The Universal and Diversity

“The universal and diversity”

Alain Didier-Weil

To give an idea of the complexity surrounding Man as soon as he encounters the dimension of the particular and the universal, we can start out from the observation of the man who rejoices over the diversity nature offers him when it provides him with the vision, for example, of the whiteness of snow, ofthe blackness of night, ofthe red and the yellow of the rainbow. But when these magnificent colors -red, yellow, white, black - are offered to him, not by nature but by humanity, why does the stupefying phenomenon of racism appear and declare that between the white man, the black man, the red man and the yellow man, the gaze claims to recognize hierarchical differences authorizing contempt, fear and admiration?

Let us first note that the racist does not react to the different sounds that thedifferent languages direct to the ear; what makes the racist react are the differences directed to the eye. As Levi-Strauss points out, this prevalence of the gaze over what is heard is implicitly acknowledged in the preamble to the second Unesco declaration: “ What convinces the man in the street that races exist, is the immediate evidence of his senses when he sees together an African, a European, an Asian and an American Indian. ” In the same text, Levi-Strauss brings up a very subversive question; while recognizing the fundamental step achieved by humanity through the Declaration of the Rights of Man, Levi-Strauss wonders about the relationship between the “proclamation” of natural equality and the “real” of cultural diversity which imposes itself on our observation. What kind of power is this “proclamation” of a human universal endowed with? As adiscourse of symbolic power, it says both that men are equal and that, in the eye of the universal, there is no difference between them. But in fact, in so far as a real difference is seen by the eyes of the concrete observer, the question becomes: when the gaze lands on the “universal” Man, can it, at the same time, see the particular Man?

Levi-Strauss answers: “No, it is as if, the proclamation of universality gave permission to act, -I quote- “as if diversity did not exist”.

The “as if” asks a very powerful question: it does not state that the relationship to the universal excluded necessarily the relationship to the particular but it states that man can look towards the affirmation of the universal while owning the possibility of negating the difference, of actingas if it didn’t exist. Isn’t this pair, affirmation - de-negation, at work in the way the Greeks, by inventing the notion of a universal logos, had no other option but to remove the barbarians from it? Isn’t it also at work in the notion of the universal invented by Saint Paul [there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither Man no Woman, neither Master nor Slave] which excluded all that didn’t recognize God the son? wasn’t it also at work in the way the universal of the French Revolution couldn’t make space for local particularities such as regional folkloric dances?

Let us go a step further by asking psychoanalysis to shed light upon this de-negating attitude towards difference. Doesn’t it tell us that the experience Freud named “trauma” is the experience of Schreck lived the small human when he makes the discovery of sexual difference? Why Schreck? because this difference, strangely, is impossible to think of as such; thus, after having passed an erroneous judgment, he considered that his mother was not originally different from the father and that she became a woman -since she wasn’t one by nature- as the result of a cultural act Freud named “symbolic castration”.

When the small traumatized human asks the question “who am I?”, the answer is brought by sexual desire, which tells him -in the case of the heterosexual choice- “you desire this woman, therefore you are a man! You desire this man, therefore you are a woman!”. Such a configuration creates the conditions for the apparition, in the declaration of 1948, of the universal rights of the Man as well as of the Woman.

However, there exists an other altogether different universal which cannot be deduced from the question “who am I?” but from the question “am I?”, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the first to experiment with. This is why he became, for Levi-Strauss, the prophetic agent of human sciences and ethnology. Furthermore, why did the question posed by this “am I?” make Rousseau become the spiritual father of the revolution? Because of the answer he brought to it. It was not the answer of the Cartesian philosophers -“I” am is identical to the “I” which thinks “I am”- but the much deeper answer of an “I” identical to a “he”. Through this “he” towards which Rousseau was turning in the experience of pity toward all men, even towards all animals or all plants, he was getting back to this original nature which the first Pre-Socratics had discovered to be fundamentally veiled behind changing appearances; this original nature which Socrates chose to approach from a political point of view, through the notion of a natural right that founds a “natural” society of Man. A society in virtue of which Man has, by nature, a sort of intuitive, divinatory knowledge of what is just, which would enable him to make a contract originating with this justness and arrive at the possibility of virtue. There would thus exist, beyond the justice declared by the positive right, the idea of a justice to which Man could have access, not through the constraint imposed by the particularity of a written law, but through the strangely human ability to recognize that, beyond all particular laws, there exists a universal law. This universal law, transcending all particular laws, reveals itself to be capable of transmitting what is eternally common to Man before he is historically determined, whether it is by his sex, his fatherland or his culture. Such a law, freed from the restrictive determinism of custom, has the capacity of giving itself in an immediate, spontaneous fashion, by calling into existence that which in Man escapes determinism: freedom. A call that Kant recognized the enthusing nature of.

To conclude, this law asks us the following question: is the nature of its relationship with particular diversities of a discontinuous or of a continuous nature?

The racist tells us his will for a radical discontinuity: for him, the other is defined by an absolute visibility which abolishes the invisibility which remains in Man as a mystery. In contrast, art traces the path which doesn’t cease to teach us that a particular color can make all light-waves vibrate, and that a particular note can make all other notes resound. That the particular is the privileged path towards the universal doesn’t only apply to art. It is the path of psychoanalysis as well. It teaches us that the relationship of a subject to his real father -he is fat, skinny, small or tall - can be an obstacle to the recognition of the dimension of this father who is neither fat nor skinny, neither small nor tall and who is the eternal symbolic father. But this antinomy between particular father and universal father can be reversed. It is then within the size, the weight, the color, the intelligence, the stupidity ... of this real father, that something Other than he comes through and surpasses him: what the alterity of the symbol “father” owes to the universality of language.

In general, human sciences, psychoanalysis, poetry lead us to think, by leaning on the fact that “I” is “he”, that the infinite variety of the “I” existing on our planet gives a sense of the invariance of the existence of a universal human nature. The fact that it not knowable but recognizable is not, of course, without consequences.