either in the power of abstract thought or in the power of arranging these thoughts in a systematic order, or, finally, of subjecting them and their whole environment to an objective critique.
(Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, p. 384)
Likely for Radin, as definitely for Karl Popper and Robin Horton, the capacity for criticism is the hallmark of thinking.
Myth
Ernst Cassirer
A far less dismissive reaction to Lévy-Bruhl came from the Germanborn philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945). For Cassirer, wholly following Lévy-Bruhl, mythic, or ‘mythopoeic’, thinking is primitive, is laden with emotion, is part of religion, and is the projection of mystical oneness onto the world. Yet Cassirer claims to be breaking sharply with Lévy-Bruhl in asserting that mythic thinking has its own brand of logic. In actuality, Lévy-Bruhl says the same and invents the term ‘prelogical’ exactly to avoid labelling mythic thinking ‘illogical’ or ‘nonlogical’. Cassirer also claims to be breaking with Lévy-Bruhl in stressing the autonomy of myth as a form of knowledge – language, art, and science being the other main forms:
But though a subordination of myth to a general system of symbolic forms seems imperative, it presents a certain danger. . . . [I]t may well lead to a leveling of the intrinsic [i.e. distinctive] form of myth. And indeed there has been no lack of attempts to explain myth by reducing it to another form of cultural life, whether knowledge [i.e. science], art, or language.
(Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. II, p. 21)
Yet Cassirer simultaneously maintains, no differently from LévyBruhl, that myth is incompatible with science and that science succeeds it: ‘Science arrives at its own form only by rejecting all mythical and metaphysical ingredients.’ For both Cassirer and Lévy-Bruhl, myth is exclusively primitive and science exclusively modern. Still, Cassirer’s characterization of myth as a form of
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knowledge – as one of humanity’s symbol-making, world-creating activities – puts myth in the same genus as science, which is not quite where Lévy-Bruhl would put it.
Subsequently, Cassirer came to see myth as not merely primitive but also modern. Fleeing to America from Hitler’s Germany, he came to focus on modern political myths, above all those of Nazism. Myth here amounts to ideology. Having previously concentrated on ethereal, epistemological issues, Cassirer now turns to brute, social scientific ones: how do political myths take and keep hold? Having previously scorned Lévy-Bruhl’s supposed stress on the irrationality of myth, Cassirer now embraces it:
In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again.
(Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 280)
Tying myth to magic and magic to a desperate effort to control the world, Cassirer applies to modern myths the explication of primitive myths by, especially, Bronislaw Malinowski:
This description [by Malinowski] of the role of magic and mythology in primitive society applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life. In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means.
(Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 279)
Cassirer departs from Malinowski in making the uncontrollable world the social rather than the physical one, in conferring on myth itself magical potency, and most of all in seeing myth as modern. But there is a catch: modern myths constitute an atavistic revival of primitivism.
Where previously Cassirer analysed myth as quasi-philosophy, now he cuts off myth from philosophy. Myth now is anything but a form
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of knowledge with a distinctive logic to be teased out. The marginalized role left philosophy is to challenge political myths:
Myth
It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary. . . . When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously. By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake. . . . We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myths. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him.
(Cassirer, The Myth of the State, p. 296)
It is hard to see how this proposed study of political myths is really a task for philosophy rather than for social science. Myth is now not merely prelogical but outright illogical – a position far more extreme than that for which Cassirer castigates Lévy-Bruhl!
The Frankforts
The fullest application to philosophy of the theories of Lévy-Bruhl and of Cassirer came in a 1946 book entitled The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East by a group of Near Eastern specialists. When republished in paperback in 1949, this title and subtitle were relegated to a double subtitle, and the book was given a new
main title that was a give-away: Before Philosophy. According to Henri and H. A. Frankfort, who provide the theory, ancient Near Eastern peoples lived at a primitive stage of culture that is properly labelled ‘pre-philosophical’. The subsumption of
ancient under primitive harks back to Tylor and Frazer. Moderns, contend the Frankforts, think ‘philosophically’, which means
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abstractly, critically, and unemotionally. The field of philosophy is only one area employing philosophical thinking, and the true exemplar of ‘philosophical’ thinking is science. Tylor, Lévy-Bruhl, and others likewise use the term ‘philosophy’ this broadly, as almost synonymous with ‘intellectual’, and likewise deem science the purest manifestation of it. Antithetically to
moderns, assert the Frankforts, primitives think ‘mythopoeically’, which means concretely, uncritically, and emotionally. Mythology is but one, if the richest, expression of mythopoeic thinking.
In fact, philosophical and mythopoeic ways of thinking are more than different conceptions of the world. They are different
perceptions of the world, just as for Lévy-Bruhl. The ‘fundamental difference’ is that for moderns the external world is an ‘It’, where for primitives it is a ‘Thou’ – terms taken from the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. An I–It relationship is detached and intellectual.
An I–Thou one is involved and emotional – the confusing original main title of the Frankforts’ book aside. The paradigmatic I–Thou relationship is love.
To say that primitives experience the world as Thou rather than as It is to say that they experience it as a person rather than a thing. The coming of rain after a drought is ascribed not to atmospheric changes but to, say, the defeat of a rival god by the rain god, as described in myth. To understand the world as Thou is to efface various everyday, I–It distinctions. Primitives fail to distinguish between the merely subjective and the objective: they see the sun rise and set, not the earth circling it; they see colours, not wavelengths. They fail to distinguish between appearance and reality: the stick is crooked in the water rather than merely seeming to be so; dreams are real because experienced as real. Primitives fail to distinguish between a symbol and the symbolized: a name is identical with its possessor; the re-enactment of a myth means its recurrence, as we shall see in the discussion of Frazer’s theory in Chapter 4.
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Myth
Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, argue the Frankforts, lived in a wholly mythopoeic world. The move from mythopoeic to philosophical thinking began with the Israelites, who fused many gods into one god and placed that god outside of nature. The Israelites thereby paved the way for the Greeks, who transformed that personal god into one or more impersonal forces underlying nature, or appearance. The final ‘demythicizing’ of nature awaited only the transformation of Presocratic imagination into experimental science.
There are many problems with the Frankforts’ thesis. First, at times mythopoeism seems no more than Tylor’s animism, which credits primitives with the same mentality as that of moderns. Second, Buber’s I–Thou does not involve the experience of a thing as a person, only of a person as a person. Third, any phenomenon can surely be experienced as both an It and a Thou: consider, for example, a pet and a patient. Fourth, no culture could engage nature exclusively as Thou yet be detached enough to, say, raise crops. Fifth, the characterization of ancient Near Eastern cultures as wholly mythopoeic, of Israel as largely nonmythopoeic, and
of Greece as wholly scientific is embarrassingly simplistic, as F. M. Cornford on Greek science makes clear.
Still, the Frankforts are to be commended for trying to apply Lévy-Bruhl’s abstract theory to specific cases. Following Lévy-Bruhl and Cassirer, they at heart argue that myths, while themselves stories, presuppose a distinctive mentality. Ironically, the Frankforts’ strongest criticism of Lévy-Bruhl is the same as Cassirer’s and is equally misplaced: it is Lévy-Bruhl himself who insists that primitive thinking is distinctive but not illogical.
The application of the Frankforts to the myth of Adonis would be the same as Lévy-Bruhl’s: it would focus on Adonis’ emotional identification with the world and consequent inability to see the world straight.
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