Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien

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LÉVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN

LÉVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN (1857–1939), French philosopher and sociologist. Lévy-Bruhl devoted most of his attention to the analysis of the human mind in primitive societies. He studied mental functions and mystical experience, symbols and myths, and notions of the soul and of the supernatural.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was born in Paris. A student at the École Normale Supérieure, he passed his agrégation in philosophy in 1870. He then taught successively at three lycées. In 1884 he was awarded the docteur ès-lettres with a thesis on the idea of responsibility. At the École des Sciences Politiques, he gave a remarkable course of lectures on the history of ideas in Germany since Leibniz. As senior lecturer (1895) and then professor (1907) at the Sorbonne, he taught the history of modern philosophy and developed his ideas about primitive peoples. He became the editor of the Revue philosophique in 1916, was elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1917, and, with Paul Rivet and Marcel Mauss, founded the Institute d'Ethnologie.

Without ever openly disagreeing with Émile Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl diverged from the leader of the French sociological school—a divergence that was made apparent when his book La morale et la science des mœurs (1904) criticized Durkheim's theory of métamorales and what he took to be Durkheim's confusion of moral philosophy with the sociology of moral life. In Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), Lévy-Bruhl examined what he took to be fundamentally different kinds of mental activity. This work sought to establish the existence of a "primitive" mentality, an attitude of mind characterized by mystic participations and exclusions and by alogical liaisons not subject to the principle of contradiction.

In La mentalité primitive (1922), he emphasized the difference between the "primitive mind" and the "civilized mind." These terms describe the distinctive tone or quality of the "collective representations" of two basic types of society. A society finds representation in the concepts and beliefs of its members; the members share a mental attitude and hence a manner of experiencing the world.

According to Lévy-Bruhl, the "primitive" mentality and the "civilized" mentality each embodies its own irreducible logic: respectively, the magico-religious and the critical. Differing conceptions of causality and representations of time and space define these contrasting modes of thought. The magico-religious, or "prelogical" mentality, judges no event (e.g., accident, sickness, death) to be natural and fortuitous but instead attributes it to the direct action of supernatural powers belonging to an invisible extraspatial and extratemporal world. Dreams, omens, divinatory practices, and ordeals are given great importance as signs of a primary mystic causality, the only truly efficient cause. Without the critical mentality's concern for the causal interconnections of phenomena, the "primitive" mind is indifferent to secondary causation. Immediate and intuitive, the "primitive" concept of causation does not employ the inductive method of the scientific West.

In L'âme primitive (1927) Lévy-Bruhl argues that the "primitive" personality appears stronger than the "civilized" personality, because the ego and the cosmos are integrated there through a network of mystic relations. In his later works, Lévy-Bruhl develops the notion of the "law of participation," according to which various aspects of reality comprise a single mystical unity based on resemblance, contrast, or contiguity and thereby enable a being to be simultaneously himself and something other. This "law of participation" is a way of living, of acting, and of being acted upon. Lévy-Bruhl attempts to show that symbols are the vehicles of participation; he claims that extrarational reality does not permit itself to be systematized into a conceptual framework.

Lévy-Bruhl's theories were controversial in their day and met criticism from a variety of perspectives. Most contemporary anthropologists have rejected the notion of a specifically primitive mentality. In his posthumous Carnets (1949), Lévy-Bruhl himself considerably tempers the difference between prelogical and logical mentalities, showing that they coexist to various degrees in all kinds of societies and that participatory thought is never entirely eclipsed by pure rationality.

Bibliography

Several works by Lévy-Bruhl have been translated. These works include Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris, 1910), translated as How Natives Think (London, 1926); La mentalité primitive (Paris, 1922), translated as Primitive Mentality (New York, 1923); L'âme primitive (Paris, 1927), translated as The "Soul" of the Primitive (New York, 1928); and Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive (Paris, 1932), translated as Primitives and the Supernatural (New York, 1935). Two additional works, though not translated, deserve to be mentioned: La mythologie primitive (Paris, 1935) and L'experience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs (Paris, 1938).

For a brief assessment of the context and application of Lévy-Bruhl's theories, see the chapter entitled "Lévy-Bruhl" in E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford, 1965). The repercussions of Lévy-Bruhl's notion of mystic participation are examined in Jonathan Z. Smith's article, "I Am a Parrot (Red)," History of Religions 11 (May 1972): 391–413. For discussions of his life and work, see Jean Cazeneuve's Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (Paris, 1963), translated under the same title (New York, 1972); and Georges Davy's Sociologues d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, 2d ed. (Paris, 1950).