Word: vi
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COLORADO SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL, Boulder, Colo. A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry VI, Part 1, and Titus Andronicus. Aug. 5 through...
...proponents of the view that man is perfectible, he extends small comfort. Whatever man is today, Lévi-Strauss insists, man already was. Among the more remarkable parallels he notes is the homology between the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and those of an unnamed Dakota Indian sage. "Everything as it moves," Lévi-Strauss quotes the Indian, "now and then, here and there, makes stops. So the god has stopped. The sun, the moon, the stars, the winds, the trees are all where he has stopped." And from Bergson: "A great current of creative energy...
...subject of history that structuralism differs most decisively with preceding trains of thought, including Marxism and existentialism, both of which very nearly deify the historical process. Though the study of Marx helped teach Lévi-Strauss to look for patterns and driving forces in human affairs, he has cooled to its rigid, dogmatic approach. In his colloquial French he says: "I still have the tripe [guts] of a man of the left. But at my age I know it is tripe and not brain." As for Sartre, he is convinced that man has much to learn from history, while...
...vi-Strauss stands aloof from such cultist and far fetched applications of structural thought. Yet in their way they are testimonials to the pull he exerts on the imagination. His approach to man has added something to the human equation that is hard to dismiss or forget. Ironically, time may show that this agnostic's principal gift to human understanding is a spiritual one. "I don't believe in God," he says, "but I don't believe in man either. Humanism has failed. It didn't prevent the monstrous acts of our generation. It has lent...
Down the centuries, an extravagant portion of human energy has supported the position that, because of their differences, men are not equal. There is no room for this in Lévi-Strauss's view of humanity. "Respect for others," he writes, "springs spontaneously and naturally in man, long before reasoning and its sophistries come into play." Elsewhere, he maintains that "insofar as man is worthy of respect, it is not just civilized man of today or the future, it is the whole of mankind...