To be is to participate

For Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others: we before I

by João de Pina-Cabral  BIO

China, 1973. Photo by Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos

is research professor in anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon in Portugal and emeritus professor of social anthropology at the University of Kent in the UK. His books include World: An Anthropological Examination (2017) and Metapersons: Transcendence and Life (2026).

It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.

Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.

In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.

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Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.

This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.

As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’.

These observations seemed to cast doubt on the humanist universalism underpinning their theoretical enterprise

Lévy-Bruhl drew on Plato’s concept of methexis, as adapted by medieval scholastic theologians (participatio), to argue that in the thought of these ‘primitive’ peoples there was a readiness to participate in others – that is, to experience a sharing of being not only among persons in close relation, but also between persons and the surrounding world. The atomistic forms of thought characteristic of post-Enlightenment philosophy, which led to an individualistic conception of personhood, simply did not apply in their case.

Were these modes of thought to be interpreted as signs of confusion – a genuine cognitive deficit? Lévy-Bruhl rejected this view. He was clear that the issue was not one of rationality: these persons were as capable of thinking and of resolving everyday problems as anyone else. Yet there seemed little doubt that the principles of Aristotelian logic were being disregarded in their modes of reasoning.

Having established this, Lévy-Bruhl faced a problem: how was this mode of thought to be named? He debated at length with........

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