Fallibilismus als Anwalt der Opfer Der kritische Schlüssel René Girards und seine Parallelen im kritischen Rationalismus

Abstract

Providing a critical instrument to identify structures of victimization, René Girard’s program is in fact very affine to Critical Rationalism methodology as developed by Charles Popper and widely assented in contemporary epistemology. In order to proof this thesis, in a first step, Girard’s understanding of epistemology is reconstructed. His occasionally very strict objection to any form of relativism thereby is shown to be due to an obviously polemic context. In claiming his theory to be scientific, Girard indeed knows very well that it is the specification of science to approach things not apodictically, but hypothetically, and he clearly assents this principle. In a second step, typical misunderstandings of both the Mimetic Theory and Poppers fallibilism are analysed and parallelized. They properly consist in an exaggeration of some aspects, while complementary aspects are suppressed. With the Mimetic Theory, just this uneven exaggeration can be explained as happening precisely in constellations of rivalry, as among the „hostile brothers”, and yet as happening unintentionally and therefore being so hard to detect. Therefore, the claim of showing this connection, as raised by the Mimetic Theory, itself cannot be presented in an apodictic manner because it so would force the counterpart into rivalry about the alleged truth, which would so again deform it, NB on both sides of the disputation. Besides this rather „ethical” reason, there also is a strongly „epistemic” reason why Mimetic Theory and the uncovering of scapegoat mechanism should consider themselves to be hypothetical and fallible: Without a continuous rising of this self-critical attitude, the self-vindicatory and self-enclosing spell of myth would have never been broken.