Rousseau Kant Lévi-Strauss

This article is based on the Philosophical Gate

Rousseau · Kant · Lévi-Strauss

sogdiana

Two weeks ago, I spent a weekend finally reading "Melancholy Tropics", and at that time people were simply high, a very atmospheric book! This book has been read many times over the years, put down many times, and one of them is remembered, once when I traveled to the northwest, I took it with me, from northern Xinjiang to southern Xinjiang, and then to Dunhuang and Jiayuguan, every night in the hotel, I watched a little without moving, but I returned to Beijing; another time was on the train from Shanxi to Beijing, waiting for a sleeper bed, standing at the junction of the carriages, but after getting off the train, I rested...

In The Melancholy Tropics, Strauss repeatedly mentions that he was influenced by Rousseau, until finally he expressed his gratitude to Rousseau with great enthusiasm. Rousseau again! Kant once said: "Rousseau was the first person to guide me and had a decisive influence on the basic tendencies of my thought." "It is well known that Kant lived a very regular life, never leaving Gönigsberg in his lifetime, and every afternoon he had to walk down a street without moving, and the local residents even corrected their watches according to the time he came out, and the only exception was because Kant was fascinated by Rousseau's Emile and missed the time for the walk. Isn't that a very magical thing? Many years ago, after hearing about this, I always wondered what Kant thought of and forgot to take a walk, and he may not have forgotten about walking, but he had forgotten himself at all. Perhaps Kant felt a bit like Rousseau's own "moment"—"If there ever was anything like a flash of inspiration, it was the passion that welled up in my heart when I read this." Suddenly I felt that there were thousands of rays of light that made my soul dizzy; [vibrant] thoughts came to the door in batches, and their power, [the chaos of the situation], plunged me into an inexplicable fascination; I felt dizzy, as if drunk. There was a sharp palpitation, and my chest was like a heavy pressure. I couldn't breathe [walking], so I let myself lie under a tree [on the side of the road], and after lying like this for half an hour, when I got up, I found that my [own] tears had wet [the front of my shirt], and I didn't know that I was in tears. Ah, [sir,] how clearly I could reveal all the contradictions of the social system if I could write a quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree! How powerfully I can expose all the ills of our system and customs! How easily I can show that human beings are inherently good, and that it is only because of these institutions and customs that human beings become bad..." Kant may have felt the same shock that afternoon when he forgot to take a walk and immerse himself in Emile. And the rich meaning of "human beings are inherently good, but only because of these institutions and customs have human beings become bad" may be what Strauss inherited from Rousseau.

Strauss spent his life exploring the question of "natural religion" and "natural man", and the "nature" he inherited from Rousseau was not the "origin" in the sense of Diderot, but the "authenticity" in the sense of Rousseau, and Rousseau's "natural man" was different from the "social man", that is to say, he had to distinguish between what human beings are and what human beings artificially make themselves into. He made this distinction neither on natural knowledge nor on historical knowledge, but only on "natural intuition." Rousseau believed that the source of true knowledge is self-knowledge and self-examination, distinguishing between "true man" and "man-made man", neither needing to go back to the distant past that has passed away, nor having to make a trip around the world, because everyone carries a single true archetype in himself. However, almost no one has the privilege of discovering it and has the ability to peel off the artificial packaging and social decoration arbitrarily added to its exterior. Strauss went to the distant Americas and spent his whole life dealing with the "distant past", but later in his academic life, this experienced and insightful master returned to "Rousseau",— his starting point, pushing the academic stone of his life, and Strauss finally understood the meaning and beauty of "Sisyphus", and the words were as moving as Kant and Rousseau's ecstasy. Time and again we need to return to the origin to replenish our nutrition, about the "origin", in addition to the meaning of the "axis period of civilization" in the sense of Jaspers's philosophy of history, there is also the meaning of What Rousseau called "nature" - "natural religion... is the latest religion to be discovered, and the only successor to all other religions ... Natural man is not our first barbaric ancestor, but the last man, and we are on our journey to become this last man. "It was almost the footing of Strausslau's life.

When Lévi-Strauss returned to Rousseau, he said this:

But our own condemnation of ourselves does not mean that we are prepared to award a certificate of perfection to any society, past or present, existing outside of a particular time and space. To do so is to commit a genuine act of injustice, because we will not understand the facts below, and if we are really members of that society, we will feel that society intolerable, and we will condemn that society as if we were condemning our own society. Does this mean that we are therefore compelled to criticize any form of social organization? Are we to celebrate a state of nature, a state of nature in which social organization inevitably has to be corrupted? When Diderot wrote the idea of "vigilance against anyone who comes to impose order," he felt that a "brief history" of mankind could be written like this: "First a natural man; then a man-made man is introduced into the body of a natural man, and then in the cave in which man dwells there is a never-ending battle until the end of life." "It's a ridiculous idea. Man cannot be separated from language, and the existence of language means that there is society. The Polynesians of Bougainville are socio-biological to the same extent that they are on par with us. To take any other view is to violate anthropological analysis, not to move in the direction of anthropological analysis that this book encourages us to explore.

The more I thought about these questions, the more convinced I became that there was no answer to such questions other than the one posed by Rousseau. Rousseau, who has suffered too many slanders and is now far more misunderstood than at any other time, is absurdly accused of having once sung the praises of the state of nature—Diderot did make the mistake of praising the state of nature, but Rousseau did not ——, in fact Rousseau said the opposite, that he was the only thinker who could tell us how to escape from that contradiction. To this day, we are still groping in that contradiction behind Rousseau's opponents. Rousseau was the most anthropological of all the eighteenth-century philosophers: although he never traveled to distant lands, his corroborative data were the most complete within the extent possible of the people of his time, and unlike Voltaire, he gave the corroborative data a lively life, because he had a warm curiosity about the customs of the peasants and the prevailing popular ideas. Rousseau is our master and brother, and we are so indebted to him that if it were not for this respect and his great reputation, every page of this book would have been dedicated to him. The only way we will be able to detach ourselves from the contradictions that arise from the anthropological situation itself is, through our own efforts, to repeat the steps taken by Rousseau. Rousseau's steps allowed him to move forward from the ruins left behind by On the Origin of Human Inequality and to build such a magnificent structure as The Social Contract, the secret of which is revealed in Emile. It was Rousseau who taught us that after dismantling all forms of social organization, we can still find principles that will allow us to use to build a new form of organization.

Rousseau never made the mistake of Idealizing Natural Persons made by Diderot. He never ran the risk of confusing the state of nature with the state of society; he knew that the state of society was inherently present in man, but that the state of society gave rise to sin; the only question was to ascertain whether the evil itself existed in the state of society. To understand it means to go beyond corruption and crime and to find the unshakable foundation of human society.