Reason or Forgetfulness? -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 19:44:59 03/17/08 Mon
Author: Kiernan
Subject: Reason or Forgetfulness?

Girard's discussion of Enlightenment thought in Chapter 7 of " I See Satan Fall Like Lightening" provides a fascinating rebuke to the rationalism of that era. Girard summarizes his argument on pg. 92: "The true guide of human beings is not abstract reason but ritual." He argues on those pages that Enlightenment thinkers read rituals as the replacement for institutions, but that, instead, those institutions came out of rituals and then assumed their rationalistic form.

Girard's argument essentially says that, where Enlightenment rationlists see humans reasoning out an institution to bring order to society, man is actually imposing a "rationalization" on an order founded in man's forgetfulnes of the very system he continues to repeat, without meaning. Instead of "rationalization" providing institutions with meaning, the very meaning and truth of these institutions has been lost as man has repeated the ritual. This creates an irony which Girard notes on pg. 93; modern man's very pride in being free of religion is the ultimate religious act.

Thus, Girard provides an interesting argument against the Enlightenment, along with his unusual apologetics. This argument caused me to wonder, however, about the difference between the ignorance/blindness, and the forgetfulness which happens over time. It seems to me that man is first blind to the nature of the system in that he is blind to the innocence of the victim. Yet he knows the system and its origins. Still, mythology disguises that act of violence. This process of mythology seems helped by time, where, as man repeats the ritual, he forget its origins, and further blurs the innocence of the victim as he forgets the origin of the ritual itself. As time continues to pass, man seems to disguise this even further by providing, not only justifications for the surrogate victim mechanism, but justifications disguising the nature of the ritual itself. Thus a process of "double disguising," one might say, is what separates us from the nature and origin of ritual.

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