2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

S TRUCTURALISM AND PHILOSOPHY
termes, les homophonies et les ambiguït´s fournissant progressivement la
matière de ces coups de théâtre speculatifs à l’ingeniosité desquels se
reconnaissent les bons travaux philosophiques.” 53
We see the first sign of the excessive proximity: his success derived from his being a better
philosopher than the philosophers themselves were. So good, in fact, that he was able—as
a true philosopher would do, we may add—to unmask the pretensions of philosophy and of
the philosophers and to see through their intellectual parlour games. On other hand, how-
ever, the opposition he sets up in the text quoted above, an opposition he will repeat inces-
santly every time he attacks philosophy, is as philosophical as it can be: Lévi-Strauss, in
fact, opposes the true reflection that his discipline will provide to the apparently true, i.e.
doxastic, reflection of the philosophers. In a passage that follows by a few pages the previ-
ous one and that I have already quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the opposition re-
ceives its clearest expression: “the mission incumbent upon philosophy until science
becomes strong enough to replace it [is] to understand being in relationship to itself and not
in relationship to myself.” (57. In short, structural anthropology is different from philoso-
phy not just because it is different, but rather because it is better—because it will succeed
where philosophy failed. This, you will have noticed, is exactly the same position that we
saw Artificial Intelligence holding “against” philosophy. But structuralism, like AI, can be
better than philosophy because it is not so different: it pursues the same goal—i.e. to un-
derstand being as being, or, as Lévi-Strauss puts it, “being in relationship to itself”—with
different means, and of course with the means of science. Commenting upon the Essay on
the Gift by Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss observes that “what happened in that essay , for the
first time in the history of ethnological thinking, was that an effort was made to transcend
empirical observations and to reach deeper realities.” 54 The exaplanation of these deeper
realities, we might add, is what would contitute an explication of “being in relationship to
itself,” i.e. it would contitute a science of being as being, to put in Aristotelian terms.
53. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques…, 55.
54. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss (London: Routledge, 1987) 38, my
emphasis. This essay was originally published in 1950 as the introduction to Sociologie et Anthropologie
(Paris: PUF, 1950) a collection of works by Marcel Mauss that included the Essai sur le don.
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