Good question. The reason I said “rarely” rather than “never” is because I do believe objective beauty exists and can genuinely attract us. I am not trying to reduce beauty to mere social contagion or prestige dynamics.
What I am suggesting is that our ordinary perception of beauty is almost always mediated by formation, memory, culture, admiration, imitation, habit, and the models around us. In other words, beauty may be objective, but our perception of it is not neutral or autonomous.
So yes, I do think there is objective beauty that attracts us, but I also think human beings encounter that beauty “through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul says. Some models help us perceive reality more clearly, while others distort our perception toward novelty, prestige, rivalry, or sentimentality.
That was part of what I was trying to get at in the post. Mimetic desire does not necessarily mean the object of desire is unreal. Rather, it means our access to reality is usually mediated through models and relationships rather than through detached autonomy.
I've been giving this serious thought, because one of the recurring questions around mimetic desire is whether it describes all desire, or merely influences and colors desires that already exist independently. My present view, which I am still working out, is something like this.
As Girard says, “All desire is desire for being.” If that is true, then the deepest and highest fulfillment of desire can ultimately be nothing other than God Himself, who is Being in its fullness. In that sense, I do believe there is objective beauty, objective goodness, and objective reality toward which desire is properly ordered.
At the same time, our ordinary perception of beauty is never completely autonomous or unmediated. We encounter reality as embodied creatures shaped by memory, culture, history, imitation, formation, trauma, admiration, and habit. Our desires are therefore always conditioned by the models through which we learn to perceive the world. Mimetic desire governs not because beauty is unreal, but because our access to beauty is mediated.
That mediation can illuminate reality, but it can also distort it. Some models teach us to recognize genuine beauty more clearly, while others train us toward prestige, novelty, rivalry, or sentimentality. This is part of what I was trying to get at in the post. We desire something real, but in our present condition we encounter it only partially, “through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul says.
So I would not say aesthetics are merely mimetic, nor would I say beauty simply compels everyone equally and automatically. Rather, objective beauty exists, but our perception of it is shaped, for good or ill, by the mimetic formation of the person perceiving it.
Do you know much about Artificial Intelligence? It would be an interesting follow up to discuss these same principles as applied to AI and LLMs.
For example, the LLMs are mimetic systems in the most literal sense. Imitation is at the core of their architecture and training.
But I haven't yet been thinking about what this means from an aesthetic sense. Can a machine have an aesthetic model? Do aesthetics influence the outputs of the LLMs? Or is this another fundamental difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence?
I do know a fair amount about AI and LLMs, and I think your observation is on target: LLMs are mimetic systems in an almost literal sense, though not the human sense. Their “knowledge” emerges through imitation, pattern absorption, weighting, reinforcement, and prediction across enormous bodies of human language. In some respects, they unintentionally reveal just how deeply mimetic human communication already is.
What I find especially interesting is that LLMs can reproduce aesthetic patterns surprisingly well. They can imitate tone, cadence, prestige language, rhetorical posture, emotional atmosphere, stylistic tendencies, and even something approximating worldview. In that sense, aesthetics absolutely influence outputs, because aesthetic structures are embedded in the training data itself.
At the same time, I think there is still a profound distinction between machine imitation and human mimetic desire. An LLM does not desire being. It does not experience prestige, shame, rivalry, exclusion, admiration, eros, fear, sacrificial belonging, or the anxiety of selfhood. It imitates patterns without participating existentially in them.
That difference may actually help clarify what is unique about human mimetic desire. Human beings do not merely imitate information. We imitate models of being. Our desires are bound up with embodiment, memory, mortality, communion, rivalry, love, and transcendence in ways that machines do not share.
Still, I think AI may become one of the most revealing mirrors of mimetic culture precisely because it is trained on the accumulated symbolic and linguistic residue of human imitation. In a strange way, LLMs are built from sedimented patterns of collective desire.
Okay, so is the attraction of aesthetics also mimetic, or is there objective beauty that attracts us?
Eric wrote, "Even our perception of beauty is rarely autonomous."
Why did he say "rarely", is it ever autonomous?
It seems like objective beauty would cause non-mimetic attraction.
Or if there is an objective beauty, is Eric's point that it is not always attractive and to everyone?
Good question. The reason I said “rarely” rather than “never” is because I do believe objective beauty exists and can genuinely attract us. I am not trying to reduce beauty to mere social contagion or prestige dynamics.
What I am suggesting is that our ordinary perception of beauty is almost always mediated by formation, memory, culture, admiration, imitation, habit, and the models around us. In other words, beauty may be objective, but our perception of it is not neutral or autonomous.
So yes, I do think there is objective beauty that attracts us, but I also think human beings encounter that beauty “through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul says. Some models help us perceive reality more clearly, while others distort our perception toward novelty, prestige, rivalry, or sentimentality.
That was part of what I was trying to get at in the post. Mimetic desire does not necessarily mean the object of desire is unreal. Rather, it means our access to reality is usually mediated through models and relationships rather than through detached autonomy.
I've been giving this serious thought, because one of the recurring questions around mimetic desire is whether it describes all desire, or merely influences and colors desires that already exist independently. My present view, which I am still working out, is something like this.
As Girard says, “All desire is desire for being.” If that is true, then the deepest and highest fulfillment of desire can ultimately be nothing other than God Himself, who is Being in its fullness. In that sense, I do believe there is objective beauty, objective goodness, and objective reality toward which desire is properly ordered.
At the same time, our ordinary perception of beauty is never completely autonomous or unmediated. We encounter reality as embodied creatures shaped by memory, culture, history, imitation, formation, trauma, admiration, and habit. Our desires are therefore always conditioned by the models through which we learn to perceive the world. Mimetic desire governs not because beauty is unreal, but because our access to beauty is mediated.
That mediation can illuminate reality, but it can also distort it. Some models teach us to recognize genuine beauty more clearly, while others train us toward prestige, novelty, rivalry, or sentimentality. This is part of what I was trying to get at in the post. We desire something real, but in our present condition we encounter it only partially, “through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul says.
So I would not say aesthetics are merely mimetic, nor would I say beauty simply compels everyone equally and automatically. Rather, objective beauty exists, but our perception of it is shaped, for good or ill, by the mimetic formation of the person perceiving it.
Do you know much about Artificial Intelligence? It would be an interesting follow up to discuss these same principles as applied to AI and LLMs.
For example, the LLMs are mimetic systems in the most literal sense. Imitation is at the core of their architecture and training.
But I haven't yet been thinking about what this means from an aesthetic sense. Can a machine have an aesthetic model? Do aesthetics influence the outputs of the LLMs? Or is this another fundamental difference between human intelligence and machine intelligence?
I do know a fair amount about AI and LLMs, and I think your observation is on target: LLMs are mimetic systems in an almost literal sense, though not the human sense. Their “knowledge” emerges through imitation, pattern absorption, weighting, reinforcement, and prediction across enormous bodies of human language. In some respects, they unintentionally reveal just how deeply mimetic human communication already is.
What I find especially interesting is that LLMs can reproduce aesthetic patterns surprisingly well. They can imitate tone, cadence, prestige language, rhetorical posture, emotional atmosphere, stylistic tendencies, and even something approximating worldview. In that sense, aesthetics absolutely influence outputs, because aesthetic structures are embedded in the training data itself.
At the same time, I think there is still a profound distinction between machine imitation and human mimetic desire. An LLM does not desire being. It does not experience prestige, shame, rivalry, exclusion, admiration, eros, fear, sacrificial belonging, or the anxiety of selfhood. It imitates patterns without participating existentially in them.
That difference may actually help clarify what is unique about human mimetic desire. Human beings do not merely imitate information. We imitate models of being. Our desires are bound up with embodiment, memory, mortality, communion, rivalry, love, and transcendence in ways that machines do not share.
Still, I think AI may become one of the most revealing mirrors of mimetic culture precisely because it is trained on the accumulated symbolic and linguistic residue of human imitation. In a strange way, LLMs are built from sedimented patterns of collective desire.