Levy-Bruhl among thePhenomenologists: Exoticisation andthe Logic of ‘the Primitive’Robert Bernasconi

Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s impact on continental philosophers from Edmund Hersserl, Max

Scheler, and Martin Heidegger, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and

Jacques Derrida is documented with specific reference to the question of understanding

other cultures. However, the fact that Levy-Bruhl focused on understanding ‘the

primitive’ infected the philosophical discussions of this topic with a certain racism and

even, on occasion, a certain exoticism, still visible even in Julia Kristeva’s efforts to

overcome it.

What does it mean to understand someone else better than they understand

themselves, particularly when that other person belongs to a different culture and

speaks another language? My intention here is neither to offer a new model of

dialogue, nor to revisit the debate between Peter Winch and Alistair MacIntyre on

understanding primitive societies. Instead, I am here largely concerned with

elucidating some of the obstacles to dialogue*/particularly those associated with

primitivism and exoticism*/as they continue to function undetected in our thinking.

In March 1935 Husserl wrote to Levy-Bruhl to thank him for sending him a copy

of his newly published Primitive Mythology. This was more than a standard ‘thank

you’ letter. Husserl’s letter was written with some care and included the observation

that it was his third draft. Nevertheless, Husserl’s way of telling Levy-Bruhl how much

he appreciated his work says more about Husserl than it does about Levy-Bruhl.

Husserl did not acknowledge some powerful insight that he had found in Levy-

Bruhl’s work other than the recognition that ‘the primitive’ thinks differently from

the modern, ‘the civilized’.1 Nor did Husserl offer Levy-Bruhl any helpful insights or

questions that would contribute to the latter’s project. Instead, Husserl told Levy-

Bruhl that his work had a significance that extended far beyond its impact on

Robert Bernasconi, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA. Email:

rbernscn@memphis.edu

ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13504630500257033

Social Identities

Vol. 11, No. 3, May 2005, pp. 229�/245

ethnology, but that it would be revealed by publications on humanity and the milieu

(Umwelt) that he, Husserl, was in the process of preparing. Husserl promised that in

these works he would replace the irrationalism of some of his contemporaries and the

old rationalism of others of them by introducing a new hyper-rationalism. In other

words, the deep-seated rationalist intentions that inspired Levy-Bruhl’s studies of

primitive mysticism would be fulfilled by Husserl in ways yet to be revealed: ‘There

are important principles in your works that will find their entelechy in the future’

(Husserl, 1994, p. 164).2 Husserl was writing to Levy-Bruhl from that future. No

wonder that when Levy-Bruhl received the letter he approached Husserl’s former

student, Aron Gurwitsch, who was then in Paris, and asked him to explain it to him

as he did not understand a word of it: ‘Expliquez-moi, je n’en comprends rien’

(Schumann, 1977, p. 459).

To be sure, that was something of an exaggeration. Levy-Bruhl must have

understood at least that he was being told that his work would one day have a

significance that he himself at this time could not yet understand. That is to say,

according to a classic gesture, Husserl claimed to understand Levy-Bruhl better than

Levy-Bruhl understood himself. The irony is that Levy-Bruhl had for years claimed to

understand the missionaries and other ethnologists whose reports he relied upon

better than they understood themselves, just as they claimed to have understood the

primitives better than the primitives understood themselves. Everybody*/except ‘the

primitives’*/claimed to understand somebody else, but there was little or no mutual

understanding between any of the various parties. And Husserl claimed to be in a

position to understand them all, even though few, if any, were yet able to understand

him. This is what he wanted to communicate to Levy-Bruhl and perhaps not much

else, as his letter was not free of the terminology of phenomenology, which he could

not have expected Levy-Bruhl to understand.

On another occasion Levy-Bruhl was willing to acknowledge a case where someone

did understand him better than he understood himself. More precisely, he attributed

to Maurice Leenhardt a ‘clairvoyant’ understanding of his work. Leenhardt, after

reading Levy-Bruhl’s Primitives and the Supernatural , asked its author: ‘The affective

category of the supernatural, isn’t it participation?’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1949, pp. 137 and

220; 1975, pp. 105 and 168). In The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, in which he

revised many of his earlier claims, Levy-Bruhl described how he did not accept this

suggestion at the time, but did so later. Of course, one could say that Leenhardt did

not understand Levy-Bruhl better than he understood himself, but, rather, that Levy-

Bruhl changed his mind. Or, perhaps, Levy-Bruhl was already moving in the direction

of equating the supernatural and participation and that is why he could call

Leenhardt clairvoyant. I emphasize this possibility because it seems to parallel the way

that European scholars have presented their relation to those they regarded as less

developed. It is because Europeans gave a direction to history, that of Europeaniza-

tion, or, as it has been called, since Kant, ‘cosmopolitanism’, that they felt able to

claim that they understood ‘the primitives’ without having to listen to them.

230 R. Bernasconi

In certain respects, Levy-Bruhl’s works succeeded in surpassing the Enlightenment

philosophy that inspired them. In spite of himself, he called into question the

tradition whose superiority he took for granted. This was recognized by Emmanuel

Levinas, who, in his 1957 essay, ‘Levy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy’,

suggested that contemporary philosophy was marked by Levy-Bruhl’s ideas on

primitive mentality, precisely insofar as he had effectively put in question the alleged

necessity of the categories which from Aristotle to Kant have been said to condition

experience (Levinas, 1991, pp. 54�/55; 1998, pp. 40�/41).3 Max Scheler was among the

first philosophers to recognize Levy-Bruhl’s contribution. Scheler had already in 1915

relegated the absolute constant natural view of the world to the status of a limit

concept and treated Kant’s table of categories as applicable only to European thinking

(Scheler, 1915, pp. 256�/57). However, ten years later he acknowledged that this

insight was part of a larger movement of ideas to which Levy-Bruhl had contributed

significantly. In Sociology of Knowledge , in the context of a discussion of Levy-Bruhl

among others, Scheler introduced the notion of ‘the relative natural view of the

world’ (Scheler, 1960, p. 61; 1980, p. 74). It is defined as whatever is generally given to

a (usually genealogical) group subject without question so that they not only do not

need justification but are being given justification. Scheler claimed that these

worldviews cannot be changed by instruction but only by ‘racial integration and

possibly linguistic and cultural mixings’ (Scheler, 1960, p. 63; 1980, p. 75). He also

proposed that these relative natural views of the world are organized according to

developmental stages that are in some way coordinated with the stages of psychic

development (Scheler, 1960, p. 63; 1980, p. 75). I mention this so as to indicate that

questions of race and of the philosophy of history were clearly in play in the

appropriation of Levy-Bruhl’s ideas.

Levy-Bruhl’s anthropological writings tend to follow a simple formula. Almost

every chapter of his numerous ethnological studies begins with the rehearsal of a

number of anecdotes drawn from the massive archive of literature left by missionaries

and explorers. The European traveller encounters a form of behaviour that makes no

sense to him or her. This is recorded with a view to showing not just the

incomprehensibility of ‘the primitives’, but sometimes also their alleged stupidity,

thereby already confirming the superiority of the Europeans who read about it. By

collecting similar anecdotes from across the world, Levy-Bruhl then proceeds to show

that the form of behaviour is not unique to a specific tribe, culture or continent, but

is widespread, with the crucial exception of Europe and by extension the civilized

world in general. When we read Levy-Bruhl, we are first supposed to laugh at the

primitive for acting foolishly, then we learn to feel superior to the ethnographer, the

initial European observer who failed to recognize that he or she was observing

primitive behaviour. Once we know it specifically as ‘magical’ or ‘pre-logical’ or as an

example of ‘participation’, what appeared to be arbitrary can be explained by

reference to a concept. The explanatory power of this approach, such as it is, relies on

establishing a decisive difference between their behaviour and ours . They, the

primitives, are pre-logical, whereas, we, as civilized, are conceptual.4

Social Identities 231

The stories told by missionaries and explorers that served as Levy-Bruhl’s starting-

point do not tell us only about the people they describe but also, and perhaps

primarily, about the missionaries and explorers themselves, both what they were

looking for and what they had been taught to expect. This accounts, at least in part,

for the repetition of the same story across cultures, which amounted to the

production of a genre. Levy-Bruhl came to dominate that genre because he claimed

to understand what those stories concealed: the truth of primitive mentality. Levy-

Bruhl’s primitives are no longer stupid; they are simply different from us. They are

well adapted to their environment. Nevertheless, we still have the edge on them

because we understand that ‘they’ are the same all over the world, something of which

they have no conception. Indeed, in this sense he believes that he understands them

better than they understand themselves, albeit he does so by insisting on his

difference from them while resolutely disregarding differences among them.

Levy-Bruhl is full of extraordinary anecdotes designed to show how ‘our logic and

our language alike do violence to the representations of the primitive’ (Levy-Bruhl,

1927, p. 207; 1965, p. 170). The primitive does not make the distinctions we regard as

essential between, for example, this world and the other world, dream and waking

experience, living and dead (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 14; 1966, p. 32). But we cannot

understand the primitive by identifying both terms in each of these pairs. The most

famous example is that of the leopard-man, who is discussed in The ‘soul’ of the

primitive . Although Europeans have the widespread idea of the werewolf to help

them, the parallel is also misleading, because the decisive characteristic of the

leopard-man is that it is a case of the same individual in two bodies at the same time

(Levy-Bruhl, 1927, pp. 192�/210; Levy-Bruhl, 1965, pp. 158�/72). Examples like these

are perhaps what provoked Husserl to ask in his Crisis of the European Sciences :

Do we not stand here before the great and profound problem-horizon of reason,the same reason that functions in every man, the animal rationale , no matter howprimitive he is? (Husserl, 1962, p. 385; 1970, p. 378)

Levy-Bruhl’s ‘primitives’ have the same capacity and the same aptitude as ‘we’ do, but

they dislike ‘the discusive operations of thought, of reasoning, and reflection’ and so

they do without them (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 12; 1966, pp. 29�/30). In the posthumous

Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, Levy-Bruhl is more precise. He conceded that he

had said that primitive thought is not conceptual like ours, but he insisted that that

should be taken to mean, not that they do not form concepts, but that they do not

make the same use as we do of discursive reason (Levy-Bruhl, 1949, p. 167, 228; 1975,

pp. 127, 174). Hence, Levy-Bruhl advised against imagining that the primitives are

like ourselves and assuming that they should reason and reflect as ‘we’ do. Instead,

they should be submitted to a description and analysis that would render their mental

activity ‘normal under the conditions in which it is employed’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, pp.

15-16; 1966, pp. 32�/33).

Let me get down to cases. Toward the end of Primitive Mentality Levy-Bruhl begins

a chapter entitled ‘The primitive’s attitude to European remedies’ with a story of how

232 R. Bernasconi

sick people at Manyanga show neither gratitude nor surprise when their ulcers are

cured after being given medical attention. His source for this anecdote, the Rev. W.

Holman Bentley, explicitly doubts if gratitude is natural to the local people.5 Levy-

Bruhl follows this with another, more extravagant, story from the same book in which

a person who had been cured of pneumonia after careful nursing comes and asks for

a present. When the Rev. Bentley, who both administered the cure and tells the story,

suggests to his former patient the debt is in the other direction, the latter reportedly

complained,

Well, indeed! You white men have no shame! I took your medicine and drank your

soup, and did just as you told me, and now you object to give me a fine cloth to

wear! You have no shame! (Bentley, 1900, p. 414; cited by Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 478;

1966, p. 411; citation corrected)

Neither Bentley, nor Levy-Bruhl, speculated in his book as to why the Congolese man

thought that his benefactors lacked shame. The ethical accusation is recorded but left

unexplored. For his part, Levy-Bruhl proceeded to add further examples of primitives

demanding presents after having been cured, by drawing on other parts of Africa, and

from New Guinea, Sumatra, Borneo and Fiji. He then set about exposing the

misunderstanding that the white doctors had created by failing to attend to what was

going on. They had failed to realize that the primitive does not understand modern

medicine, but assimilates it to primitive medicine. In their eyes what had taken place

was the cure of one charm by a more powerful one (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 485; 1966,

pp. 415�/16). The primitive, as Levy-Bruhl had long laboured to show, does not

understand secondary causes. This is confirmed by other aberrant behaviour. The

medicine is supposed to work immediately and to work as well whether the patient or

his wife takes it (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 486; 1966, pp. 417�/18). One observer alone is

found to have given the right explanation: the primitive shows no gratitude because

he or she can see that the European doctor delayed the cure (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, pp.

492�/93; 1966, pp. 422�/423).

Now the native doubtless would be ready to thank him if he had been cured

instantly, if as he expected, the medicines had had the effect of a touch of the magic

wand. (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 493; 1966, p. 423)

But why the demand for a gift? Why does the Congolese man believe that the

person who saved his life, Mr Crudgington, has put himself under an obligation to his

former patient? Levy-Bruhl suggests that the mutual incomprehension between

blacks and whites, primitives and Europeans, could have been averted.

Perhaps the reason for this mutual misunderstanding will reveal itself if here again,

instead of taking for granted that the natives explain and regard such occurrences

just as the Europeans do, we try to see things from their point of view, and judge

the matter as they do. (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 498; 1966, p. 427)

Social Identities 233

Levy-Bruhl insists that mystic elements are more important to ‘the black’ than ‘the

actual events’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 498; 1966, p. 427). Furthermore, one cannot see

these events as isolated moments but as part of ‘a complicated system of mystic

‘participation’’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 500; 1966, p. 429). By intervening to save the

primitive, the malevolent spirits who made him sick in the first place are now likely to

be angry. The primitive is therefore in his own eyes not being ungrateful or

unreasonable, if he now feels he needs more protection: the person who, on his own

initiative, intervened to save his life made a sacred pledge that it would be

treacherous, if not criminal, to break.

It is to be hoped that this humanity may not confine itself to dressing his ulcers, butthat it may strive towards sympathetic penetration of the obscure recesses of aconsciousness which cannot express itself. (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 502; 1966, p. 430)

Levy-Bruhl claims that the methodological basis of his procedure is to ‘rid our

minds of all preconceived ideas’ so as to ‘guard against our own mental habits’

intervening, which would be to imply that the primitives ‘should reason and reflect’ as

we do, which is something he denies (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 15; 1966, p. 32). He wants

to show that their mental activity is not a childish rudimentary or pathological form

of our own, but that it can be made to ‘appear to be normal under the conditions in

which it is to be employed, to be both complex and developed in its own way’ (1947,

p. 16; 1966, p. 33). For Levy-Bruhl the alien character of the alien is not to be reduced

to something familiar but is maintained as alien. When the Rev. Bentley calls the

patient ungrateful, what he is saying is that were he to behave in that way, asking in a

similar context for a fine cloth to wear, then it could only be interpreted as

ingratitude. Levy-Bruhl recognizes that it is something else. However, by designating

the primitive ‘prelogical’ and above all by employing the term ‘primitive’, the

encounter with another culture is controlled. To this extent the unnamed Congolese

man may be right to say the missionary has no shame. If the missionary had

experienced himself as seen by the other he might have had his framework of ideas

put in question. Levy-Bruhl seems to have been no more open to having his own self-

conception challenged by the so-called primitive than the missionary was putting his

or her own faith on the line, opening it to question from elsewhere. The missionaries

wrote assuming the truth of Christianity, just as Levy-Bruhl wrote on the assumption

that the physical science of his day was true.

Furthermore, as he himself subsequently came to recognize, he introduced

concepts that were foreign. Indeed, in his publications he maintained that the

concepts were foreign precisely as concepts. There can be no satisfactory translation

because translation relies on concepts ‘encompassed by the logical atmosphere proper

to European mentality’. ‘Translation had the effect of betrayal’ (Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p.

506; 1966, p. 34). The division cannot be bridged. The power of Levy-Bruhl’s

descriptions and analyses, for all their many shortcomings, is that they do not

promise to explain anything or to make the primitive transparent. Instead, they are

aimed at having us understand the limits of our understanding. But this does not

234 R. Bernasconi

stop Levy-Bruhl from adopting the position of understanding them better than they

understand themselves, because he understands, as they do not, that they are

primitive. He has found a way of saying that we will never be able to understand

them, while, by confining them to a realm from which we have been absolved,

reaffirming our superiority over them. We understand them because they stand under

us in an implicit hierarchy.

Like other phenomenologists from the first half of the twentieth century, Husserl

seems to have been fascinated by the figure of the primitive, even if he did not get far

in his reading of Levy-Bruhl (see Luft, 1998, p. 20, n.2). However, Husserl had a copy

of Alexander Koyre’s review of the German translation of The ‘soul’ of the primitive ,

and he was no doubt struck by Koyre’s characterization of Levy-Bruhl’s approach as

that of a purely descriptive phenomenological analysis that was nevertheless

undermined by his use of a terminology that implied more than the description

allowed. Koyre also stressed the radical disjunction in Levy-Bruhl’s works between the

‘world’ of the primitive and our ‘world’, the ‘world’ of ‘the civilized’. Koyre wrote:

It [the primitive world] has a completely different structure, and submits tocompletely different laws, both materially and categorically, from the mechanistic-scientific world of the modern European. This difference is not gradual but is

qualitative so that it is simply not possible to develop one from the other. They areclosed systems, that correspond to one another in a certain sense but that cannot betransformed into one another, precisely to the extent that the spiritual structures ofthe primitives and of the civilized are completely different. For that reason none of

the basic concepts can be directly carried over from one to the other. (Koyre, 1930,p. 2295)6

Husserl was provoked by this claim that there can be no straightforward translation

between the two worlds. This was reflected in his letter to Levy-Bruhl, where he

acknowledged the importance of the attempt ‘to ‘empathize’ (‘einzufuhlen’) ourselves

into a living humanity that is enclosed in a vital generative society and to understand

it in its unified social life on the basis of which it has a world that is not a world of

representation for it, but is rather the world that actually exists for it’ (Husserl, 1994,

p. 162).

Husserl’s considered response to Levy-Bruhl came a year after the letter, in ‘The

Origin of Geometry’, where he announced an historical a priori . Husserl recognized a

possible objection that Levy-Bruhl, or one of his followers, could have made:

One will object: what naıvete, to seek to display, and to claim to have displayed, a

historical a priori, an absolute, supertemporal validity, after we have obtained suchabundant testimony for the reality of everything historical, of all historicallydeveloped world-apperceptions, right back to those ‘primitive’ tribes. Every people,large or small, has its world in which, for that people, everything fits well together,

whether in mythical-magical or in European-rational terms, and in whicheverything can be explained perfectly. Every people has its ‘logic’ and, accordingly,if this logic is explicated in propositions, ‘its’ a priori. (Husserl, 1962, pp. 381-82;

1970, p. 373)

Social Identities 235

However, Husserl’s answer to this objection is that the methodology of establishing

historical facts presupposes history as the universal horizon, albeit only implicitly.

These texts became the basis for a dispute between two generations of French

phenomenologists. It was Merleau-Ponty who made Husserl’s letter to Levy-Bruhl

famous when, long before it was published in its entirety, he drew on it to show that

Husserl recognized that contact with historical and ethnological ‘facts’ are

indispensable to philosophical investigation (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, p. 50; 1964, p. 90).

Husserl was struck by the contact which Levy-Bruhl had established, through his

book, with the actual experience of primitive man. Having made this contact with

the author’s aid, he now saw that it is perhaps not possible for us, who live in

certain historical traditions, to conceive of the historical possibility of these

primitive men by a mere variation of our imagination. For these primitives are

non-historical (Geschichtlos ). (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, p. 51; 1964, pp. 90�/91)

Consideration of the particular example of being without history need not detain us

for the moment. Suffice it to say that Merleau-Ponty focused on it because it is the

example given by Husserl in the letter, even though Merleau-Ponty was no doubt well

aware that this is one of a number of points on which Levy-Bruhl’s characterizations

of primitive society had been severely judged by subsequent scholars, including

Claude Levi-Strauss. Merleau-Ponty suggested that Husserl’s earlier procedure of

relying on imaginary variation for a delimitation of historical possibility had in the

primitive found its limits.

In his Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry, Derrida contested this

suggestion. To be sure, Derrida focused on certain comments made by Merleau-Ponty

in the context of his discussion of Husserl’s letter to Levy-Bruhl and ignored the fact

that Merleau-Ponty, as usual, initially overstated the case as a step on his way to a

more balanced interpretation (see, for example, Merleau-Ponty, 1960, pp. 138�/39;

1964, p. 110). However, there was no denying that Husserl had already long

recognized the limitations of proceeding by imaginary variation alone. According to

Derrida, Merleau-Ponty exaggerated both the effect reading Levy-Bruhl had on

Husserl’s understanding of the limits of imaginary variation and the limits of

imaginary variation themselves. In Origin of Geometry Husserl wrote that we have

complete freedom to transform in free variation our historical existence and thereby

generate with apodictic self-evidence an essentially general set of elements going

through all the variants.

Thereby we have removed every bond to the factually valid historical world and

have regarded this world itself [merely] as one of the conceptual possibilities.

(Husserl, 1962, p. 383; 1970, p. 375)

Derrida knew that he could use this quotation to declare victory over Merleau-Ponty,

but at the precise moment he seemed to be about to do so, he hesitated showing that

he too, like Merleau-Ponty, could write with twists and turns:

236 R. Bernasconi

We could then be tempted by an interpretation diametrically opposed to that ofMerleau-Ponty and maintain that Husserl, far from opening the phenomenologicalparentheses to historical factuality under all its forms, leaves history more than everoutside them. We could always say that, by definition and like all conditions ofpossibility, the invariants of history thus tracked down by Husserl are not historicalin themselves. (Derrida, 1962, p. 122; 1978, p. 116)

The problem Derrida was trying to negotiate quickly became complex, but the basis is

simple: if Merleau-Ponty is wrong about Husserl, then surely it is Husserl who suffers

because we would be forced to conclude that Husserl failed to account for history. So

Merleau-Ponty would ultimately be vindicated. There are more ways than one for

Merleau-Ponty to be wrong: Merleau-Ponty could be wrong about Husserl but right

about history, so that we would end up having to reject Merleau-Ponty’s

interpretation of Husserl but by going in the direction Merleau-Ponty proposed.

Or Merleau-Ponty could be wrong about history and right about Husserl. This is

what Derrida concluded: the judgment that Husserl had failed to incorporate history

would ultimately have to rely on the structures of historical invariance that Husserl

sought.

Derrida tried to imagine a Husserl eager to ‘learn from the facts’ as Merleau-Ponty

imagined him to be (Derrida, 1962, p. 117; 1978, p. 112). If, as Derrida insisted, it was

only by renouncing factual history that Husserl had access to the invariants of history,

that is, to historicity (1962, p. 112; 1978, p. 108), then it would be a very peculiar

move altogether if Husserl suddenly became interested in history and looked to it for

confirmation of what he had designated invariants of history. It would be an

extraordinary vote of no confidence in the ability of imaginary variation to do the

job. But that is because if there were a failure to thematize the apodictic invariants of

the historical a priori , the failure would be as Derrida said, with history rather than

with historicity. That is why Derrida concluded that Husserl’s attempt to grasp

histority thematically would have been a flagrant failure, if Husserl had become

interested in something like history (1962, p. 123; 1978, p. 116). But, Derrida

concludes, ‘He never seems to have done that’ (1962, p. 123; 1978, p. 117). Perhaps

no amount of imaginary variation would enable us to fantasize a Husserl interested in

history.

Derrida was no doubt right to take Merleau-Ponty to task for making the

encounter with Levy-Bruhl’s account of primitive mentality a decisive moment in

Husserl’s intellectual development. The discussion of imaginary variation and the

primitives in Origin of Geometry confirms that it was not.7 Nevertheless, the history

of existential phenomenology shows the importance of ethnology and history for the

philosopher. This can be shown with reference to Heidegger and here, unfortunately,

Merleau-Ponty was wrong again. In ‘Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man’ he

claimed that Heidegger, the philosopher of finitude, did not recognize any restriction

on the absolute power of thought (Merleau-Ponty, 1967, p. 55; 1964, p. 94). Although

Heidegger, no more than Husserl, abandoned the priority of philosophy, Heidegger,

while finding the distinction between the ontological and the ontic strategically

Social Identities 237

indispensable, nevertheless recognized the difficulty of maintaining it rigorously

thereby moving in the direction Merleau-Ponty invited philosophy to take.8

Nevertheless, if Merleau-Ponty was wrong in his interpretation of Heidegger, as

with Husserl, it only means that Heidegger supports Merleau-Ponty’s basic

contention that contact with historical and ethnological facts are indispensable to

the philosopher in his or her attempt to delineate the possible.

But important though these arguments are, I believe that there are other aspects of

Levy-Bruhl’s texts that also deserve attention when the overriding question at issue is

that of the models of and the conditions for dialogue. Early in The ‘Soul’ of the

Primitive Levy-Bruhl set out to describe how the primitive conceives the connection

between a living being and the species to which it belongs.

When a leopard, or a mouse, for instance, is actually present to his sight or is

imagined by him, the representation of it is not differentiated in his mind from

another, a more general image which, though not a concept, comprises all similar

beings . . . . The representation of it is characterized both by the objective qualities

which the primitive perceives in beings of this kind, and by the emotions they

arouse in him. (Levy-Bruhl, 1927, p. 59; 1965, p. 59)

At this point Levy-Bruhl introduced one of those analogues or parallels from among

those he called ‘the civilized’ that litter his work and that are supposed to help the

civilized in some imperfect way empathize with the primitive, albeit without in any

way compromising the distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’.

It is somewhat analogous to the way in which, during the Great War, many people

would talk of ‘the Boche’, and as many colonists talk of ‘the Arab’, or many

Americans of ‘the black man’. It denotes a kind of essence or type, too general to be

an image, and too emotional to be a concept. Nevertheless it seems to be clearly

defined, above all by the sentiments which the sight of an individual of the species

evokes, and the reactions it sets up. (Levy-Bruhl, 1927, p. 59; 1965, p. 59)

What Levy-Bruhl is saying, unwittingly no doubt, but with a clarity that is

extraordinary, is that if we want to understand how the primitive thinks we need

only reflect on European racism. The primitive’s mental processes are like the racist’s

mental processes: both operate with crude generalizations. It is as if Levy-Bruhl, by

casting the primitive as like a racist, sought, in a progressive discourse, to characterize

the racist as primitive and thereby to envisage a time in which by the process of

civilizing we might expel racism from our midst.

Nevertheless, if this was his aim, he succeeded only in reinscribing in the figure of

the primitive*/as a figure */the very racism he sought to expel. The fact that Levy-

Bruhl often employs the term ‘blacks’ as if it was a synonym for ‘primitives’, just as he

treats ‘whites’ as a synonym for ‘civilized’, only serves to confirm this impression. The

people who agree to call certain others ‘primitives’ are the same people who agree to

call themselves ‘civilized’ and who do so in spite of the fact that they may know

better.9 In his efforts to distinguish two radically different kinds of mentality, the

238 R. Bernasconi

primitive and the civilized, Levy-Bruhl repeatedly refused the parallels which

suggested themselves between the two (Levy-Bruhl, 1927, p. 192 et seq. ; 1965,

p. 158 et seq.). Levy-Bruhl knew better, but for the most part he refused to say as

much. He told Evans-Prichard that he had ignored the superstitions of religious

believers, such as pious Catholics, among his contemporaries primarily out of

sensitivity to them (Evans-Prichard, 1981, p. 130). It would be a mistake to suppose

that the problems with Levy-Bruhl are all on the side of his construction of the

primitive as if his construction of the civilized was not equally problematic.

Furthermore, in his later years Levy-Bruhl became more ready to acknowledge that

participation was not the preserve of primitives alone and that the so-called civilized

were more like the primitives than they liked to think.

At the beginning of his resume for the course on the ‘Structure and Conflicts of

Childhood Consciousness’, Merleau-Ponty showed himself fully aware of the problem

that undermined Levy-Bruhl’s orientation. Merleau-Ponty recognized that in Levy-

Bruhl’s early analyses the ‘white civilized normal adult’ had a monopoly on all reason.

Presumably with The Notebooks on Primitive Mentality in mind, Merleau-Ponty

acknowledged that Levy-Bruhl himself had in his later years begun to disengage the

concrete experience on which the myths of the primitives rested so that those myths

could be understood as expressing a certain relation with the world and thus having a

certain ‘truth’. Furthermore, participation could be found among the so-called

civilized so that the division between primitive and civilized became less profound

(Merleau-Ponty, 1988, pp. 171�/72). Nevertheless, in ‘From Mauss to Claude Levi-

Strauss’, Merleau-Ponty accused both Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl of lacking ‘a patient

penetration of its object, communication with it’ (Merleau-Ponty 1960, p. 144; 1964,

p. 115). If Durkheim sacrificed the primitive to our logic, Levy-Bruhl did the reverse.

Merleau-Ponty wrote:

Whether it assimilated reality [le reel] too quickly to our own ideas [Durkheim], oron the contrary declared it impenetrable to them [Levy-Bruhl], sociology alwaysspoke as if it could roam over the object of its investigations at will*/the sociologistwas an absolute observer’ (1960, p. 144; 1964, p. 115)

Merleau-Ponty’s overriding objection against Levy-Bruhl was that ‘he congealed them

in an insurmountable difference’. In other words, that he made the difference between

‘us’ and ‘them’ too great. But even if this warns us against ways in which dialogue can

be made impossible from the outset, the question remains: ‘How can we understand

someone else without sacrificing him to our logic or it to him?’ (1960, p. 114; 1964,

p. 115).

However, the idea that one could sacrifice one’s logic to the other is not an easy one

for the philosopher to entertain. In a gesture that mirrors Levy-Bruhl, civilization is

defined by Husserl as the ‘we�/horizon’ of the community of ‘those who can

reciprocally express themselves, normally, in a fully understandable fashion’ (Husserl,

1962, p. 369; 1970, p. 359). The abnormal are explicitly excluded, as are children. The

role of normalcy in Husserlian phenomenology is apparent in Husserl’s response to

Social Identities 239

the observation that the truths of Negroes in the Congo or Chinese peasants, fixed

and verifiable for them, are not ‘the same as ours’ (1962, p. 141; 1970, p. 139).

But if we set up the goal of a truth about the objects which is unconditionally valid

for all subjects, beginning with that on which normal Europeans, normal Hindus,

Chinese, etc., agree in spite of all relativity*/beginning, that is, with what makes

objects of the life*/world, common to all, identifiable for them and for us (even

though conceptions of them may differ), such as spatial shape, motion, sense-

quality, and the like*/then we are on the way to objective science. (1962, pp. 141�/

42; 1970, p. 139)

Recognizing that the introduction of these empirical and factual modifications of

universal transcendental norms represents a serious problem, Derrida asks: ‘how can

maturity and normality give rise to a rigorous transcendental-eidetic determination?’

(1962, p. 74; 1978, p. 80). Derrida is well aware of the answer: ‘The notion of (adult

normalcy’s) ‘‘privilege’’ denotes here a telos’ meddling beforehand in the eidos’ (1962,

pp. 74�/75; 1978, p. 80). In other words, ‘certain speaking subjects*/madmen and

children*/are not good examples’ (1962, p. 75; 1978, p. 80). Derrida might have

added ‘primitives’ to the list. Had he done so, the meddling of the telos in the eidos

would have been even clearer. He need only have cited these passages from ‘The

Vienna Lecture’ where Husserl claims that the spiritual telos of European humanity is

shared by all human beings.

There is something unique here that is recognized in us by all other human groups,

too, something that, quite apart from all considerations of utility, becomes a motive

for them to Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to self-

preservation; whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, would never

Indianize ourselves, for example. (1962, p. 320; 1978, p. 275)

To be sure, Europe is not understood here geographically, but spiritually: the United

States is said to belong to Europe, ‘whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as

curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not’

(1962, pp. 318�/19; 1978, p. 273). The fact that this was written in 1935 on the eve of

the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies cannot be ignored.

What does it mean ‘to Europeanize’? Levy-Bruhl quoted a story from Robert

Moffat’s Missionary Labors and Scenes in South Africa . He explains that the Bechuaras

confused Western medicine with magic potions, so that they valued medicine,

however nauseous, and could not understand that it was the patient who should take

the medicine and that it would not work as well if a patient’s relative took it instead

(Moffat, 1842, pp. 591�/92; cited Levy-Bruhl, 1947, p. 486; 1966, p. 417). The story

seems to be told in such a way as to suggest that the primitive want European cures,

but do not know how to take their medicine. Europeanization is presented as a bitter

medicine Westerners bring to a population who needs our guidance, because ‘we’

understand better.

240 R. Bernasconi

Primitivism was at one time widespread in the West in the form of nostalgia for the

primitive. One need only think of Rousseau or of the histories of the idea of the

primitivism that were offered in the last century by George Boas, Arthur Lovejoy and

Whitney (Lovejoy & Boas, 1965; Boas, 1966; Lovejoy, 1978, pp. 14�/32; Whitney,

1965). However, primitivism became transformed, indeed its direction became

reversed, when in the late nineteenth century it was united with a philosophy of

history constructed on the idea of progress. It is this that gave rise to the structure

whereby, for the ethnographer, the primitive is someone who is not yet civilized, who

perhaps will never be civilized, but who is what the civilized are no longer. Insofar as

we constitute ourselves as civilized, the primitive is that part of ourselves that we

refuse, as when Levy-Bruhl associates the primitive with racism as a form of thought.

According to the logic of ‘the primitive’, even though Levy-Bruhl sometimes tries

harder than most to resist it, the primitive is the civilized Westerner as that Westerner

used to be. The primitive is the West’s past in a form the West can barely recognize,

but which it knows it now wants to disown. There is now a form of ‘evolutionism’

that remains implicit in the notion of the primitive, even when it is explicitly

renounced (see Stocking, 1982, pp. 234�/69; Boas, 1966). In its current sense, the idea

of the primitive presupposes that there is a linear process of development at the

beginning of which the primitive stands.

The philosophy of development favours Northern Europe and, especially, the

United States. They are singled out as the civilized, those who already embody the

criteria by which other societies and cultures are to be judged. Furthermore,

possession of the criteria means that Northern Europe and the United States are not

judged by the criteria, they are merely affirmed by the criteria which they embody

(see further Bernasconi, 1998, pp. 23�/34). The philosophy of economic and social

development governed the idea of cosmopolitanism and now dominates the process

widely referred to as globalization. Globalization is a form of universalism that not

only primitivizes those who refuse it, as development theory does, but it also allows

for their exoticisation. As Stuart Hall explains, ‘The global is the self-presentation of

the dominant particular’. That is to say, it is the process by which ‘the dominant

particular localizes and naturalizes itself ’ (Hall, 1997, p. 27. See also Segesvary, 2001,

p. 97). By rendering ‘our’ particularism universal, their particularism is perceived as

irrelevant, anachronistic, or ripe for exoticization. Globalization is perfectly

consistent with an emphasis on difference, so long as difference is exoticized. Indeed,

the affirmation of local cultures that seems to run counter to globalization is entirely

consonant with it, so long as those cultures are exoticized.

Exoticization is a familiar gesture and can be found even where one least expects it.

For example, Kristeva begins the second paragraph of Strangers to Ourselves with the

question, ‘can the ‘‘foreigner’’, who was the ‘‘enemy’’ in primitive societies, disappear

from modern societies?’ (Kristeva, 1988, p. 9; 1991, p. 1). By this gesture Kristeva

locates the specific idea of the stranger or foreigner as enemy elsewhere, even as she

acknowledges that it remains in force here. She does this so that she can imagine

another possibility. At the same time that she is problematizing the ‘we’, she is

Social Identities 241

implying that ‘we’ can outgrow this problem. I mention Kristeva because her account

of ‘strangers to ourselves’ as presented in the closing pages of her book of that title is

the clearest presentation that I know of a powerful idea, which in her exposition is

based on the Freudian notion of unconscious, although it is familiar to some

phenomenologists, like Jean-Paul Sartre, on another basis. There is ‘an otherness that

is both biological and symbolic’ that ‘becomes an integral part of the same’. She

continues, ‘Henceforth, the foreigner is neither a race nor a nation.. . foreignness is

within us’ (Kristeva, 1978, p. 268; 1991, p. 181). We no longer understand ourselves.

We don’t know our own minds: ‘the foreigner is within me, because we are all

foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners’ (1978, p. 284; 1991, p. 191).

There were foreigners, but now there are no foreigners. But this creates a division

between those who see this and those who do not. This gesture is unavoidable. The

difficulty is that by locating the idea of foreigner as enemy from the outset of her

presentation in primitive society and by announcing a ‘cosmopolitanism of a new

sort’, albeit one whose features remain obscure, it seems all too likely that the

structures I have identified in this paper remain intact.

One way of understanding the transformation of the idea of primitivism in the last

hundred years or so, what I called its reversal of direction, is that the moment of

exoticization has been separated from it. This is how Todorov described the recent

course of exoticism in On Human Diversity (Todorov, 1993, p. 266). I want to focus

on exoticism for a moment because it too is like primitivization a refusal of dialogue

with another. Through the primitivization of the other, I, who understand myself as

the embodiment of rationality, am excused from the obligation of reasoning with the

other, who lacks reason. The exoticization of the other has the same effect. In

Infelicities , Peter Mason gives an account of the exotic as ‘that which is refractory to

the egocentric attempts of self to comprehend other’ (Mason, 1999, p. 159). Nothing

is inherently exotic. The exotic is produced by a process of decontextualisation which

gives rise to a certain recontextualisation that introduces new meanings (p. 3). To say

that the exotic is not encountered but produced does not mean that it is produced

through a collision of cultures, the ego culture and the alien culture. It is an effect of

discriminatory practices, for example, colonialism (pp. 160�/61). But to render a

culture exotic, as we all too readily do in an effort to avoid primitivization, is in effect

simply to find another means of excluding the possibility of dialogue. To treat one’s

dialogue partner as primitive or exotic is to silence him or her.

If the primitive is that part of ourselves that we recognize but at the same time

disown, the exotic is that which, having been disowned, we romanticize. For example,

Europeans identify themselves with reason, so that emotion comes to be

characterized as African, even to the point where an African like Leopold Sedar

Senghor himself accepted the characterization (see Senghor, 1939, p. 295). By

identifying emotion with Africa, Europeans succeed in disowning passion. But

subsequently, Europeans develop a passion for passion. A similar operation occurs

with sexism. This shows the proximity of primitivization and exoticization within the

242 R. Bernasconi

dominant discourse. But it also shows the difficulty of displacing both operations so

long as that discourse remains intact.

The multiplication of discourses does not sustain difference, unless the dominant

discourse is also explicitly attacked. It cannot even be allowed to survive as simply one

discourse among many, because it is constructed in such a way as to subsume all

other discourses and refuse dialogue. One should not underestimate the resilience of

these structures of primitivization and exoticization and one is not likely to

underestimate them if one indeed thinks of them as associated with

identification�/projection, whether from a Freudian perspective or, as in my case,

from a phenomenological perspective. It is all too easy to primitivize Levy-Bruhl as it

were. The term ‘primitive’ allowed Levy-Bruhl to project some of the undesirable

characteristics of the Western Europeans of his day onto others. These characteristics

were treated as ‘throwbacks’ or remnants. We are always in danger of doing it

ourselves, when we assert our superiority over Levy-Bruhl. This happens if, for

example, I read Levy-Bruhl to have my prejudices about his racism confirmed. One

does this by emphasizing that he belongs to a colonial era where a certain kind of

racism was prevalent and that his system of categorization reflects this. But it seems to

me that we have not even begun to go beyond Levy-Bruhl if we see him simply as a

child of his time, a product of colonial institutions without reflecting on the

institutions that dominate our own practices. One sees this in the way that

philosophy addresses the racism of great philosophers*/Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche,

Heidegger, and so on. Philosophers often think they can identify that component and

remove it in a surgical operation while everything else remains intact (see Bernasconi,

2003, pp. 10�/19). But racism is not always readily identified, because*/like

exoticism*/it is constantly being reproduced on the basis of certain institutional

colonial and neo-colonial practices. It constantly reinvents itself. I readily concede

that this might be the case for everyone, but, for someone with my background and

education, to read Levy-Bruhl profitably is to read him to learn something about

myself. I have to entertain the possibility that, under the guise of dialogue and respect

for difference, I can be suppressing both and not know it, and that I may never know

for sure. This is why I believe that the study of these structures is of such importance.

Notes

[1] I shall not always place scare quotes around these terms, but they are to be understood.

Similarly, I have not sought to correct the sexist language of some of the author’s quoted, as I

believe that would be more misleading than enlightening.

[2] For a rich discussion of Husserl’s letter, see San Martin (1997, pp. 87�/115). Unfortunately

this essay came to my attention too late for me to take it into account.

[3] Levinas’s use of the notion of ‘the primitive’ and especially his discussions of paganism merit

critical scrutiny. See Sikha, 1999, pp. 195�/206.

[4] Levy-Bruhl subsequently dropped the term ‘prelogical’, a determination that seemed to run

counter to the suggestion that the differences between the two worlds were essential and not

temporal. On his use of the term, see Evans-Pritchard, 1965, pp. 81�/82.

Social Identities 243

[5] Levy-Bruhl attributes the remarks to Rev. Bentley and ignores the fact that he is citing

Thomas J. Comber. Bentley, 1900, p. 445. Quoted in Levy-Bruhl at 1947, pp. 477�/78; 1966,

p. 411.

[6] For the fact that Husserl had a copy, see Noor, 1992, p. 44.

[7] So it seems does a marginal note to Eugen Fink (1995), where Husserl introduced a thought

experiment by which I can put myself in the place of a primitive child and vice versa. The

possibility arises of ‘putting myself in the place of all men in all eras and all conceivable

world-historicalities’ and that this horizon, which embraces all actual and possible cultures

and which is the same for everyone, are the limits of phenomenology to be found.

[8] Presentation of the detailed evidence that supports this claim will have to await another

occasion. See not only Sein und Zeit (1953), sections 11 and 17, and his review of the second

volume of Ernst Cassirer (Heidegger, 1928), pp. 1000�/12, but also Einleitung in die

Philosophie , 1996.

[9] In the Preface to the original French edition of L’ame primitive , Levy-Bruhl problematized

the word ‘soul’ but employed the phrase ‘those whom we have agreed to call ‘‘primitives’’’

(1927, p. v; 1965, p. 7).

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