A romantic brain

Claude Lévi-Strauss held in Geneva on the occasion of the 250th anniversary in 1962. The birthday of Jean Jacques Rousseau a speech in which he presented Rousseau as a founder of the sciences of humans. In the same year, Lévi-Strauss published his book on “Wild Thinking,” where in his famous engagement with Sartre he points out that “the last goal of the sciences of man is not to constitute man, but to dissolve it.” Within a year, Lévi-Strauss Rousseau declared himself the founder of human sciences, but on the other hand he saw the goal of the human sciences, which had just been committed to Rousseau, as the dissolution of their subject. How is this possible and what are the reasons for this conviction? In his theoretical reflections, the author shows how an answer to this question gives rise to a level of ambition that encourages sociology to perceive structural anthropology as a “traveler” on the way to natural science. Because the topicality of Lévi-Strauss’s social anthropological work is to be found especially in the natural sciences based motif complex of a “romantic longing.” (ICI2)