Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Resolution of Binary Opposites

2 Comments | December 19, 2007 at 11:05 am by mahud
Filed under Structualism, Lévi-Strauss

Long before Lévi-Strauss, myths were often understood as the way that a society might give meaning to the question of its origins or the mysteries of birth and death. …a myth is a way of treating an impossibility. But Lévi-Strauss went much further than this. He argued that myth responds to the initial situation of impossibility or contradiction not with a solution but by finding new ways of formulating it logically.

Rabate, Jean-Michel, 2003, ‘The Cambridge Companion to Lacan‘, p.38-39 (Cambridge University Press)

Over the past week I’ve been reading up on Claude Lévi-strauss. One thing that strikes me as interesting is his belief that the function of myth is to resolve diametrically opposed problems, such as raw and cooked, nature and culture, basically anything that cannot be reconciled. However myths do not exactly resolve these apparent paradoxes:

The solution is never logical, strictly speaking, but it imitates logic. If the problem were capable of a purely logical solution, there would be no need to have recourse to myth. But myth can do what logic cannot, and so it serves as a kind of cultural trouble-shooter. Rather than thinking of it as a kind of placebo which creates the mere impression of solution to a problem, it may be regarded as a mechanism for relieving anxiety.

Csapo, Eric, 2005, ‘Theories of Mythology‘, p.226 (Blackwell Publishing)

Once the paradoxical problem of mythic thought has been truly overcome logically, the myth is no longer needed to obscure the dilemma of contradictory thought.

Once a myth has been penetrated and understood, it dies; it no longer functions as an expression of a dilemma or contradiction. The nonliving mythologies of the world are fossilized dynamic thought which has been discarded because it was resolved, outgrown, or made irrelevant by events or cultural evolution.

Caughie, John, 1981, ‘Theories of Authorship: A Reader‘, p.158 (Routledge)

I can think of no bigger mythological paradox than the ultimate ineffable state of reality, which will never be resolved by science and philosophy. Myths will always be a vehicle for the sacred, an unresolvable paradox, that can only be reconciled with our minds through myth and ritual