Where your Desires Come From
The hit German SciFi Netflix series DARK (2017), opens with a quote from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer:
“Man can do what he wills, But he can not will, what he wills.”
Or in other words, we cannot decide our own “desires”. Then how do desires arise? Psychoanalysts would say they come from the “unconscious”, but that’s not really an answer is it? We can find more compelling answers in the works of French philosopher Rene Girard, whose primary work consisted of the exploration of how desires work. He discovered that “desire” is a social thing, not an individual thing, although it feels very personal. According to Girard, desires don’t arise in our minds out of nowhere, but are mediated by models. Models are mediators of desire who endow objects with value. We imitate our models often unknowingly and mimic their desires which Girard calls mimesis. Models don’t have to be alive or even real, they can be fictional, they can be a celebrity or a coworker, or a socially constructed ideal. And I found a perfect anecdote that demonstrates the existence of a hidden model under a common desire.
In a short video I came across on YouTube, Jeremy Clarkson, a British journalist, is showing photographs of Premier League Footballers from different countries and the cars they drive. The point he wants to make is that all of the players had expensive cars like Lamborghini, Porsche etc. except the one who is from France because in French culture and society, having and maintaining an expensive car is not seen as something a respectable person would do, Clarkson says:
“The fact is that in france, unlike anywhere else, the car is simply not seen as a status symbol. If you buy an expensive car it’s considered…bourgeois. And if you look after it, that’s disgusting. And the world of Premire league football backs this up…”
The same object, an expensive car, can be stripped of its value and desirability if a different model mediates the desires of individuals. So the object of your desires is secondary to what having that object says about you or makes you. It brings you closer to your model. Hence, you don’t want things, you want to be things.
