Phenomenology and Ethnology. Some Remarks on the Margin of Edmund Husserl’s Letter to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl Together with its Translation

Abstract

The latter of Edmund Husserl to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl with thanks for the received book on the mentality of primitive people shows many details concerning the importance of the enological argument for philosophical reflection. Husserl appreciated Lévy-Bruhl’s work, especially his subjective approach in treating non-European communities. Ethnology, whilst focusing on the cultural “otherness”, accomplished a reduction of some aspects of the European spirituality. First of all, it showed the life bereft of history, the Aristotelian logics and auto-presentation. It is the life in the world of primitive people, reduced to elementary and autarkist form of the social existence. According to Husserl, in such like structure of a concrete cultural world, no phenomena of the individual existence of the self can be lacking, and the latter is a basis for transcendental investigations. In the paper, some features (possibly known by Husserl) of primitive thinking are addressed as described in the works by Lévy-Bruhl. Husserl’s views on the genesis of human societies are presented, on their prehistory, on the life of primitive people in the context of his thesis on the exceptional importance of the European philosophy.