Background
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was born on April 10, 1857 in Paris.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was born on April 10, 1857 in Paris.
He stadied at the University of Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and received his doctorate in 1884.
After graduating from high school in his native Paris, he hesitated between studying philosophy or becoming an orchestral conductor. In fact, throughout his life he exhibited an avid interest in music. Nonetheless, he decided to study philosophy, graduating in 1879 from the Ecole Normale Supérieure.
Lévy-Bruhl taught at Poitiers and Amiens before being appointed professor of higher rhetoric at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand, and a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. The following year, he moved to the Sorbonne. Concurrently he lectured at the Ecole Libre des Sciences politiques.
Lévy-Bruhl’s views, as expounded in his books on preliterate culture and the nature of primitive mentality, evolved from the concept that the primitive’s thought was indifferent to the laws of logic and therefore mystical, to the contradictory idea that prelogical and prelitcratc societies did possess logic to the extent required by the practical demands of the natural environment. Among his books, Ethics and Moral Science is a study of moral systems in which he acknowledges that an absolute ethic is impossible because of the incommensurability of thought systems of different cultures; this book earned him the chair of history ot modern philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1904.
Despite his reputation at the university and his works which gained renown, he was a modest man. In World War I, a former pupil of his — Albert Thomas, minister for munitions — asked him to become an attaché in his bureau and Lévy-Bruhl served voluntarily in that capacity from 1915 to 1919.
In 1917 he took over the administration of the Revue Philosophique and in the same year, became a member of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques within the Institut de France. From 1919 on, Lévy-Bruhl’s reputation spread beyond France.
Responding to many invitations, he lectured all over the world, while keeping up his research and extensive writing on the topic ol primitive mentality. His works included studies of the myths of the Australian aborigines and the Papuans.
Lévy-Bruhl maintained that ethics was a science, the methodology of which was empirical and descriptive. The descriptions of and explanations in terms of ethical ideas provided by this science were not primarily at the level of the individual, but at that of social groups.
Most of Lévy-Bruhl’s work was centred on the study of data about primitive societies provided by anthropologists. Amongst the tools he used in his investigation was the concept of collective representations, derived from the work of Durkheim.