THE “LOGICAL CONNECTION” BETWEEN TWINS AND BIRDS.

THE “LOGICAL CONNECTION” BETWEEN TWINS AND BIRDS. I used Google to look up the sentence “Twins, like birds,…‘occupy an intermediary position between the supreme spirit and the merely human.’” The sentence comes from the essay by Claude Levi-Strauss entitled “Toward the Intellect”, and it can be found in a Google book edition of TEACHING LEVI-STRAUSS edited by Hans H. Penner. Here is the passage from page 36 of the Levi-Strauss essay:

“What we are presented with is a series of logical connections uniting mental relations. Twins ‘are birds,’ not because they are confused with them, but because twins, in relation to other men, are as ‘persons of the above’ to ‘persons of below’, and, in relation to birds, as ‘birds of below’ are to ‘birds of the above.’ They thus occupy, as do birds, an intermediary position between the supreme spirit and human beings.”

I still don’t understand, but I am pleased to see that twins seem to come out above humans.