Intersubjectivity and Embodiment JEAN-PIERRE DUPUY Ecole Polytechnique, CREA, 1 rue Descartes, 75005, Paris, France; Stanford University, France-Stanford Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, c/o Department of French, Stanford CA 94305-2010, USA (jpdupuy@stanford.edu) Synopsis: This paper explores how the self-constitution of the social order is affected by a property of human desire that is seldom taken seriously in the social sciences, namely the fact that desire is essen- tially triangular. It brings into play a subject, an object, and a mediator or third party whom the sub- ject imitates. It is suggested that the difficult issue of the embodiment of social cognition finds its solution in the role played by the third party. It is shown that Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes were familiar with this pattern. The paper focuses on the role played by imitation in Hayek’s conception of the social order as spontaneous or self-organized. Many apparent contradictions in Hay- ek’s social philosophy are explained (away) when one realizes that Hayek remains oblivious to the ambivalence of imitation. Imitation is efficient if the correct information is present somewhere and rec- ognized as such, but otherwise it becomes a source of illusions and waste. The problem is that it is impossible from inside the system to know in which of the two cases one finds oneself. To overcome this undecidability, it is necessary to resort to an exteriority. Generalized imitation has the power to create worlds that are perfectly disconnected from reality: at once orderly, stable, and totally illusory. The notion of collective or social self-deception is illustrated with the case of gift giving. The conclusion of the paper is devoted to a critique of the notion of truth in American pragmatism in that it ignores that possibility altogether. Key words: American pragmatism, French Intersubjectivist School of Economics, Hayek, imita- tion, gift-giving, social deception JEL classification: B52 1. The third party Superseding the subject–object dualism or dichotomy has been a serious challenge for many schools of philosophy, American pragmatism being just one of them. Many tried, and most failed. It might be useful to reconsider that issue from a novel perspective and to take seriously a controversy between two French philoso- phers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Rene´ Girard, about a point that may sound frivolous. In his reflection titled: Une Ide´e Fondamentale de la Phe´nomenologie de Husserl: L’intentionalite´, Sartre (1939 [1947 edition]), following Husserl and Heidegger, intends to protect the thing from its absorption by the subject. He writes, ‘[Hus- serl] has opened the space for a new treatise on the emotions with would take its inspiration from this truth which is so simple and so profoundly misunderstood by our sophisticates: if one loves a woman, it is because she is lovable. With this we are delivered from Proust’ (Sartre 1939, [1947 edition, p. 32]). Journal of Bioeconomics 6: 275–294, 2004 Ó 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.