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PETER
CAWS
themselves. The respect in which I think Levi-Strauss does not ex–
ploit the full resources of his own method in distinguishing between
primitive and modern societies has to do with this complexity of inter–
relation of structures.
If
mind emerged, as it surely did, under
evolutionary pressure which required an order of complexity in be–
havior greater than that of any other form of life, if when the evolu–
tionary pressure was off it devised language as a means of keeping
that complexity in dynamic equilibrium with its world, then it seems
to me the way was opened for a kind of amplification of complexity
by shifting language from the side of the object to the side of the
subject, where mind (now ramified with language) became capable
of handling an even greater objective complexity, and indeed re–
quired it in order to maintain equilibrium. We are perhaps today in
one of the later stages of such an exponential development.
If
that should be the case we might well cultivate the totalizing
quality of the primitive mind, of which Levi-Strauss speaks at the
end of
La Pensee sauvage.
It
is there (in the course of a polemic
against Sartre) that he refers also to "this intransigent refusal on the
part of the savage mind to allow anything human (or even living)
to remain alien to it." This allusion to one of the oldest mottoes of
humanism may seem an odd conclusion to a discussion of an anti–
humanist point of view; but I think the truth is that here again
Levi-Strauss does not go far enough. To restrict the sphere of concern
to the human, or even to the living, does not do justice to mind as
its own history has revealed it. The structuring activity which keeps
the subject in balance with the world is and must be all-encompassing.
To quote Pouillon once more, "structuralism forbids us to enclose
ourselves in any particular reality." The fact that we abandon a
restrictive humanism, however, does not mean that we cease to be
men.
If
structuralism had a motto it might well be:
Homo sum,
nihil a me alienum puto.
The danger with attitudes as generous as this is, of course, that
they may in the end become completely uncritical. A theory that ap–
plies to everything does not distinguish between different things and
might as well apply to nothing; if every human activity allows a
structuralist interpretation, the fact that any particular activity does
so ceases to be instructive. The structuralist thesis seems to me to
bear the stamp of truth, but there is a penalty for arriving at the
truth, namely that in at least one important respect nothing remains
