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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:
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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