Claude Lévi-Strauss: Rousseau, The Father Of Anthropology

Claude Lévi-Strauss in his essay “Rousseau, the Father of Anthropology” opposes Descarte 's doctrine of the Cogito to the Rousseau’s formula ‘The me is another’. Lévi-Strauss insists that it is was Rousseau who invented the principle, which had become crucial for anthropology, ‘For in order to rediscover one 's own image as reflected in others, which is anthropology 's single purpose in studying man, one should first reject one 's image of oneself’ (12). The pages of Traité des sensations, Condillac draws an image of a marble statue with a soul, unspoilt by any idea. Condillac-Pygmalion gradually endows this Galatea with senses, which prompt statue’s mental faculties to come into existence. What is the most important for our research here is not a statue’s acquired mind, but its initial insensibility and numbness, a cold surface of the unanimated body. We deconstruct Condillac’s thought experiment and recur to the virgin emptiness, to the nought. It is the moment both of our null and the beginning of the existence, the time when I do not belong to myself. I can become whatever I am thought of, my skin absorbs everything without sensing it. I is another: I is regardant rather than voyant , I am listening with all my ears, but I do not hear, so I am deaf.

Childhood resurrects, getting rid of the discouraging and humiliating stain of immaturity. It experiences a deficiency of language and turns into the blissfully nescient force, uneager of its oblivion from birth and