QuestionsWhat is love?We desire through another: "spontaneous" desire is a romantic lie
What is love?A useful illusion

We desire through another: "spontaneous" desire is a romantic lie

Mimetic desire; triangular desire; the mediator of desire

René Girard 1923 · 2015Literary critic and anthropologist: we desire through a model, and the rivalry that results lies at the heart of human conflict.
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What it claims

Romantic passion rests in part on an illusion: we think we love the other for himself, while we desire through a model or a rival.

Why

The hero thinks he desires for himself, but his impulse goes toward a model whose desire he imitates.

The same idea through history
Stendhal (Henri Beyle)1822In On Love, Stendhal describes a love "of vanity", where one wants a woman because others envy her. Girard turns this case into a rule of desire, reading Stendhal as a novelist who unveils this mechanism. (Stendhal's "crystallisation" is another argument on this site.)
René Girard1961Girard reads Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Proust side by side and finds one structure in them: a subject, an object, and a mediator whose desire the subject imitates.
In short

"We desire through another: "spontaneous" desire is a romantic lie" is an argument by René Girard (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961; English 1965), 1961) on the question "What is love?" (answer: a useful illusion). Its claim: Romantic passion rests in part on an illusion: we think we love the other for himself, while we desire through a model or a rival. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3, P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961; English 1965)
Valid with an implicit premise

When we fall in love, it feels as if the desire comes from us alone: this person is desirable, and that is that. René Girard, reading great novels, claims the opposite. The romantic hero believes his desire is spontaneous, but the novelists show a "mediator": a model, often a rival, whose desire the hero imitates without knowing it. Don Quixote wants to be a knight because Amadis was one; the jealous lover desires the woman because another desires her. The object is a pretext, and the impulse goes toward the mediator. If Girard is right, part of romantic passion rests on an illusion: we think we love a person for herself, while we follow another's gaze. This is a thesis drawn from reading novels, which its defenders extend to real life and its critics find too general. The book is in copyright: we quote short passages of the 1965 English translation, checked.

P1The romantic hero believes his desire is spontaneous: he thinks he desires the object for the value it has in itself, and sees himself as the source of his desire.
P2The great novelists show the opposite: desire passes through a mediator. The impulse toward the object is, ultimately, an impulse toward the mediator, whose being or prestige the hero wants to possess.
P3 · implicit premiseIf desire goes toward the mediator as much as toward the object, then the value the lover thinks he sees in the beloved comes partly from a third party's gaze, not from the beloved person.
P4 · implicit premiseBelieving one's desire is spontaneous when the object's value comes from a third party is to be under an illusion about the cause of one's desire.
Therefore romantic passion rests in part on an illusion: we think we love the other for himself, while we desire through a model or a rival.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3 and P4, one can grant that we imitate models (P2) while keeping a love based on the person's real qualities: the model only made us notice what was already there. P1 and P2 stay true and the conclusion false.
The argument is valid with P3 and P4. P1 describes the hero's belief; P2 says that, according to the novels, desire passes through a mediator; P3 concludes that the value seen in the object comes from a third party; P4 says that believing the opposite is an illusion. The debates concern P2 (does all desire pass through a model, or only some?) and the reach of the word "illusion": the beloved may well have value, even if another person made us see it.
Analogy. In a shop, an ordinary garment becomes irresistible once you see that everyone wants it. You think you like it for itself; but if fashion changes, the desire vanishes. Girard says romantic love sometimes works the same way.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Arthur Schopenhauer 1844 · attacks premise 2

Schopenhauer explains the choice of a lover otherwise: the instinct of the species drives two people toward each other, according to traits that favour viable children. Romantic desire thus has a direct biological cause that needs neither rival nor model.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1844, after the author's death (2015).
J
Jean-Michel Oughourlian defender of the argument · 1982
The psychiatrist Jean-Michel Oughourlian, a close collaborator of Girard, extends the theory in Un mime nommé désir (A Mime Named Desire): animal need is biological, but human desire, unlike need, is imitative. Instinct provides needs; mimesis decides what, among others, one desires.
The debate goes on (our summary) The two explanations are not necessarily incompatible: one speaks of what attracts us in general (the species), the other of what makes us choose this person rather than another. We have no text by Girard discussing Schopenhauer on this exact point.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: the psychology of attraction (biology, imitation, culture) has not settled the share of each cause. The basic disagreement is the place of imitation relative to instincts (our summary).
E
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1985 · attacks premise 2

In Between Men, Sedgwick takes Girard's love triangle but shows it is not neutral: in the novels she studies the bond between the two rivals is as strong as either one's bond to the woman, sometimes stronger, and the triangle presupposes an inequality between the sexes that Girard does not question. His general rule of desire is thus more tied to a type of society and of novels than he admits.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Girard in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sedgwick does not reject the idea that desire passes through a third party: she keeps it and shifts it, showing that it depends on gender and power. We have found no direct reply from Girard.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: does the Girardian triangle describe human desire in general, or a historical form of desire and of the novel? Girard's heirs and his critics disagree (our summary).
Objection anticipated by Montaigne 1580 · attacks premise 1

Montaigne describes, about his friendship with La Boetie, an attachment that no model and no interest explains: "because it was he, because it was I". If there are bonds where we love the other without a third party, Girard's rule is not universal.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Girard in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Girard does not discuss Montaigne. But he does not rule out every love without rivalry: at the end of his book he describes a novelistic "conversion", in which the hero recognises the lie of his pride and of his imitated desire. For him, a love free of the model comes after the illusion has been dismantled, not before. One may also note that Montaigne speaks of friendship, not romantic passion.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Basic disagreement: is there a mediator-free love that is natural, or only a love that has overcome rivalry? The two camps read the same friendship or love in opposite ways (our summary).