Lévi-Strauss has been described as sensitive, dignified and reserved, someone who has always privileged rigorousness in his professional life, and no doubt striven, as a result, to maintain a certain distance from events, people and facts. In order to know more about him we can turn to his own testimony (Charbonnier [1961] 1969; Lévi-Strauss [1975, 1979] 1983; Lévi-Strauss and Eribon [1981] 1991), concerning his roots and intellectual development, and relate certain aspects of his work to his life and personality.
Those close to him all agree on his distinctive sensibility, which leads him sometimes to prefer the company of nature, rocks, plants and animals, to that of people. Undoubtedly this is the key to his aesthetic sensitivity, whether in relation to painting, music, poetry or simply a beautiful ethnographic object (Lévi-Strauss 1993). Is this aesthetic refinement part of his family heritage? This is quite plausible when one takes into consideration that his great grandfather was both a composer and a conductor, that two of his uncles were painters, as was his father who was also passionately interested in both music and literature.
This aesthetic sense can be found in most of Lévi-Strauss’s books; it is expressed in the choice of titles, in the choice of images (on the covers of the French editions of Mythologiques, or The Savage Mind, even in the colours of the characters of the titles (e.g. the raw, green and red; the cooked, brown), and the organization of the contents (e.g. the musical arrangement of Mythologiqws beginning with The Raw and the Cooked, which is devoted to music, and concluding with the ‘finale’ of The Naked Man).
In his remarkable autobiographical volume, Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss [1955] 1976) he wrote about his early interest in nature and a taste for geology which led him to scour the French countryside in search of the hidden meaning of *landscapes. We can add to this youthful fascination a close reading of Freud and a discovery of *Marxism. Although each operates on a different level, he tells us that these three approaches (geology, Marxism and *psychoanalysis), show that true reality is never that which is the most manifest, and that the process of understanding involves reducing one type of reality to another. For each, he adds, the same problem arises, that of the relationship between the sensory and the *rational; and the objective of each is a kind of super-rationalism which can integrate the sensory and the rational without sacrificing any of the properties of either. Although he has distanced himself gradually from Marxism and pschoanalysis, this is nevertheless the programme that Lévi-Strauss has striven to realize throughout his work.
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