Claude-Lévi Strauss and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In 1754 Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality, a treatise in which he sought to demonstrate that
social and economic inequality is not natural to human beings, but is
rather a product of the organization of structured society and the
attendant division of labour. At the outset Rousseau identifies the
subject of his essay in this way: "It is of man that I have to
speak." Rousseau's intent is to show that property, inequality, and
their train of jealousy, hatred, crimes and war, could have arisen only
in the passage from the state of nature to an artificial, unnatural
state of civil society.
Using both an array of field data provided by accounts of travellers
outside Europe and his own speculative logic, Rousseau's method is to
hypothesize exactly what might have happened as prehistoric humanity
evolved from its natural or animal state into its civilized state. In
doing so Rousseau breaks radically with the Cartesian concept of the
human person as pure consciousness endowed with reason and language. The
human species had to exist before language in order to create it, and
reason is not a faculty that a particular being either possesses or does
not, but rather a continuum of capacities that extends into the animal
world.
In his 1955 autobiographical account of his intellectual development,
his travels, his field work in Brazil, along with his commentary on the
regrettable homogenization of global culture, entitled Tristes
Tropiques (an abridged English translation has the title World on
the Wane), Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies Marxism, Freudian
psychoanalysis, and geology as his three "mistresses" from whom he had
learned that "understanding consists in the reduction of one reality to
another," and that "true reality is never the most visible of realities"
or what one sees on the surface. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had also
understood this point, observing that the discourse which binds together
the different elements of an inegalitarian society is not at all a true
representation of reality, that it is, to use his word, a "specious"
discourse contrived by the dominant class of the rich. Together with
Lévi-Strauss's three mistresses, Jean-Jacques Rousseau must be reckoned
as his "master" -- "Rousseau our master," he writes in Tristes
Tropiques, "our brother to whom every page of this book could have
been dedicated if such a tribute would not have been unworthy of his
great memory."
Tristes Tropiques marked, in the words of Zygmunt Bauman, "the
manifesto of an entirely new concept of human studies," one in which
the myth and ritual of so-called primitive societies could be decoded
as representations of the unconscious mechanism of segmentation and
structuration of experience common to all human beings. In a 1962 essay
entitled Jean-Jacques Rousseau, fondateur des sciences de
l'homme, translated rather awkwardly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
founder of the sciences of man and published in 1977 in the English
edition of Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss acknowledges
not only his own debt to Rousseau but the debt of the whole of cultural
anthropology. Alluding to Rousseau's autobiography, the
Confessions, Lévi-Strauss asks: "Does the anthropologist write
anything other than confessions?" He describes in the strongest terms
the determining contribution of Jean-Jacques to our understanding of
what it means to be human: "Rousseau," he writes, "did not simply
anticipate anthropology, he founded it."
Levi-Strauss
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For Lévi-Strauss the key text here is of course Rousseau's
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Rousseau, he argues,
articulated the fundamental anthropological problem of the relationship
between nature and culture. It was Rousseau who first grasped that in
order to understand what the human species is in general, it is
necessary to study precisely the total diversity of human experience. To
this end, Rousseau suggested that it would be necessary for scientists
with the skills and knowledge of philosophers and scientists like
Montesquieu, Buffon, or Diderot to undertake field work in Africa, Asia,
and America -- a proposal which Lévi-Strauss characterizes as the very
programme and method of modern cultural anthropology.
For Lévi-Strauss, a key lesson in Rousseau's narrative of the human
species' prehistoric triple transition from nature to culture, feeling
to knowledge, and animality to humanity, is the necessary recognition of
the human faculty that bridges both sides of the transition, namely the
faculty of pity, a faculty which according to Rousseau human beings
share with other animals, and which for Lévi-Strauss constitutes the
innate human ability to identify with another, not just with a relative
or compatriot, but with any human being and indeed with any sentient
living being, and the corollary of this, the ability to refuse to
identify solely with oneself. "Rousseau's revolution," he affirms,
"consists of refusing obligatory identifications." This concept
encapsulates Lévi-Strauss's characteristic dialectic of the universal
and the particular: to be truly universal is to recognize the inherent
value of the diversity of human culture and expression. And going beyond
the process of identification with other human beings, the innate human
ability to identify with other forms of life is illustrated in the
phenomenon of totemism, which for Lévi-Strauss enables human beings to
classify social status by transferring animal categories to human
beings.
Rousseau saw the pre-rational faculty of pity as the very foundation of
human morality, and according to Lévi-Strauss there is for contemporary
human society a powerful moral lesson in Rousseau's anthropology, "It
is today," writes Lévi-Strauss, "that [Rousseau's] thought takes on
its fullest meaning and acquires its greatest importance." Here
Lévi-Strauss cites the torture, massacres, and exterminations that have
accompanied modern imperialism, and which prove the absolute failure of
an anthropocentric humanism that extols the exclusive dignity of human
nature. The ultimate lesson of Rousseau's anthropology is therefore a
lesson in humility, a humility which derives from the human person's
natural capacity to identify with all forms of sentient life.
Lévi-Strauss concludes that there is only one truly unpardonable crime
for a human being: "to consider oneself, in the short term or in the
long term, superior [to others], and to treat other human beings as
objects." Is not this lesson as important today on Lévi-Strauss's one
hundredth birthday as it was forty-six years ago?
James MacLean
Oral presentation at Memorial University of Newfoundland
on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Claude Lévi-Strauss, November
28, 2008.
Other essays by James MacLean
Observations and analyses in these essays are those of the author, and are not to be attributed to the
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