Richard J. Severson

One of my favorite theorists of human nature is Claude Levi-Strauss, the famous French anthropologist whose long life spanned almost the entirety of the 20^th century.  In his view, the human mind operates according to a universal law (or structure) that reconciles binary pairs of contradictory elements.  As an ethnographer, Levi-Strauss focused on the role of myths in prehistoric societies.  For example, he argued that Native American Trickster myths reconcile the primordial conflict between life and death by emphasizing the contradictory (trickster) personalities of ravens and coyotes.  These two animals in particular stand halfway between herbivores and predators, or agriculture and hunting, which are polar opposites that correlate with the life/death paradox.  The contrariness of their personalities is a reflection of the contradiction between life and death, as well as the subtle reconciliation of that contradiction, which therefore serves as a source of solace and meaning regarding our own mortal predicament.  Levi-Strauss was convinced that the inherent polarity of mythic thinking is paradigmatic for every kind of cognitive activity.  I’ve often wondered if he is right about that.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher of the early 19^th century, claimed that history unfolds according to a rational (logical) process hidden in the topsy-turvy triumphs and tragedies of seemingly disparate human events.  His dialectical interpretation of history and consciousness bears some resemblance to Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, but I don’t think the latter was as systematic (dogmatic?) in his approach.  After all, Levi-Strauss was a scientist, not a philosopher.  His view of thinking as a paradoxical endeavor involving the resolution of fundamental contradictions was grounded in the study of indigenous peoples, not philosophical musings about the logic of history.  The subjects of his studies really were preoccupied with the paradoxes of life and death, past and future, family and strangers, danger and safety, and so forth.  It is upon such struggles of the conscious mind that the meaningfulness of our own existence is forged.  That’s what Levi-Strauss believed.

What about civilization itself, which stands as the great alternative road that human beings took in their rejection of the animistic beliefs of our Stone Age ancestors?  Is there a polarizing contradiction at the heart and soul of every civilization, something akin to an indigenous myth, or root metaphor, that animated an entirely new path forward into the future?  Levi-Strauss was convinced that the modern civilized mind is as polarized as the aboriginal mind was, and I suspect he is at least partly right about that.  However, I think the elements of the civilized mind’s polarities are different, and they are reconciled not by myths, but by intentional projects that have built up a bulwark of practices and institutions whose sole purpose has been to protect us from the belittling circumstances of life, such as sickness, injury, death, poverty, crime, etc.  Whereas the myths of our ancestors reconciled them to the harder realities of life, civilization has set itself up as an alternative (man-made) world to the pregiven natural order of things.  Nature itself, I suspect, became the chief polar antagonist for the modern mindset.  That turn of events has proved to be a disaster, I believe. 

Final thought: I think we must heed Levi-Strauss’s warning that the modern mind is no more sophisticated, capable or intelligent than the “savage” mind.