Log24

The mediative, ordering capacity of myths, their ability to “encode”—another Lévi-Strauss word—to give coherent expression to reality, points to a profound harmonic accord between the inner logic of the brain and the structure of the external world. “When the mind processes the empirical data which it receives previously processed by the sense organs, it goes on working out structurally that which at the outset was already structural. And it can only do so inasmuch as the mind, the body to which the mind belongs, and the things which body and mind perceive, are part and parcel of one and the same reality.” The codes through which these perceptions are transmitted and understood are, suggests Lévi-Strauss, binary. That’s again a technical word, but not difficult for us to understand. He says that everything that matters comes in sets of two. Thus we have the relations and interactions of what he calls “the great pairings”. For example, affirmation and negation, which really means in simple language, yes and no; organic and inorganic; left and right; before and after. Lévi-Strauss suggests that the symmetries of the nervous system and the hemispheric architecture of the human cortex—the two halves of our brain—seem to be an active reflection of this binary structure of reality.

— Steiner, George. Nostalgia for the Absolute
(The CBC Massey Lectures) (pp. 26-27).
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