2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P HILOSOPHY, NON-PHILOSOPHY, AND SCIENCE
by de Beauvoir) are very close to the theses of the philosopher, they should not come too
close, since they would threatens the very possibility of philosophy as such. “only the
philosophical consciousness of intersubjectivity, he adds in the same essay from which we
quoted above, allows us, in the last instance, to understand scientific knowledge. Without
it, the meaning of scientific knowledge will escape indefinitely”(127).
Thus, structuralism receives from philosophers a treatment that is similar, although re-
versed, to the one it gets from social scientists: interesting results but it has better defer to
the philosophers a real understanding of the meaning of its discoveries. The situation, how-
ever, is not symmetric, because what make scientists wary of Lévi-Strauss’s generalizations
toward an understanding of “deeper realities” is his suspicious affinity with philosophy.
However, philosophers are not worried—as one might expect from a symmmetric reversal
of the scientists’ criticism—from an excessive dose of science. Rather, they are worried
that the scientist may be taking himself to be a philosopher, in which case he will necessar-
ily miss the meaning of his results, as Merleau-Ponty stresses. In short, the sour point of
both confrontations is constituted by what may perhaps be called the “philosophical con-
tamination” of Lévi-Strauss’ work. Either structuralism is too philosophical to be scientific,
or it takes itself to be philosophical, when the metaphysical business of understanding
deeper realities should rather be left to the professionals. This excessive proximity with
philosophy, to put it differently, cannot be accepted by the philosophers because structural-
ism refuses to be assimilates and it proves unwilling to defer to philosophy the explanation
of any meaning that may lie hidden in its results. It refuses to do so because, as Lévi-Strauss
proclaims again and again, structuralism business is rather to end philosophy, i.e. to termi-
nate it (since it is the science, presumably, that has become “strong enough to replace it”).
The parallel with the AI case we explored above is apparent. Although Lévi-Strauss never
coined, as Minsky did, a term like “pre-structuralist philosophy,” his position does not seem
that different.
57. See Simone de Beauvoir, Les Temps modernes, (1949); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard,
1960) 154.