Levy-Bruhl was a French scholar whose major works were How Natives
Think (1910), Mental Functions in Primitive Societies (1922), and Primitive
Mentality (1922). He suggested two basic mindsets of humankind: Primitive
mentality and Civilized/Modern mentality and tried to show that the mechanisms
of thinking of these two types of mind were different. His research on the
psychology of ancient peoples has provided historians with new ways of
understanding social psychology and conflicting concepts in ancient beliefs and
stories. His ideas are mystical, creative and diverse, transcending the lines
of logic found in philosophical thought. He believed in a historical and
evolutionary teleology leading from the primitive mind to the modern mind.
Although he believed that moral beliefs are wholly the result of social
conditioning, he also acknowledged the possibility that different cultures may
share the same basic morality: "The characteristics of responsibility and
emotional state often arise from all circumstances, almost the same as in any
reasonable civilized human life."
(Levy-Bruhl 1902, 121) He opposed the rationalism associated
with Emile Durkhiem and argued that different societies have different ways of
thinking. In his book How Natives Think, he predicts two ways of thinking in humans:
Primitive and Civilized. a. Primitive Mentality According to Levi-Bruhl, the
Primitive mentality does not differentiate the supernatural from reality, but
rather uses ‘mystical participation’ to manipulate the world. It does not
address contradictions. ‘Mystical thinking’ was the essence to the laws of
logic, it is not governed exclusively by them. The primitive mind is
essentially mystical and 'pre-logical'. It does not differentiate between the
supernatural and the natural, the material and the spiritual, the self and the
non-self. (Its purpose is not to belittle the old culture and put it in a bad
culture, but to show that the old culture should be studied in itself.) Rather
it uses ‘mystical participation’ to manipulate the world.
In other words, instead of using logical categories, it uses the
"law of participation", controlling supersensible forces. However, by
‘pre-logical’ he did not mean contrary-to-logic (antilogical) or deprived from
any logical thought. He meant that pre-logical' is a type of thinking that has
not yet fully developed into logical thinking. In the minds of ancient people,
the same thing or event can have many different things at once. Thus,
Levy-Bruhl concluded that ‘mystical thinking’ was the essence of the primitive
mind. b. Modern Mentality ‘Rational thinking’, based on logic and influence,
were the hallmarks of the civilized mind. This modern mentality uses
speculation and logic. Law of Participation Primitive people are prevented from
pursuing enquiries into the workings of nature by their collective
representations. The Collective Representations were a social reality (social
facts), common to the members of a given social group and existed beyond/above
the individual members, and were transmitted from one generation to
another.
The transmission occurred through customs, myths, and group
rituals. Collective representations awakened sentiments of respect, fear,
adoration, and so on. They were affective in nature and were non-cognitive and
non-conceptual. Some examples: ➢ When a savage is killed by a buffalo, he refers
the occurrence to supernatural causes, like witchcraft. Though well aware that
the dead man was killed by a buffalo, he believes that the buffalo would not
have killed him unless supernatural forces had also operated. ➢ The belief of West
African Negros that they will sustain an injury if they lost their shadows
during the day. ➢ New Guinea: A man who fails to catch anything at hunting/fishing
believes his nets are bewitched and when met with a member of a neighbouring
village who came visiting, kills him believing him to be the sorcerer. ➢ For Levy-Bruhl,
Christianity and Judaism were also superstitious, indicative of pre-logical and
mystical mentality at perceiving reality. Criticism 1. He makes savage thought
far more mystical than it is. Both missionaries and Negros alike were dominated
by the Collective Representations (CR) of their cultures. The observers
(missionaries) were dominated by the CR of their own culture which often
prevented them from seeing the admirable logic of the savage critics. Both
groups chose to believe in their own invisible beings/gods but considered
ridiculous the invisible beings og each other. Europeans prefer to record the
peculiarities of the culture rather than the mundane - they are more interested
in the supernatural ideas of the savages than their more common ideas and
activities (other aspects of social life) – ignored/ neglected the many
activities which depended upon observations and experiment – practical economic
pursuits like gardening, hunting, herding, manufacture weapons, utensils,
ornaments, legal disputes, warfare, relations with others, etc. 2. It makes
civilized thought seem far more rational than it is.
The problem with the specification of the term ‘us’ or ‘we’. Who
are ‘we’? Is the dichotomy of human mentality into primitive and civilised
referring to the European peasants and the Negro peasants of the same age?
Aren’t some/most of the modern peasants of rural areas mystical in many ways?
3. He treats all savage cultures as though they were uniform and writes of
civilised cultures without regard to their historical development. There is
danger in generalisation – taking examples from Polynesians, Africans, Chinese,
and North American Indians and treating these examples as of equivalent
significance – for the cultures of these peoples prevent little uniformity.
Similarly, he contrasts these ‘primitive’ peoples with the European culture
(civilized) without regarding the fact that even Europe had a ‘primitive’
past/mentality.
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