“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, of the blackness of night, of the 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 the different languages
direct to the ear; what makes the racist react are the differences directed to the eye. As LeviStrauss 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 a discourse
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 acting as
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.