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The Nature of the Experience of the Primitives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Friedrick Zuckerkandl
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Is the experience of the primitives fundamentally different from ours, or is there only a difference of degree? What is striking at first is that this experience presents two aspects. On the one hand, the primitives understand and think as we do; they distinguish objects and their relationships by localizing them in the space and time of the exterior world, by separating them from the subjective “I”, in short by objectifying them in a rational manner. This is the “natural” aspect of primitive experience.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Diogenes , Volume 12 , Issue 46 , June 1964 , pp. 103 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © 1964 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 This article is taken from a broader study. This is a summary of the introduction.

2 Course in Positive Philosophy, 52nd lesson.

3 Presses Universitaires de France, 1962.

4 Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paris, Plon, 1961, p. 20.

5 E. S. Russell, Le comportement des animaux, Paris, Payot, 1949, p. 221 f.

6 The author calls "valent…or endowed with valency…objects or particularities of objects, or even events situated in the world of an animal's perception… and with regard to which he manifests a behavior. Valent signifies a ‘thing' which has been perceived, to which the animal pays attention and to which he has reacted in the particular situation under consideration. In the final analysis, this word has a psychological connotation." Ibid., pp. 218-219.

7 N. Tinbergen, Study of Instinct, Oxford University Press, 1951.

8 Henceforth the word valency will be translated into "positional value."

9 Russell, Ibid., pp. 171-172.

10 Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets, p. 250.

11 Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets, p. 98.

12 Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets, p. 247.

13 Lévy-Bruhl, Carnets, p. 103.