Cosmologies of Lévi-Strauss

Bringing a full description of the world is inconceivable, since thousands of our lives would not be enough and that in the meantime would have stopped transforming … nevertheless, to live and act there, and like what have done and continue to do all the cultures, we need to build an idea or a global image. No doubt this is the most archaic and most necessary orientation system. These cosmologies can borrow from reality such as and such of its elements, most often to distort it, they are never enslaved to it. However, this architectonic trait characterizes a large number of theories in the humanities, in the same way, a fortiori Those who claim their promontory providing an integral explanation of man, world, history (Marxism, Freudism, Structuralism etc.).

This very general thesis serves both as a starting point and an explanatory framework for a new and fascinating investigation by W. Stoczkowski, an investigation which comes after that which he devoted fifteen years ago in search of the old Western cultural prejudices which fed and even founded the learned theses of modern paleoanthropology. W. Stoczkowski therefore transposes in the field of the study of learned culture a well -known principle of any anthropological study. This rapprochement is, according to him, since the two types of culture rest in the same way and last instance on a “ cosmological design (P. 18). These conceptions are also similar to the extent that they are never created Ex nihilosince they result from an often complex history in which sometimes numerous currents intertwine. It is not uncommon, moreover, that we still find today in the learned culture of thoughts or notions from Plato, Lucretia, Stoics, first Christian theories or Gnostic thinkers, to name only systems born during Antiquity. And, in their completed form, these conceptions, adds W. Stoczkowski, always present an identical organization based on the presence of an ontology, an etiology, an axiology and a steriology. The first says what the world or the human condition is fundamentally ; The second completes the previous one by defining the nature and origin of the evils, accidental or irreversible, which overwhelm them ; the third, in the name of its own system of values, makes it possible to make a judgment on these ailments and on the need to get rid of the world ; As for the last she draws, in particular when these evils are only accidental, the future that awaits humanity when she has managed to remove them. We will obviously note the great kinship of this general heuristic model with that presented by Christian cosmology and anthropology. This last model has undoubtedly influenced most of the subsequent Western cosmologies, scientific or not, religious or not, starting with that imagined by Marx. Hence, moreover, the possibility of going from one to the other quite easily, but not to live them simultaneously.

Two visions of racism

In this new work, the incredibly precise, methodical and excavated investigation carried out by W. Stoczkowski therefore invites you to look at a part of the scientific work of C. Lévi-Strauss in the way ethnologists usually look at distant cultures. He is particularly interested in two texts: Race and historypublished in 1952, and Race and culture which dates from 1971. Two famous texts therefore, but which do not concern structuralism or kinship systems.

These two texts approach, as we know, the same central theme, racism, but they have given rise to diametrically opposite reactions. While the first can be considered as an irreproachable example of eminently correct thought, the second aroused astonishment and reprobation to the point of making its author pass for a disciple of Gobineau, or even for a bitter racist. Indeed, in the first, C. Lévi-Strauss, followed quite faithfully the doxa of theUnescodeveloped after the massive extermination of Jews during the Second World War. She solemnly affirmed the equality of races and men. He pronounced himself in favor of the pluralism of cultures, considered all as fundamentally respectable, and even of their measured interbreeding. But he brought to the most embarrassing questions of the overly convoluted or too Irenic answers to convince him himself a long time: how to weigh down the interbreeding so that he does not remove the wealth born of diversity ? How to explain the often deep differences in terms of technical or intellectual progress presented by cultures without mentioning one form or another of inequality ? And how to design collaboration between so different cultures while avoiding their standardization ?

The 1971 text breaks with this order optimism and ends with what could have been considered a denial. That W. Stoczkowski sums up as follows: “ Civilizing progress leads to the growth of the population, which promotes exchanges, but the latter lead to the erasure of cultural diversity, at the same time as demographic saturation fatally generates intolerance and hostility towards peoples that have become rivals (P. 48). The least we can say is that this “ Disenchanted vision of man And this land pessimism surprised as much as it was displeased.

Faced with two texts with such dissimilar conclusions, Stoczkowski does not invoke a sudden hypochondria in C. Lévi-Strauss where we do not know what other idiosyncratic factor. In accordance with his initial postulate, he poses that these two texts are part of different cosmological schemes, the first being obviously more optimistic than the second, but one could as well say that the first bet on voluntarism, as for the second it seems as fatalist and resigned as the philosophy of Gobineau. In the first, W. Stoczkowski finds in particular the intellectual and moral influence of the Belgian socialist Henri de Man whose young C. Lévi-Strauss was a fervent disciple. Through this tradition, the latter was able to get closer after the war and without too much difficulty in the humanist optimism of theUnesco. But, practically at the same time, the numerous fears he perceived in the wake of exponential population growth, were going to lead him to modify his first cosmological model quite significantly. Indeed, this new etiological data would condition its diagnosis on absolute evil now embodied by overcrowding, a disaster that threatened both nature and human cultures in their peaceful coexistence and their diversity. For C. Lévi-Strauss (and it no longer seems to have varied on this point since then), overcrowding indeed leads to the massacre of all natural resources and, mechanically, an increasingly harmful promiscuity, since individuals, unable to support it, develop feelings of hatred towards their fellow men who appear to them now as very little resembling. The xenophobic and racist feelings find their origin there. Of Race and history has Race and culture We are ultimately witnessing the substitution of one cosmological model for another, substitution which is very logically accompanied by a modification, not of the terms themselves of the series (etiology, ontology, axiology and steriology) but of their content.

At the end of the work, the reader, as long as it was endowed with a spirit as agile as that of the author, will not fail to (arise) to ask this question: if any ambitious scientific theory is necessarily based on a cosmology, in this case the approach which claims to analyze it in order to account for it as completely as possible must not be based on a cosmological infrastructure, if it is implicit or stripped or stripped, ? Perhaps W. Stoczkowski would subscribe to these written lines a few years ago and which, in a neighboring context, were trying to answer a similar question. “” (This approach) is by no means anxious to substitute a new cosmology for those it studies. Its final ambition is and is only methodological, since it gradually discovers its own systematicity in the rules imposed by the comparative analysis of other systemicities. Indifferent to all metaphysics, she has fun dismantling all those, complex or fragmentary as possible, which she meets on her way ».