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ARISTOTLE'S OTHER SELF On the Boundless Subject of Anthropological Discourse GREGORY SCHREMPP Among the principles that have been suggested as capturing the essential character of Western thought, Aristotelian logic, or its founding principle, the law of contradiction, has proven particularly compelling. And certain other contenders-for example, "linearity" (as contrasted with "cyclicality") and even "rationality" itself-are sometimes thought to derive from the supposedly sequential and rigorous character of classical syllogistic reasoning. This special significance was recognized even before Lucien Levy-Bruhl, in his classic formulation of 1910, Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures, made the law of contradiction a specific focus for cross-cultural comparison and contrast . The notion of contradiction was, for example, implicitly addressed in the common nineteenth-century assumption that the evolution of thought was a matter of transition from confused images to clear concepts. The idea of such a transition can be found even in the Durkheimian tradition (e.g., Durkheim and Mauss 1903:5ff.), and is no doubt relevant to the interest that Durkheim and his descendants showed in Levy-Bruhl. Contradiction, and its significance in the comparative study of systems of thought, was carried toward more technical debates in the French tradition , particularly by Levy-Bruhl and Emile Durkheim and his descendants. In a contrast that was initially sharply drawn, Levy-Bruhl proposed that there were systems of representations that operated in terms of a law of participation rather than a law of contradiction. He presented the latter in several different formulations, most ofwhich, however, center around supposed statements of "mystical" identities in which "the opposition between the one and Gregory Schrempp is Assistant Professor of Folklore at Indiana University. His major previous publications include "The Re-education of Friedrich Max Muller." He is currently at work on Maori and Polynesian cosmology. 10 ARISTOTLE'S OTHER SELF 11 Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. Painting by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchased with special funds and gifts of friends of the Museum, 1961. [61.198]. All rights reserved.) the many, the same and another, and so forth, does not impose ... the necessity of affirming one of the terms if the other be denied, or vice versa" (1910:77). Subsequent inquiries into the possibility of alternative logics have emphasized statements of seeming identity between humans and other entities of the natural world, notably an apparent claim of the Bororo that they are parrots . However, Levy-Bruhl himself recurrently schematized "participations" as of three types: those between given individuals and their appurtenances (e.g., hair, nails, food, clothes, name, reflection, shadow); those between individuals and their social groups; and those between individuals and other entities 12 GREGORY SCHREMPP of the natural world. These various kinds of participations will be considered in the course of this discussion. It is well known that, in the posthumously published Notebooks of LevyBruhl , there were some significant alterations in his formulation of the participation /logic contrast. Although many of these were matters of emphasis (cf. Horton 1973:257ff.), two are particularly important here. First, while there was still a general sense of an evolutionary transition from a preponderantly participatory to a predominantly logical mentality, there was a greater emphasis on both principles as fundamental to all humans, and an incipient interest in exploring the character and function of participation as a seemingly generic principle of human mentality (e,g., Levy-Bruhl 1949:99-105). Secondly, the emphasis on the affective, noncognitive, character of participations was now accompanied by an uneasiness about pairing participation with logical thought (thus treating these two principles as comparable) (1949:61, 73, 99106 , 154). Among subsequent scholars, debates about the law of contradiction developed into a fascinating set of variations, reflecting in part different questions brought to this discussion within changing intellectual contexts. In the dialogue between Durkheim and Levy-Bruhl, the law of contradiction was involved in several momentous debates. Horton (1973:268ff.) has contrasted Levy-Bruhl and Durkheim with respect to their views on the nature of the transition from traditional religious thought to scientific thought, suggesting that Levy-Bruhl envisioned this in terms of contrast and inversion, while Durkheim saw it in terms of continuity and evolution. But the significance of participations to Durkheim was not limited to evolutionary issues. Durkheim 's notion of effervescence and the arguments with which he surrounded it, such as the pars pro toto argument, suppose a kind of fusion that at least approaches the mystical participations that Levy-Bruhl proposed. Though...

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