What Is Desire?
Love. War. Envy. Voilence. Where do these come from?
There’s a force at work in human nature. It’s behind us, before us, around us. From youth to old age, it animates our thoughts and directs our actions. It shapes every person, every people, every society, every culture. It’s been with us from the beginning of human civilization. It could also be the end of human civilization. But we couldn’t be human without it. It’s the source of our creativity and compassion. It’s also the source of our
hatred, and it stokes our insatiable appetite for destruction. Without it, we will never achieve happiness. If we don’t learn how to use it wisely, we are sure to perish.
What is this force? For an answer, let’s look to the fundamental in-sights of the interdisciplinary thinker René Girard, whose work we will be unpacking in this book Girard was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, and his thought begins and ends with the fundamental concept of desire.
DESIRE
Let’s talk about desire.
Girard believes desire is the quintessential human phenomenon. It sets us apart from every other animal. Indeed, it’s the force that gives rise to human nature and governs our behaviors.
All creatures have needs. By instinct animals identify their needs and fulfill them. They do this by copying the behavior of other members of the herd. Generally, members of a herd fulfill their needs without undermining the survival of the whole. By instinct they resolve competition over limited goods—food, mating partners—in non-conflictive ways. Instinct holds them in check. Humans are different. Somewhere in the course of our evolution, the mechanism for identifying and satisfying our needs surpassed the limits of instinct and crossed over a threshold to a realm of greater complexity and magnitude. Our capacity to identify with those whose behaviors we copied to meet our needs lost all restraint. The mere satisfaction of needs was overtaken by an unquenchable longing for more. In other words, needs mutated into wants. An irrepressible, insatiable urge took possession of this species. It was the birth of desire. It was the birth of the human.
We’re interested here in the way this human desire works. We’re interested in what sets human desire apart from mere satisfaction of instinctual drives, turns hunger into cravings, and turns needs into wants. René Girard’s mimetic theory explores these questions.
IMITATION
Let’s talk about imitation.
When we talk about human desire, we’re always talking about imitative desire. Girard uses a special phrase: mimetic desire. The word mimetic is derived from mimesis, the Greek word for imitation. Mimetic desire means wanting through imitation. Simply put, we want what the other person wants.
Think about yourself for a moment. Think about your favorite things: certain foods, certain clothes, or certain songs or movies or places. Did you ever wonder how you came to like those things so much? Didn’t someone you know introduce them to you? Didn’t their own preferences move you to adopt those things as your very own? What makes those things so very special to you? We can find many great works of art and many fine foods in the world. What makes your preferences valuable to you? Could it be that it isn’t only the merits of the things in themselves, but also your relationship to the other persons who brought them to your attention?
Or consider this. Can you ever remember a time when you were carefree and content? Or rather, have you always carried one preoccupation after another like an invisible sack? What’s on your mind? Let’s put aside for a moment worries like sickness or poverty. These are global problems. Let’s turn from the world for a moment and look at ourselves in our intimate, anxious thoughts. Consider these: the hostility you feel toward the new student in your Spanish class who speaks more fluently than you do; the resentment you feel as the understudy toward the lead actor in the musical you’re rehearsing; the pressure you feel to get your GPA above your classmates who are vying for the same college fund scholarship. Or consider the admiration and jealousy you feel toward your good friend who could afford that new smartphone, even though you have a smartphone capable of doing everything you need. Or consider any time in your childhood when your parents favored your siblings over you with more dessert, more play time, better birthday presents. You may think your preoccupations occur without rhyme or reason, but this isn’t true. You may not be aware of it, but there’s nothing accidental about your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. It’s the mechanism of mimetic desire that triggers them.
Now, let’s make a map of desire. Let’s draw a triangle.
TRIANGULAR DESIRE
Girard tells us that human desire is never linear. It doesn’t just proceed from the needy person directly to the thing needed. Instead, one person identifies what she needs through another person who has attained or is seeking that certain something. Thus desire is angular.
Fig. 1 Triangular Desire
It bends mere needs into wants. Another person (what Girard calls the model or the mediator) stands between the one who desires and the thing or object that person wants. In fact, I want the object because the other wants it!
We can visualize desire as “triangular,” with the desiring person or subject forming one point of the triangle, the model of imitation (the person they imitate) forming the second point, and the object of desire (hinted at or desired by the model) forming the third and endpoint.
It’s as simple as that! A model whom we respect, admire and love secretly or openly suggests objects of desire which we want for ourselves. We may regard this person so highly that we may even copy their behaviors and mannerisms consciously.
This is not to say that every choice we make is conditioned by others. If you’re hungry and all you can find is a jar of peanut butter, then you will have peanut butter. If you’re crossing a barren desert and you’re thirsty, then you will make a beeline to the first jug of water you see. We’re not talking about instinctual bodily appetites. We’re talking about something more complex than basic stimulus-response. We’re talking about a socially conditioned response to goods that we don’t necessarily need. Girard believes it’s not the goods themselves but the individuals we look to who make them attractive to us, who are the stimulus. They exert a force as strong as gravity over us. Therefore, our responses aren’t merely instinctual. Our responses are mimetic, imitative, by nature, and dynamic. Our seeing passes through another person’s eyes. What the second person, the “model,” chooses becomes our choice. So our choices aren’t just subject-object. They are subject-model-object. That’s desire!
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