Critical Remarks on the Concept of the Mystical Mentality, as Well as on Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Law of Participation

Abstract

It is generally accepted that Lucien Levy-Bruhl not only developed James Frazer’s idea of two laws of sympathetic magic by combining them into the law of participation, but also, in opposition to the evolutionary anthropological concept of phylogenetic intellectual development, formulated a sociological concept of a collective drive to seek animistic causality (mystical mentality), which determines the existence of the law of participation. In this article, we will demonstrate the fallacy of the main tenets of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s concept of mystical mentality. The aim of the study: (1) to demonstrate the inconsistency of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s sociological presupposition regarding the existence of the phenomenon of prelogical thinking; (2) to demonstrate the erroneousness of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s interpretation of the contagious magical law. The objectives of the study are: (1) to demonstrate the inability of the mystical mentality to accommodate the mechanism of transition from the mystical to the logical mentality; (2) to demonstrate the incorrelativity of the tendency to search for animistic causality of the mystical mentality and the law of participation; (3) to demonstrate that the law of participation develops the principle of homeopathic magic, but is not capable of explaining the principle of contagious magic of James Frazer. The novelty of the study: (1) through the biological deconstruction of Charles Peirce’s semiotics, we will distinguish two modes of indexical association in the form of a motivated (linguistic index) and an unmotivated (epistemological Secondary) index, which will allow us to distinguish between the functions of the contagious aspect of Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s law of participation and the functions of James Frazer’s law of contagious magic; (2) we will present a new principle of the functioning of James Frazer’s contagious magic.