LÉVY-BRUHL, LUCIEN
(1857–1939)

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the French philosopher and social anthropologist, was educated at the University of Paris and the École Normale Supérieure. He occupied the chair of philosophy at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand from 1885 to 1895, when he became maître de conférences at the Sorbonne; in 1908 he was appointed titular professor. In 1916 he became editor of the Revue philosophique.

Lévy-Bruhl's early work was devoted to the history of philosophy, particularly that of Auguste Comte. While still under the influence of Comte and also of Émile Durkheim, he published La morale et la science des moeurs (Paris, 1903; translated by E. Lee as Ethics and Moral Science, London, 1905). It stressed the need for detailed empirical studies of the diverse moral attitudes and ideas of different societies as well as the adaptation of these ideas to the social structure of the group. He considered such a description and explanation as a preliminary to a possible applied science of morals, which would give men the same power to modify social life as physical technology gives them over natural phenomena.

Lévy-Bruhl did not develop this idea of a moral technology but devoted most of his life to investigating an extremely wide range of anthropological data derived from the reports of other observers. The interest of his work lies in the theoretical ideas that he applied to this material.

Lévy-Bruhl argued that the behavior of men in primitive societies must be understood in terms of Durkheim's concept of "collective representations," which are emotional and mystical rather than intellectual. The primitive man's world is dominated by occult powers, and his thought is "prelogical," following a law of participation and quite indifferent to what civilized man would regard as self-contradictions. For example, the members of a totemic group may regard themselves as actually identical with their totem, as belonging to a continuum of spiritual powers, rather than as existing as distinct individuals. Prelogical concepts imply no systematic unity but "welter, as it were, in an atmosphere of mystical possibilities" (How Natives Think, Ch. 3). Space, for instance, is conceived, not as a homogeneous whole, but in terms of the mystical ties binding each tribe to a particular region, the structure of the ties being understood in terms of the various occult forces to which the life of the tribe is subject.

Primitive man is similarly indifferent to conceptions of causality as understood in civilized cultures. For him there is no natural order within which perceptible phenomena are causally interconnected, but, equally, nothing happens by chance. Events are brought about directly, not through any mechanism of secondary causes; they are effected by the imperceptible denizens of an occult realm who have no definite spatiotemporal location and who may be felt as present in several places simultaneously.

Durkheim's followers have criticized Lévy-Bruhl for failing to bring out the connections between primitive collective representations and social structure. He has also been accused of overstressing the extent of prelogical elements in primitive thought. In attempting to reconcile the existence of fairly highly developed arts and crafts in primitive tribes with his denial that such tribes thought at all in terms of logical and causal connections, he held that such manual skills are not based on reasoning but "are guided by a kind of special sense or tact," refined by experience without benefit of reflection. Lévy-Bruhl's most serious philosophical shortcoming, perhaps, is his failure to see anything problematic about the nature of logic itself and the role it plays in civilized life. His identification of logical thought with the thought of Western civilization prevented him from perceiving many important continuities and analogies between primitive and civilized attitudes and practices.

See also Comte, Auguste; Durkheim, Émile; History and Historiography of Philosophy; Logic, History of; Philosophical Anthropology.

Bibliography

additional works by lévy-bruhl

History of Modern Philosophy in France (1899). New York: B. Franklin, 1971.

La philosophie d'Auguste Comte. Paris: Alcan, 1900. Translated by K. de Braumont-Klein as The Philosophy of Auguste Comte. London: Sonnenschein, 1903.

Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. Translated by L. A. Clare as How Natives Think. London: Allen and Unwin, 1926.

La mentalité primitive. Paris: Alcan, 1922. Translated by L. A. Clare as Primitive Mentality. New York: Macmillan, 1923.

L'ame primitive. Paris: Alcan, 1927. Translated by L. A. Clare as The "Soul" of the Primitive. London: Allen and Unwin, 1928.

La morale et la science des moeurs (1927). 16th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971.

Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalité primitive. Paris: Alcan, 1931. Translated by L. A. Clare as Primitives and the Supernatural. London: Allen and Unwin, 1936.

La mythologie primitive. Le monde mythique des Australiens et des Papous. Paris: Alcan, 1935.

Les carnets de Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949.

The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1975.

works on lÉvy-bruhl

Cailliet, Émile. Mysticisme et "mentalité mystique." Étude d'un problème posé par les travaux de M. Lévy-Bruhl sur la mentalité primitive. Paris, 1938.

Leroy, Olivier. La raison primitive. Essai de réfutation de la théorie du prélogisme. Paris: Geuthner, 1927.

Peter Winch (1967)