The philosophy of optimism and pessimism
pp. 349-359
in: Carol C. Gould, Robert S. Cohen (eds), Artifacts, representations and social practice, Berlin, Springer, 1994Abstract
Intellectual fashions never cease to puzzle me: only yesterday Claude Lévi-Strauss was all the rage, and today he is all but forgotten. Yet he did make an important observation: myths think for us, he said, and they usually come in sets of polar couples, such as tall-short, hot-cold, raw-cooked, honey-ashes. The absence of gradation makes us speak crudely as if instances of the two polar extremes exist and no instances of any intermediate case, whereas usually (almost) only the intermediate cases exist; and we mix the extremes to create the intermediate: we call the more-hot-than-cold more often hot than cold and, symmetrically, the more-cold-than-hot we call more often cold. At times, Lévi-Strauss says, we find this insufficient, and then we invent a mediating pole.
