The Legitimacy of Solomon Some structural aspects of Old Testament history

Abstract

I must start with a personal disavowal. This essay employs an explicitly Lévi-Straussian procedure but it is not intended as a guide to wider aspects of Lévi-Strauss thought. Although I feel reasonably safe with Lévi-Strauss's concept of structure, I am quite out of my depth when it comes to the related but subtler notion of esprit. Lévi-Strauss's esprit appears in sundry guises. In 1952, originally in English, he/it was a personalized “human mind”, an uninvited guest who took his place around the conference table among a group of American linguists and anthropologists (1); in the earlier chapters of La pensée sauvage he is perhaps the bricoleur—handiman—who is busy contriving culture from the junk of history and anything else that comes to hand (2); at the conclusion of Le cru et le cuit (3), in more abstract and more serious vein, esprit seems to be a kind of limiting characteristic of the human brain mechanism and appears as part of an extremely involved interchange relationship in which it (esprit) is the causal force producing myths of which its own structure is a precipitate. Elsewhere again (4) esprit seems to correspond to that very mysterious something which is a mediator between “praxis et pratiques” and which is described as « le schème conceptuel par l'opération duquel une matière et une forme, dépourvues l'une et l'autre d'existence indépendante, s'accomplissent comme structures, c'est-à-dire comme êtres à la fois empiriques et intelligibles ».