The book by French philosopher, ethnographer, and psychologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl is dedicated to the problems of the nature of human thinking and the cultural conditioning of its development. Lévy-Bruhl became the author of his own concept of pre-logical thinking, the main positions of which have sparked widespread debate in various fields of the humanities. While most of his contemporaries took the laws of individual psychology as the starting point for analysis, Lévy-Bruhl argued that the consciousness of primitive people was wholly socialized, and the individual was under the yoke of collective representations imposed on them from the very first days of life and passed down from generation to generation. Such group stereotypes in primitive society include language, traditions, and beliefs. People of a primitive nature compare and mix what civilized nations clearly distinguish. For example, a person, their name, and their image. Or a person and other representatives of the fauna and flora. In the simplest logic, there exists only one, all-pervasive mystical world, and consciousness, when interacting with a particular object, is interested not in its objective qualities but in the magical power of which the object is supposedly a retransmitter. Carriers of primitive thinking establish a special cause-and-effect relationship between objects and phenomena, completely ignoring their true correlation. According to the scholar, examples of the latter can include the magic of numbers and words, which has survived to this day as a remnant among many cultured peoples.
The present book opens with an article by V.K. Nikolsky from its first Soviet edition, which also addresses the issue of the perception of Lévy-Bruhl's ideas in Russia.
This proposed work may be useful for psychologists, religious studies scholars, anthropologists, cultural scientists, as well as for anyone interested in the problems of human cognition.
