Can we get a Rene Girard thread going? I'm only discovering

With MacIntyre, Anscombe, Oderberg, Feser, Geach, Ratzinger, Stein reading Girard seems so unappealing. French postmodern Catholicism sounds like a waste of time desu lad.

>>8640587
Okay, but why? French postmodern Catholicism actually sounds pretty good to me some days - and to be honest, I usually skew heavily on the atheist/agnostic side of things.

Enlighten me, you sexy bastard. You sound like you know what you're talking about. What do you find unappealing about Girard? And why?

>>8640620
I find the break from augustinian and thomistic traditions unappealing in general, whenever it's about a Catholic philosopher. The break from language, introduction of unnecessary concepts that are interesting, but not in the least substantial, the focus on something extremely specific and hardly applicable outside theology alone. This isn't of course a final judgement, it's just an impression I got from reading a few larger articles on First Things a year or so ago when I was looking into him.
The main reason is, I'm a law student with aspirations to writing about essentialism in context of law and bioethics as I see the lack of any sort of philosophy as guide makes it incredibly arbitrary and based in ideological rhetoric instead of a firm and fair intellectual basis.
Girard is just someone so specific I cannot see how I can even broadly apply him to my thinking.
The authors I've listed are incredibly substantial, MacIntyre changed my outlook on many things and I haven't even read all of Aquinas and if I want to achieve my goals, I'll have to keep reading into those. Girard just doesn't seem to compare.
I could be wrong of course.

>>8640661
Thanks for sharing.

I haven't read MacIntyre at all, so I can't really comment there. I'll have to take a look at that.

Most of what I have read has come from the continental side of things, and largely from self-study. But I share the aversion to arbitrariness and ideological rhetoric...my own interest is in how it is that we always manage to find reasons for what we do (and the ways in which this rapidly gets out of hand). The I and its reasons, how truth is not the same as honesty, and honesty not the same as truth - all this.

Zizek and Lacan have both been illuminating in looking at the relationship of speech, violence, the superego, and so on. In fairness, this is frequently with reference to 'law' as a literary or psychoanalytic concept - for example, in Kafka or Oedipus and so on.

Maybe I like Girard for this reason. Because the world of the unconscious seems to be anything but firm and fair, a sense of understanding people with regards to the ways in which they are sometimes least able to understand themselves - that is, the unconscious and its desires - seems helpful and constructive.

>>8640735
And yet, at the same time, we live in a world where we must hold people accountable for their actions, however sincere. Warrants mentioning.

As time goes by, I guess, existentialism seems less interesting than Catholicism, or even religion in general. But I've never considered myself a religious person, precisely because religions always seem to have this inescapably violent dimension in them. Girard seems to have a different perspective on that.

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>>8640661
You have to realize that girard isn't a metaphysician or anything, to understand girard is to understand the way he thinks and sees human history, mimetic theory is kind of the name he's given it, but it's not fleshed out rigorously.
In fact, there are many organizations dedicated to the sole purpose of continuing and developing the theory now that its keeper of the flame died.

Basically girard's idea is that Christianity is the antithesis of myth, and that the crucifixion is a line of demarcation between the mythological world of mimetic scapegoating and the world of Christianity which represents an intellectual reversal of the more natural mimetic framework of human interaction.
In short, Christianity was the next step in human evolution, it gave us the medieval, the renaissance, scholasticism, art, literature, all fueled by the distinctly unnatural light of divine revelation.
We now take all of this for granted, and sometimes we imagine that rome was just another civilization like our own except that it's gone now and we have iphones and stuff.
Meanwhile there are attempts to return to the old system, by breaking with Catholic theology, not understanding the importance of all of our cultural accretion which we are steeped in from birth and which educationally shapes us into western men.
By breaking with all of this, we enter an age of scientific esoterism fueled by the animal impulses, and enshrined in the creation of new gods which are ultimately just deifications of natural phenomena.

Have you read any maritain?
Also girard's theory seems to coalesce with the writings of de maistre.

>>8641690
No, not yet. De Maistre is on my kobo and I'll get to him in the relatively near future.
And I know the outline of Girard's theory. Neat, but there's too much to read and too little time.

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>>8641690
OP here. This is really helpful, thanks anon. Exactly what I was hoping for. Christianity as the antithesis of myth...things make much more sense to me now.

Now I can see why, perhaps, Girard has not been so popular: mass movements on both the left and the right require myths, and Girard's reading of myth doesn't exactly lend itself well to revolutionary fervour.

Although I'm not a Christian myself, I've believed for a long time that Christian theology was instrumental in developing Western metaphysics and the scientific method. Since the 19C, however, people have moved farther and farther from this in the interests of deconstruction, Marxism, much else. Always, or usually, for the best intentions, but perhaps we are now seeing some of the consequences of this (and the scary sense of not knowing where any of it will end, and so on).

Could you expand some more on that last sentence? I've read some de Maistre, but no Maritain. I would be very interested to hear more about the de Maistre-Girard connection. Please explain further!

>>8640582
Why do you guys worship catholic "philosophers"?

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>>8643124
I'm OP. All I can give is my own experience here, but the last thing I want to do is bring an end arbitrarily to discussion of this question. I'm only answering for myself, and by no means with great confidence or assurance.

I've been studying philosophy pretty intensely for the past couple of years - largely on my own. I have no religious upbringing, and most of my life I've been very skeptical towards it. In 2016, what seems more broken than religion? It always seemed like a cop-out, or just an easy way to legitimize getting what you want.

I've read the Stoics, the Chinese, and a lot of continental stuff, in particular Nietzsche and Heidegger. Grew up in the shadow of a family member who wrote their doctorate on Derrida and Levinas, but was always very suspicious of deconstruction and its religious aspects.

Of course, Nietzsche is that guy. A lot of philosophy is today carried on in his shadow. I also find Rene Guenon interesting as well...but all I can say is that I thought Catholicism meant putting philosophy aside, and for that reason I wasn't going to read it. And for sure, nobody can really talk about Girard's philosophy without discussing religion, which is there at the centre of it.

So for me, anyways, that's where I'm at. This idea of desire, mimesis, violence, et al - Marxists talk about it in Marxist ways, psychoanalysts in psychoanalytic ways. Having no real exposure to how Catholics talk about it, I find their perspective illuminating...even if I can't ignore the elephant in the room, which is Christianity.

Sorry if that's a long post, but it's a complicated question. Long story short, I guess...violence is an interesting question, and the Catholics have a very particular take on it.

>>8643184
Do many "new philosophical" Catholics read esoterics like Guenon?

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>>8644328
Beats me. I can't speak for what you are describing as 'new philosophical' Catholics, if only because I'm not sure what you mean. I'm not a Catholic myself (yet?), just someone who's begun considering what the Catholics have to say on questions that I thought were only of interest to psychoanalysts. Maybe you could expand on this?

I do think Guenon is highly interesting, though, and I'd be very open to more discussion about him. I'm surprised to have only come across him recently, and that he doesn't have more of a scholarly reputation. I think he's utterly brilliant and his thought has been a major discovery for me. But Tradition is I think something other than what Girard seems to be focusing on, which is this idea of Christianity as a demythologized religion, whereby it has this exceptional status for him.

I suspect Guenon will probably become more popular as right-wing politics continue to acquire momentum, but I'm not sure if it will be the same for Girard, who seems to represent more of a pacifistic universalism that may be on the decline, but is probably where the centre of my own moral compass is in some deep way. There are a lot of things I like and even admire about the reactionary worldview, but again: violence and myth. I like to know when and how it is justified. Carl Schmitt is another guy with some interesting stuff to say on this.

On a slightly different topic, there's an interesting and somewhat contrarian article here on the subject of religion and violence during the Thirty Years' War, if anyone is interested.
https://www.athenaeum.edu/pdf/Wars%20of%20Religion%20and%20The%20Rise%20of%20The%20State.pdf

>>8642451
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB2U9XXpHP4
This is a pretty good summary.

>>8643124
Are you trying to tell me you don't think people like Aquinas are real philosophers?

>>8644847
Much appreciated, anon.

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I'm starting to realize more of why I find the Catholic perspective important: they're really good at thinking through the concept of the apocalypse, the end of the world, the eschaton.

Most social-progressive theory is based around this idea of revolution, some kind of bloody event that brings on the Great Change. I've spent years wondering about this relationship of violence and utopia, the ends and the means, all of this. Fascism, for instance, sort of requires this perpetual mobilization, this sense of the struggle never ending, the front being everywhere - but this is there in the more hysterical strains of Marxism as well. Catholics like Girard prioritize the importance of a single event that already happened, in the shadow of which most if not all of our thought takes place. The death of God may often be a personal event, and consequently everyone experiences nihilism, alienation, et al in their own ways. But the question, or one of the questions, is whether or not this collective experience of nihilism actually enables people to come together at some point on some kind of common ground, or if it just infinitely drives them all apart, in infinitely different directions, forever.

Heavy stuff, no doubt. But that's violence and myth for you. There's always somebody more nihilistic than you, but nihilism in the present age often doesn't call itself nihilism, it calls itself ideology. Zizek's critique of this is important, but he never gets past Hegel. Girard has this alternative view - he argues that it's actually Clausewitz who is the philosopher to consider, rather than Hegel. I had never really considered that.

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>>8646050
"The incredible news, the event whose import the Western world has not yet realized, though its own history has been increasingly determined by it, is that God is now on the side of the scapegoat victim."

Isn't this exactly the conundrum with heroic-aesthetic violence? You can't be an awesome Greek hero anymore, and yet a world without awesome Greek heroes...is a world without awesome Greek heroes. It's the world of the Last Man.

But from Girard's mimetic perspective you can't just double down on Nietzsche here because within mimetic theory the death of God is supposed to mean an *end* to violence and artistry, not a cause to reproduce it. If everything is a copy of everything else, you can't actually *be* the ubermensch - you can only impersonate one.

There's one other thing to consider here, which is the concept of violence in East Asian cultures, in particular the meaning of martial arts...but I don't want to get sidetracked.

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>>8646167
One more thought here.

Is it possible that the whole idea of the ubermensch and the idea of Christianity espouse, I think, fundamentally different world views, rather than two world views which are reacting or opposing each other in a linear-historical sequence?

If a totalitarian despot self-identifies as the ubermensch (not a crazy interpretation) he is doing it from a sort of *social* perspective - becoming the artist of state in order to make ‘the world’ a better place. But isn't this precisely why people say that the Nazis misread Nietzsche? The Nietzschean artist is engaged in something personal, something which is bigger than the individual...but which is not necessarily the same thing as a utopian social project which is intended to Make Germany Great Again. Art, great art, is different from propaganda precisely because it does not have an expressly social function, and a person who makes themselves into a living work of art is going to be enigmatic and impenetrable for the same reasons.

It's why in that way I feel like reading Nietzsche and concluding that he's the bomb because Christianity seems to have failed has some funky logic going on. Nietzsche draws on Christianity to make his own point, but I can't help but think that he is simply espousing something radically different: a way of responding to the death of God, rather than than trying to abolish the significance of this event from collective human consciousness. This is what makes him vastly superior to superficial ideological interpreters with political-religious goals. Conversely, Christians who dismiss the significance of Nietzsche’s life fail to grasp the enormous philosophical importance of Dionysus vs the Crucified.

So there’s pre-Christian religion, which is based on myth, and then there’s this necessarily de-mythologized Christianity, and then there’s modern political religion, which is based on the return to myth which is always required to go through Christianity in some sense. I guess that’s what I’m learning.

>>8644854
fuck aquinas