Lévy-Bruhl has a bad reputation. From his work, we generally know just enough not to take the trouble to read them, and to condemn with indignation a concept such as that of primitive mentality. Frédéric Keck returns to this ostracism by highlighting the paradoxical posterity of this philosopher who became anthropologist.
Thinker without school and without successors, Lévy-Bruhl worked on the three great philosophical currents of the XXe Century-Analytical philosophy, phenomenology and structuralism-an influence which is measured if necessary that each of them has won the idea of a thought capable of ignoring the principle of non-contract. The case which serves as a starting point for the reflection of Lévy-Bruhl is borrowed from the anthropologist Karl von Den Steinen, who reports that the members of a tribe of Brazil, the Bororo, affirm that they are Araras (parrots). Now being both humans and non-humans violates the founding principle of logic, and it is to describe this phenomenon that Lévy-Bruhl invokes a Participation law of which he makes the central principle of the primitive mentality.
Based on this example, F. Keck shows that the problem raised by Lévy-Bruhl makes it possible to deploy a real cartography of contemporary thought. The principle of charity invoked by Quine can thus be understood as a means of reducing to translation errors the contradictory statements on which Lévy-Bruhl was based. If phenomenology has been more welcoming for the concept of prelogical mentality, it is because it has seen an instrument allowing to describe the experience “ naive From the sensitive world, regardless of the intellectual frameworks that science imposes on our perception. But by subjecting this “ Practical logic To a theoretical logic which is superior to it, phenomenology has lost what made the radicality of the questioning of Lévy-Bruhl. As for structuralism, his strength was to prove that apparently contradictory statements took on meaning in the light of the ethnographic context of which Lévy-Bruhl had isolated them: if the Bororo boast of being Araras, it is not because they ignore the contradiction, it is in reality to distinguish themselves from their neighbors, the Trumai, who identify with aquatic animals. While recognizing the fertility of this analysis, F. Keck stresses that focusing on the networks of semantic oppositions, structuralism does not account for the syntax of contradictory statements which fascinated Lévy-Bruhl.
To follow the construction of this questioning on the concepts of contradiction and participationF. Keck follows a plan that is both chronological and thematic, since the four periods he cuts out in the work of Lévy-Bruhl correspond respectively to the concepts of primitiveof mentalityof participation and ofexperience.
A genealogy of the notion of mentality
The first chapter highlights the roots of the concept of “ primitive »In French philosophy of XIXe century. He shows that like the first work of Durkheim, the thesis of Lévy-Bruhl, entitled The idea of responsibilityis in line with Renouvier’s philosophy. However, F. Keck stresses that Lévy-Bruhl is distinguished from the objectivist position which will be adopted by Durkheim in Of the social labor division By being interested in the formation of a feeling of responsibility both subjective and objective, in the crossing of moral consciousness and criminal regulation.
The second part of the book offers a political and intellectual genealogy of the concept of mentality. This is first part of a history of colonial policies: following the failure of the assimilation policy, the concept of mentality is put forward within the framework of the new association policy because it allows to lock up individuals in mental structures of which they “ cannot pretend to go out (P. 70). But the most surprising aspect of this chapter is probably that it does not rely on the works that Lévy-Bruhl specifically devotes to the notion of mentality. It is indeed in the history of philosophy that Lévy-Bruhl published in the years 1880-1900 that F. Keck went to seek the intellectual roots of this concept. He thus underlines that the importance that Lévy-Bruhl attaches to the diversity of the modes of thought specific to each people is located in the confluence of the two distinct philosophical traditions, the German romantic philosophy resulting from Jacobi and Herder and the positivism of Comte. And to highlight the weaknesses of the notion of mentality, it is towards the posterity of this concept that F. Keck turns: the analysis of the uses which are made of it both in psychology, with Piaget and Walloon, and in history, among the members of the School of Annals, allows him to demonstrate that he remains inseparable from “ A form of implicit evolutionism (P. 124).
The experience of participation
The essential contribution of F. Keck’s work, however, consists in showing that the work of Lévy-Bruhl cannot be reduced to the unanimously decried concept of “ primitive mentality ». In the third chapter, he thus chose to tackle the anthropology works which made him famous through the concept of participationstressing that the latter should not be understood negatively, as a state of intellectual confusion, but positively, as an attempt to rehabilitate the place of affectivity in mental life. While registering in the path opened by Ribot, which sought to define a vital logic And not purely intellectual, Lévy-Bruhl criticizes him for not having taken into account the importance of social factors in the training of primitive representations. And F. Keck shows very well that it is this bond of vital and social that defines the originality of its position in relation to the two dominant figures of Durkheim and Bergson.
Unlike Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl does not focus on collective representations crystallized in institutions: on the contrary, he wants to study how they constitute “ in a field of perception prior to the separation between the individual and the collective (P. 164). And if it is based on the Bergsonian analysis of perception to maintain that in primitive mentality, virtual elements such as shadows and ghosts are an integral part of perception, it refuses to adopt a metaphysics of life which loses sight of the social dimension of mental life.
However, it is the use of the malebranchist theory of causality which best characterizes the original position of Lévy-Bruhl on the border of philosophy and ethnology. F. Keck very finely analyzes the torsion he undergoes to this philosophical theory to transform it into an instrument of ethnographic description: where Malebranche affirmed that it is impossible to conceive of natural causality without resorting to a primary causality of a divine nature, Lévy-Bruhl maintains that the primitive mentality reports any natural event-and in particular unusual accidents- Supernatural, that is to say that it inscribes human life in a network of socially constituted invisible forces which gives it meaning.
This unexpected rapprochement clearly shows that Lévy-Bruhl is increasingly focusing on the positive description of the experience of participation, by passing his opposition to conceptual thought in the background. The last chapter of F. Keck’s work studies this attempt to describe in the frames of our language a form of experience which irreparably escapes it. While highlighting the reasons why this radical approach has been able to arouse a wide interest in ethnological, philosophical and literary circles, F. Keck underlines the aporetic character of the latest works of Lévy-Bruhl, which seem to accumulate ethnographic data by renouncing to propose a theoretical framework which could only betray the own logic.
With this book, F. Keck does not only enlighten a decisive moment in the constitution of French ethnology. He also shows that the anthropological survey on the diversity of modes of thought should not be understood as a break with philosophy: in Lévy-Bruhl, it appears as a way of testing and “ subvert Philosophical concepts (p. 256). Through the study of this figure “ minor “(Ibid.), F. Keck therefore retraces a history of the human sciences which is not that of the accumulation of discoveries but that of the construction of problems and the circulation of concepts between different fields of knowledge. In fact, the interest of this hybrid discourse developed by a historian of philosophy late spent anthropology is less due to the positive contribution that he was able to bring to one or the other of these disciplines than to his ability to worry them both in “ plug -in One on the other. However, given the impasse to which Lévy-Bruhl results, it remains to be defined under what conditions this question on participation could today find relevance for anthropology and philosophy.