Lucien Levy-Bruhl - French ethnologist, anthropologist, philosopher. He was born in Paris in 1857. The key theme of the works created by Lucien Levy-Bruhl is primitive thinking .
Biography
Lucien was born into a Jewish family. His father was a businessman, his mother a housewife. Lucien acquired his second surname by marrying Alice L. Bruhl. At the Sorbonne, he worked at the Department of the History of the Philosophy of Modernity. Levy-Bruhl also founded the Institute of Ethnology at the University of Paris. He began his career as a philosopher. His first works were devoted to the history of the formation of German thought. Subsequently, Levy-Bruhl became interested in anthropology. This was prompted by his acquaintance with the work of D. Fraser and the research of S. Qian (Chinese historian).
Legal solidarism of L. Levy-Bruhl
The initial concept in all studies was "collective representation." This definition of Levy-Bruhl borrowed from Durkheim. According to the latter, collective representations are ideas, moral concepts, beliefs that a person receives not from his own life experience, but through education, public opinion, and customs. The identification of the laws of this aspect of social culture, the study of its manifestations in societies that differ in their level of development, are the main tasks that Levy-Bruhl set in his works . "Primitive thinking" is the first work in which the philosopher tries to solve them. The work was written in 1922.
Levy-Bruhl: "Primitive Thinking" (summary)
At the beginning of his work, the author gives a detailed description of collective representations. He indicates a number of signs by which they can be recognized. These criteria are common to all members of a particular social group. Collective Submissions:
- Passed from generation to generation.
- They are imposed on individuals, activating feelings of fear, respect, worship, depending on the circumstances.
- It does not depend on a specific individual.
The latter is caused not so much by the fact that representations presuppose some collective subject, but by the fact that ideas exhibit properties that cannot be comprehended through only consideration of the individual directly. For example, as Levy-Bruhl points out, language, despite the fact that it actually exists in the minds of people who speak it, acts as an undoubted social reality. It is based precisely on a set of collective representations. The language imposes itself on each person in a social group. Moreover, he precedes her appearance and outlives her.
Cultural diversity
It is he who determines the specificity of collective representations - as Levi-Bruhl believed . The primitive mentality in the works of the philosopher was a kind of starting point for research. The author believed that for an archaic (traditional) society, effective orientation, collective sensations and feelings are of great importance than mental activity in itself. In this regard, Levy-Bruhl criticized Taylor for the image of the "savage philosopher", comprehending the world intellectually. In his opinion, the laws within which there are collective representations of "backward" peoples are absolutely not like modern ones. They are not separated from sensory aspects, emotions of archaic cultures.
The phenomenon of suggestion
He, along with the socio-psychological "infection" of fear, horror, hope, etc. during religious rites, plays a large role in archaic cultures. Among all the decisive facts investigated by Levy-Bruhl, the supernatural in primitive thinking occupied a key role. An individual of an archaic culture has an unshakable faith in mysterious forces and in interconnection with them. As Levy-Bruhl emphasized, the "savage" does not try to find explanations for environmental phenomena. They arise in him in a single complex of ideas about magical properties, the secret forces of nature, and not in a structurally-analytical form in the form of its individual components. The perception of the world by primitive cultures, Levy-Bruhl believed, is aimed not at revealing objective characteristics, but at subjective-sensory methods of development. In this regard, the "primitive man" in a dream mixed, for example, really existing objects with images, people - with their illustrations, name, shadow. Primitive thinking is impenetrable to experience. It does not show sensitivity to him. Accordingly, experience is not able to reassure an archaic individual in his belief in mystical powers, witchcraft, etc.
The Law of Communion
It takes the place of the laws of logical thinking and is as follows. An object (animal, human) can simultaneously be itself and someone else. In a traditional society, a person feels himself in a mystical unity with his totem (eagle, parrot, etc.), with a forest soul, and so on. Levy-Bruhl called this form of thinking prelogical, operating with preconnections (preconceptions).
Nuances
Almost immediately after the publication of the work "The Primeval Culture," Levy-Bruhl was widely criticized. The author, in turn, felt the internal inconsistency of the concept. In this regard, he gradually softened the key thesis about the prelogical form of thinking. Over the course of all subsequent years, with various reservations, he almost ruled out its opposition to logical laws.
Problem complexity
It is worth saying that cognition and thinking actually have different properties. The question, however, is how to explain them. Is it possible to talk about qualitatively different types of thinking regarding representatives of unequal cultures. Levi-Bruhl always pointed out that the existence of a prelogical form is limited to collective representations. He emphasized that practical tasks are carried out by primitive people rationally, taking into account real conditions. This raises a fairly logical question. How can such duality exist in a person when the syncretic form of his worldview is emphasized? The correlation of representations of European and "primitive" cultures is also unclear. Many experts consider Levi-Bruhl's opinion that the content of the former is consistent with the laws of formal logic erroneous. Otherwise, the sphere of religious beliefs of Europeans is excluded.
Mistakes concept
F. Boas, one of the founders of the psychological direction of cultural anthropology, considered Levi-Bruhl's position to be a consequence of an incorrect interpretation of ethnographic data. At the same time, he pointed out that it was unacceptable to draw conclusions about logic based on customs and traditional ideas. A psychologist from England, Bartlett, considered Levi-Bruhl's main mistake to compare "primitive" thinking with scientific standards. Thus, the critic was able to identify the weakest link in the concept. He pointed out that in everyday modern life, human thinking is often inconsistent with the “logical type” of Levy-Bruhl.
conclusions
Studying the complex problem of the implementation of the thought process, the French philosopher used a rational-deterministic model of culture. Within its framework, the search and understanding of material (empirically-material) causal relationships and the organization of this knowledge according to the principles of logical classification are supposed. In the course of thinking there is no insight, intuition. It has only a gradual transition from one position to another. In this model of modern thinking, positive science and rationalist philosophy prevail. It contains a certain distance between the living variety of a work of art or a historical text and formal-logical constructions, according to the laws deduced by the ancient Greeks. What Levi-Bruhl called mythological, prelogical thinking is an integral part of culture as a whole, just as conceptual, deductive, rationalistic science is an essential component of European civilization.
Thus, collective "primitive" ideas are deeply different from modern ones and are not equivalent to them. The main feature of the former is their mystical character. This term is used to express faith in actions, forces, influences, inconspicuous for sensations and feelings, but, however, real.