Claude Levi-Strauss, a monumental figure in modern thought, died today at age 100.
I honor his loss with this amazing passage from Octavio Paz's book on CL-S:
The history of Western thought has been the history of the relations between being and meaning, the subject and the object, man and nature. After Descartes, the dialogue was altered by a sort of exaggeration of the subject. This exaggeration culminated in Husserl's phenomenology and Wittgenstein's logic. The dialogue of philosophy with the world became the interminable monologue of the subject. The world was silent. . . . Levi-Strauss breaks brutally with this situation and inverts the terms. Now it is nature which speaks with itself, through man and without his being aware. It is not man but the world which cannot come out of itself.
--Octavio Paz, Claude Levi-Strauss
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