Three Voices/One Message: The Importance of Mimesis for Human Morality
- Three Voices/One MessageThe Importance of Mimesis for Human Morality
Introduction
Our twenty-first century is a time of turbulence. Some of that turbulence is derived from not fully understanding what makes us moral. This article reassesses human morality in order to identify what nurtures and what distorts our moral nature. Such a reassessment potentially offers hope for a way through the escalating violence in our world that currently threatens to destroy us.
This article focuses on three voices: the voice of anthropological philosopher René Girard, whose mimetic theory calls us to wake up about our role in creating violence; the voice of medieval scholastic John Duns Scotus, whose moral theory is enjoying a renaissance in our contemporary world; and the voice of neuroscience with its unfolding knowledge about how human neurophysiology mediates our actions and our morality. Central to all three messages is the concept of empathy.
The term “empathy” is only about a hundred years old.1 It is defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as the action of and the capacity for “understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing [End Page 139] the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another” without having them “communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
According to the neuroscientific discipline of behavioral science, empathy is a key element of our human social nature and an essential prerequisite for our moral development.2 For Girard, empathy can pull us into mimesis—a nonconscious imitation of others—and violent reciprocity with each other. Empathy can also allow us to identify with the other in a process of renouncing our own violence.3 For Scotus, the word empathy did not exist. Yet, the lodestone for Scotus’s view of morality is empathy—a desire for the good in itself of things. The centrality of empathy plus the moral significance of freedom of the human will mark a distinct advance in Scotus’s thinking over that of his predecessors.4
The purpose of this article is to show how the three voices from divergent disciplines are conveying one message to audiences today: the importance of mimesis for human morality. This message leads to greater clarity and explanatory depth about human morality.
The Voice of René Girard
Girard’s Mimetic Theory5
Mimetic theory emphasizes the role of imitation in our lives. Imitation is a way in which we learn in life—a way in which we learn language and acquire culture.6 According to Girard, imitation also generates human conflict in the form of competition, rivalry, and violence.
How does imitation generate conflict?
If our desire to be like a model is strong enough, if we identify with that person closely enough, we will want to have what the model has or be what the model is. If this is carried far enough and if there are no safeguards braking our desire (one of the functions of religion and culture), then we become rivals of our models. Or we compete with one another to become better imitators of the same model, and we imitate our rivals even as we compete with them.7
Through his eyes as a historian and a philosopher of social science, Girard understands the scapegoat mechanism8 as a way to resolve the conflict that comes from mimetic rivalry. Rather than fighting with the other for what he has or is, rather than killing the other, human beings join mimetically with each [End Page 140] other and blame an outsider, a scapegoat. When they unite against the scapegoat and sacrifice the victim, harmony is restored. In this way, maintains Girard, the public sacrifice of a scapegoat is the foundation of all archaic religions and civilizations. It is the formula for transforming the effects of mimetic rivalry into viable communities.
The problem today, as Girard sees it, is that the ancient formula no longer has to work. He attributes this to Christianity. A scapegoat only works as long as people believe in its guilt. Since the crucifixion of Jesus, the truth that the victim is innocent has been revealed. “By accepting crucifixion, Christ brought to light what had been ‘hidden since...
