct answers. Although I think them answerable, I do not think they are *finally* answerable. My hope is that my students (and I) can hold these questions in the background of our thinking throughout the course and beyond. I think there is great value in sustained attention to such questions, even if the answers never improve. Questions shape our subjectivity more than answers, both our attentiveness and our reflectiveness. A thinker without a question is like a body without a soul. Something in us must *commit* to particular questions if we are ever to advance as thinkers and knowers.

Anatomy of Platonic Eros

“There is a certain guidance each person needs for his whole life, if he is to live well; and nothing imparts this guidance — not high kinship, not public honor, not wealth — nothing imparts this guidance as well as love” [i.e. eros]  — Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, translated by Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett Publishing, 1989), 178C-D.

In order to understand how eros can function as a guide for life, I think it is helpful to anatomize eros into four interrelated parts: 1) penia, 2) poros, 3) chorismos, and 4) kinesis (more…)

Favorites Among Books That I Read in 2013

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Volumes I & II — These autobiographical books are just now being put out in English translation out of their original Norwegian, the first two volumes of a projected six volume project. I suspect they will not be to everyone’s taste but they rank with the best things I have ever read. Knausgaard can turn a long description of cleaning a bathroom into gripping reading — I kid you not! Sample quote: “For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here (more…)

Two Types of Opinion

Much of the time, we talk as though there is only knowledge and its absence with no in- between. But none of us has much experience with either pure ignorance (which would imply an absence of experience too at any rate) or pure knowledge. We spend most (if not all) of time in the hazy mental space between ignorance and knowledge, a space Plato calls doxa, which is usually translated as “opinion.” Doxa is an intermediate between ignorance and knowledge. From the side of greater knowledge it looks like ignorance and from the side of lesser ignorance it looks like knowledge. But to understand Plato’s notion of doxa, it is important to understand that it participates in both sides of the ignorance/knowledge distinction. To hold an opinion is to intend the truth, but to remain still in ignorance. Even “true belief” conceals ignorance; even false belief harbors truth.

Knowledge is only approached by way of doxa. At its most developed, doxa is dynamic, a movement (kinesis) from ignorance toward knowledge. At its least developed, doxa is static, “the residue that remains when thinking has stopped” (Joe Sachs). Plato calls the more developed, dynamic form dianoia, which I translate as “thinking.” He calls the less developed, static form pistis, which I translate as “belief.” Belief is opinion that holds itself against the questions that would undermine it. Thinking by contrast is opinion that focuses on its own defects as an avenue toward greater knowledge.

The type of opinion that is aware of itself as still participating in ignorance is thinking (dianoia). Thinking is thus necessarily bound up with self-knowledge. Every opinion should invite questions (or at least mild qualms) about itself. But these qualms are not focal components of the opinion itself, but are subsidiary components of the holder of the opinion. To bring a qualm out of the murky depths of preconscious irritation into the full radiance of a well-formed question requires an attentive self-consciousness.

Belief represses this awareness of ignorance, abstracts from it, reacts against it as threatening. Belief is an escape from the anxiety of ignorance; it is satisfying in contrast with the dissatisfactions of doubt. This is both a strength and a weakness. It’s strength is that it allows practical perseverance, since doubt and anxiety are in themselves paralyzing to action. Its weakness is that it tends to be allergic to any opinion or question that threatens to reintroduce the doubt from which it has escaped. Belief is deaf to the qualms and doubts that would unsettle it, that would goad it to self-transcend.

All of this makes it sound like we must dispense with belief and pursue dianoia. But we cannot live without belief. All perseverant action requires the steadiness of belief to push through the discouraging headwinds of doubt that oppose it. (In Plato, pistis is related analogically to the virtue of courage.) Even thinking (dianoia) contains a germ of belief at its core, since thinking intends knowledge that it does not yet know. Dianoia has at its heart an active abiding belief in knowledge. Without this pistis, this faith, dianoia devolves into a mere skepticism, self-contradictory and impotent in itself. In the Republic, Thrasymachus is the examplar of dianoia without pistis, whereas Glaucon is one who healthily combines the two, simultaneously critical of his own opinions but trusting of the guidance of Socrates.

Opinion is thus the intermediate between ignorance and knowledge, but dianoia is the intermediate between belief and knowledge and pistis is intermediate between ignorance and dianoia. (See the Divided Line at the end of Book VI of the Republic.)