2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE CHALLENGE OF CLOSURE
other words, by accepting an intrinsically inconsistent philosophical classification, Lévi-
Strauss would less be committing himself to a philosophical position than rejecting the rel-
evance of philosophy altogether—with its tools, concepts and history—to the anthropolog-
ical project. An interpretation bound to find support in the well-known tirades against
philosophy contained in “Making of an anthropologist” (in Tristes tropiques) as well as in
the final pages of L’homme nu, where Lévi-Strauss proclaims that he has never had any phi-
losophy of his own, “apart from a few rough convictions that I have come back to, less
through the development of my own thought than through the progressive erosion of what
I was taught and that I once taught myself.” 38 What do we gather, then, from this excursus
into Lévi-Strauss’s quibbles with the philosophers? It would almost seem as if the exchang-
es we outlined are to be considered just merely academic disputes better read as symptoms
of underlying power struggles than debates with some real bearing on the conceptual issues
at stake.
Let us start by acknowledging that Ricoeur is absolutely right in his dismissal of Lévi-
Strauss’s —and, more generally, game-based approaches’ —philosophical claims. First,
because he points out, quite rightly, that leaving the issue of content aside reduces game-
based approaches like Structuralism, in his interpretation, and AI, in mine, to technically
useful formalisms that cannot be philosophically self-sustaining. Thus, when he questions
what he sees as game-based (non)philosophy inability to recover the level of content, he is
asking them a question that they must answer in order to be up to the challenge. In other
words, the theoretical possibility to supplant philosophy passes necessarily through the an-
swer to that question about content. Moreover, as Ricoeur and the other quoted critics make
clear, there is no ready-made philosophical answer to be found in the history of philosophy:
Not in Kant, not in Hegel, not in Husserl, etc. As a matter of fact, the effort to adapt the
former philosophies to Structuralism makes them ipso facto prone to impassable contradic-
tion: Kantism lacks its transcendental subject, Hegelianism loses its no subject-object me-
diation, and so forth.
38. Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu, …, 570; Engl. tr. 638, emphasis added.
285