Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

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Lucien Lévy-Bruhl

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (born April 10, 1857 in Paris , † March 13, 1939 in Paris) was a French philosopher and ethnologist .

Career

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was the son of a Jewish family from Metz in eastern France. He attended the Lycée Charlemagne , where he studied music, philosophy and science. In 1876 he was accepted into the École Normale Supérieure , where he received the agrégation de philosophie in 1879 . Between 1872 and 1882 he worked as a high school teacher in Poitiers , between 1882 and 1883 in Amiens and between 1883 and 1885 as a teacher of higher rhetoric at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris . In 1884 he received his doctorate at the École Normale Supérieure with the dissertation L'idée de responsabilité and taught both there and at the École libre des sciences politiques from 1886 as maître de conférences . In this role it was u. a. his job of training the young elite for politics and administration in the Third Republic .

His scientific career began with a work on modern French philosophy (1889); This was followed by works on German philosophy since Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz ( L'Allemagne depuis Leibniz 1890), on the philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi ( La Philosophie de Jacobi 1894) and on the philosophy of Auguste Comtes ( Lettres inédites de John Stuart Mill à Auguste Comte 1900). In La morale et la science des mœurs (1903) Lévy-Bruhl's interest in ethnological aspects becomes clear for the first time. In 1904 he became professor for the history of modern philosophy at the Sorbonne .

In the post-war period there was a lively intellectual exchange between Lévy-Bruhl and universities abroad. This gives him an international reputation, but at the same time his early philosophical works take a back seat.

In the 1920s, Lévy-Bruhl attracted attention with his ideas and became a major figure in ethnological research. In 1917 he became editor of the influential Revue philosophique , which was an important medium for the human-scientific and social-philosophical intellectual life in Europe at the time. In 1925 he founded the Institut d'Ethnologie at the Sorbonne , which u. a. Trained field researchers and colonial officials. He appointed Marcel Mauss as managing director and the ethnologist, linguist and later director of the Musée de l'Homme Paul Rivet . Only two years later, however, he left the institute again because of differences between the scientists.

In 1928, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl helped found ethnological institutes in Costa Rica , Nicaragua , San Salvador and Guatemala .

While Marcel Mauss followed Émile Durkheim's example and devoted himself to researching human activity, ascribing a special key role to ritual, Lévy-Bruhl always remained a philosopher and was particularly interested in myths and their influence on thought processes.

Political interest

As early as the 1890s, Lévy-Bruhl observed the relationship between his home country and the booming Germany. He saw the moral reasons for its rise in the country's lively intellectual and cultural life. During the First World War , Minister Albert Thomas , his former student, took him into his cabinet. It was Lévy-Bruhl's task to take action against German war propaganda and to contribute to both the Bulletin de l'Alliance française and the Bulletin des usines de guerre . From 1919 he worked as an attaché to the Foreign Ministry a. a. at the Paris Peace Conference .

Act

Lévy-Bruhl was part of a generation of French intellectuals at the beginning of the 20th century. B. Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson , who applied philosophical principles to studies of the human mind and society. He contrasted the rationalistic tradition with the idea of ​​fundamentally different types of knowledge. His theories on the “primitive mentality” represent a controversial development in early modern ethnology .

La mentalité primitive

Under the influence of Durkheim and his follower Marcel Mauss , Lévy-Bruhl increasingly moved away from classical philosophical studies and turned to ethnology, whose idea of ​​universal human nature he rejected.

Even before his appointment to the Sorbonne, Lévy-Bruhl had started his way from philosophy to ethnology. In La morale et la science des mœurs he develops his approach to the spiritual world of non-written cultures. This is based on the examination of the philosophy of science approaches from Auguste Comte's positivist early phase and the sociology of Émile Durkheim. This marked the beginning of a new phase of Lévy-Bruhl's scientific work, which manifests itself in his publications on mentalité primitive . His main interest was now the structural differences between the worldview of non-scripted cultures and modern western civilization. In other words, he devoted himself to the question of whether non-European societies have modes of thought that have nothing in common with Western logic. He dedicated his two main works Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910) and La mentalité primitive (1922) to this theory of fundamental cognitive differences .

Differentiation from the British school

Lévy-Bruhl distinguished himself from the British school. He criticized Edward Tylor and James Frazer for seeing deviant "primitive" thinking simply as a less developed, deficient version of Western modes of thought. This evolutionist perspective assumes the universal validity of moral norms and logical thinking. Lévy-Bruhl contradicted this by describing “primitive” thinking as mystical- prelogical , which did not follow the laws of formal logic (theorem of contradiction, theorem of identity, etc.), but the so-called participation principle.

Participation rate

See also : Participation mystique

The thought structures described by Lévy-Bruhl are shaped by and aligned with collective ideas, a. manifest in myths and customs. The principle of participation also says that certain differentiations, which are essential for Western logic, do not exist. These include the differences between reality and dream; Present, past and future, as well as the trigger and expression of an event. Furthermore, the phenomenon of “multiprésence” excludes the differentiation between one and many, like and other, as well as animate and inanimate - i. i.e. that a person e.g. B. can be present in different places at the same time. Time and space are seen as exclusively subjectively perceptible and cannot be measured using (western) quantitative methods.

In addition, the phenomenon of transmigration of souls is an important part of the participation principle - Lévy-Bruhl reports of New Guinean sorcerers who have “le pouvoir de métempsychoser les morts dans un serpent, un crocodile, etc.” (La mentalité primitive: 42). The mentalité primitive includes, not otherwise than the formal Western logic, contradictions from. You «ne complaît pas gratuitement dans le contradictoire… mais elle ne songe pas non plus à l'éviter. Elle y est le plus souvent indifférente »(La mentalité primitive: 79). Carl Gustav Jung took up the principle of participation with his conception of a “ collective unconscious ”.

criticism

Lévy-Bruhl's theories of the “primitive” mentality, which he even extended to the indigenous people of China and India, were increasingly criticized. The ideas of colleagues like Marcel Mauss and Bronisław Malinowski tended to emphasize the plurality and peculiarities of cultures. Lévy-Bruhl, however, manifests insurmountable contradictions between two human modes of thinking, which also means discrepancies between European civilization and its colonial domains, according to critics in France in the 1920s. However, this criticism is inadequate because it does not take into account the philosophical basis of Lévy-Bruhl's considerations of 1903. Another problem is that, according to Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (1910), he repeatedly refers to his essential findings, but initially hardly develops them further. From the 1930s Lévy-Bruhl was accused of ethnocentrism because his thoughts on the primitive mentalité did not correspond to the scientific way of thinking.

In addition, his comparative method was subject to criticism, it ignored both the complexity of non-literate peoples and the variants of European worldviews that are dependent on education and class. The fact that Lévy-Bruhl relied primarily on travel reports and notes from missionaries as a source, in so far as he worked as an armchair anthropologist , was considered insufficient. In La pensée sauvage (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss also argues against the thoughts of his former teacher: “Contrary to the opinion of Lévy-Bruhl, this [wild] thinking proceeds on the paths of the understanding, not affectivity, with the help of distinctions and opposites , not through confusion and participation. "

Lévy-Bruhl himself also reformulated his theories under the pressure of growing criticism: Both types of mentality can be found in all societies, but to different extents. The modern society bear remnants of the mystical and pre-logical ( prelogical ) in itself. In posthumously published notebooks ( Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl 1949) he revoked large parts of his work.

It was not until the late 1980s that the criticism of Lévy-Bruhl's work was widely revised.

influence

Despite massive criticism, Lévy-Bruhl's work reveals fundamental thoughts on important issues in science in the 20th century, especially ethnology: for example, the crisis of representation, questions of power and tradition and their role in the community. Today Lévy-Bruhl's approach of analytically separating two structurally different world views is recognized. However, it must be taken into account that these appear variable both in Western civilization and in non-literate cultures and can be specifically subordinate.

The non-logical elements identified by Lévy-Bruhl were u. a. reinterpreted by Durkheim for his reflections on the sociology of religion and Jean Piaget's developmental psychology. Today Lévy-Bruhl is gaining new meaning in the view of a modern sociology, ontogenesis. While Piaget had confirmed Lévy-Bruhl's account with his empirical stages (sensomotoric, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational), Günter Dux et al. a. with the "historical-genetic theory" (Dux 2000) the historical development of traditional peoples and their pre-formal thinking going further in the sense of Lévy-Bruhl.

In his time, Lévy-Bruhl's ideas influenced less other ethnologists than more the literary avant-garde of the 1920s, such as TS Eliot and James Joyce . Even Francis Cornford built on its approaches.

Works

  • L'Allemagne depuis Leibniz. Essai sur le développement de la conscience nationale en Allemagne, 1700-1848 . Félix Alcan, Paris 1890. Digitized
  • La philosophie de Jacobi . Félix Alcan, Paris 1894.
  • History of modern philosophy in France . Chicago 1899. Digitized
  • Lettres inédites de John Stuart Mill à Auguste Comte, publiées avec Les réponses de Comte et une introduction par Lévy-Bruhl . Félix Alcan, Paris 1899.
  • La philosophie d'Auguste Comte . Félix Alcan, Paris 1900.
  • La morale et la science des mœurs . Félix Alcan, Paris 1903. Digitized
  • Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures . Félix Alcan, Paris 1910. Digitized version ( 1951 edition )
  • La conflagration européenne. Les économiques et politiques causes . Félix Alcan, Paris 1915.
  • Jean Jaurès. Esquisse biographique, suivie de lettres inédites . Bieder, Paris 1916.
  • La mentalité primitive . Félix Alcan, Paris 1922. - Online
  • L'âme primitive . Félix Alcan, Paris 1927. Digitized
  • Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive . Félix Alcan, Paris 1931. Digitized version (edition 1963)
  • La mythology primitive. Le monde mythique des Australiens et des Papous . Félix Alcan, Paris 1935. - Online
  • Morceaux choisis . 1936.
  • L'expérience mystique et les symboles chez les primitifs . Félix Alcan, Paris 1938. - Online
  • Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl . PUF, Paris 1949. - Online

In German translation

  • The thinking of primitive peoples , edited and introduced by Wilhelm Jerusalem , Braumüller, Vienna 1921 ( Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures , dt.).
  • The spiritual world of the primitives , Munich: F. Bruckmann 1927 ( La Mentalité primitive , German, incompletely translated by Margarethe Hamburger) (later licensed edition: Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1957)
  • The soul of the primitive . Authorized translation Else Baronin Werkmann , Braumüller, Vienna 1930 ( L 'ame primitive , Ger.) (Later licensed edition: Diederichs, Düsseldorf 1956).

literature

Web links

Commons : Lucien Lévy-Bruhl  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Contrairement à l'opinion de Lévy-Bruhl, cette pensée [sauvage] procède par les voies de l'entendement, non de l'affectivité, à l'aide de distinctions et d'oppositions, non par confusion et participation" ( 355)
personal data
SURNAME Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher and ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH March 13, 1939
Place of death Paris