Primitive Thinking

Front matter

DE

Nicola Gess Primitive Thinking

Paradigms

Contents

Chapter 1 The Presence of the ‘Primitive’: An Introduction — 1 The ‘Primitive’ as a Narrative of Origins — 3 The ‘Primitive’ as a Scientific Paradigm — 5 The ‘Primitive’ in the Service of Cultural Critique — 7 The ‘Primitive’ as a Figure of Thought — 9 The ‘Primitive’ as Literary Utopia — 12 The Presence of the ‘Primitive’ in Disenchanted Modernity — 15 Two Cultures: The ‘Primitive’ as Poème — 22 Literary Primitivism —— 25

Chapter 2

The Ethnological Paradigm of the ‘Primitive’ —— 33 The Paradigm of the ‘Primitive’ in Tylor’s Primitive Culture — 36 Analogy, Allochrony, and Survival — 41 The ‘Primitive’ as a Figure of Thought in Early Ethnology — 43 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s Notion of Participatory Thinking —— 51 The Ethnological Poéme of the ‘Primitive’ — 60

Chapter 3

The Child as ‘Primitive’ — 75 Recapitulating Phylogeny — 76 Othering: The ‘Bad’ Child — 80 The Question of Conscious Deception — 88 Jean Piaget and the Magical Thinking of Children —— 97 Between Natural Science, Philology, and Literature: The Methodological Dilemma of Developmental Psychology — 103

Chapter 4 Psychopathology in the Paradigm of the ‘Primitive’ —— 110 The Poémes of Psychology — 112 The Analogy of Regression —— 115 Phylogenetic Regression —— 120 Ontologization — 130 The Schizophrenic Artist — 136

VI —- Contents

Part Two: Art, Language, and ‘Primitive Thinking’

Chapter 5 The Origins of Art — 143 Justifying the Study of Art — 146 The Enigma of Creativity — 157 Pathology or Heroization: Genius and Madness — 160 Normalizing the Artist — 166 Art as (Child’s) Play — 167 Art and Deception — 170 Art and Destruction —— 172

Chapter 6

‘Primitive Language’ - Theories of Metaphor — 176 Constructions of ‘Primitive Language’: The Cratylist Tradition — 178 Malinowski and the Magical Power of Language — 182 Theories of Metaphor around 1900: Nietzsche, Mauthner, Vischer, Biese, Cassirer — 184

Part Three: ‘Primitive Thinking’ in German Literary Modernism

Chapter 7 The “Tropological Nature” of the Poet in Miller and Benn — 205 A Biological Reverie — 205 The Tropics — 209 Tropological Language —— 217 Poets —— 222 Returning to Primordial Slime — 228 The Body as Hieroglyph of the Archaic —— 231 The Way to Fascism —— 234

Chapter 8

A Sister in Madness: Figures of ‘Primitive Thinking’ in Robert Musil — 236 Musil’s Ethnological Readings —— 236 Red Parrots or ‘Primitive Thinking’ — 239 On ‘Primitive Language’ and Its Magic — 241 Animal-Humans: From Expedition to (Self-)Experimentation — 243 Clarisse — A Sister in Madness (The Man Without Qualities) — 248

Contents — VII

Psychology as the Springboard for Literature — 285 Primitivistic Narration — 291

Chapter 9 The Dialectical Turn of ‘Primitive Thinking’: The Child and Gesture in Walter Benjamin — 303 The Child as ‘Barbarian’ — 308 The Child as ‘Primitive’ — 314 A Dialectical Turn — 322 The Sovereign Child — 329 Toward the Child’s Language of Gesture — 332 A Theory of Gestures in the “Problems in the Sociology of Language” —— 335 The Politics of Gestural Language — 349 The Arcades Project: The Child as Historiographical Model — 352

Epilogue — 358 Bibliography — 361

Index — 391

Chapter 1 The Presence of the ‘Primitive’: An Introduction

This book is about modernity under the spell of the ‘primitive. From proponents of the ideology of progress to critics of civilization, from utopians dreaming of a re-enchanted existence to the supporters and opponents of nascent fascism, the first decades of the twentieth century were profoundly shaped by the phantasm of the ‘primitive,’ which European modernity in its many variations regarded as both its origin and opposite. This book, however, argues that the ‘primitive’ must instead be seen as modernity’s own product and presence.

Exploring modernity’s primitivism, it takes a somewhat different angle than previous research.” A central element of the phantasm of the ‘primitive,’ this book shows, is the notion of ‘primitive thought,’ a distinct mode of thinking — characterized by turns as magical, mythical, mystical, or prelogical — that forges a fundamentally other relationship to the world. In this respect, modernity’s fascination with the ‘primitive’ may also be described as epistemological primitivism. The book also demonstrates that epistemological primitivism of the early

1 Modernity is used here first as an epochal designation, that is, as “a shorthand term for modern society, or industrial civilization” (Anthony Giddens, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998], 94) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which witnessed the emergence of philosophical and aesthetic modernism. It is used, second, as a critical concept, applied by social and cultural theorists of that time when reflecting upon the specificities of their own society (whether in a normative and affirmative sense, or to negative and critical ends). Throughout this study, part of my aim is to show the extent to which this self-understanding of modernity depended on the ‘primitive’ as its imaginary counterpart. Because this problem is inscribed into the very concept of modernity, its uncritical, naive use has quite rightly provoked critique (e.g., from a postcolonial perspective by Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005] or from a sociological standpoint by Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]).

2 Representative works from literary studies, which I will talk about below in more detail, include Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven. Weltliteratur und Ethnologie (1870-1960) (Munich: Fink, 2005); and Sven Werkmeister, Kulturen jenseits der Schrift. Zur Figur des Primitiven in Ethnologie, Kulturtheorie und Literatur um 1900 (Munich: Fink, 2010). Last to appear, after the publication of the German edition of this book, was Ben Etherington, Literary Primitivism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017); and Samuel Spinner, Jewish Primitivism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021). Further works from literary studies and adjacent fields such as art history, cultural studies, and anthropology will be referenced below.

8 Open Access. © 2022 the author(s), published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110695090-001 twentieth century concerned not only indigenous cultures but also other figures of alterity. As important as the postcolonial perspective on the ‘primitive’ has been, its focus on the (false) representation of indigenous cultures has tended to obscure two things: First, the constructed nature of the ‘primitive,’ which should be understood as the product, not the object, of primitivism. And second, the observation that indigenous cultures constitute only one of many figurations of alterity constructed by early twentieth-century primitivist discourse.’ Other embodiments of the ‘primitive’ that proved just as important include children and the mentally ill.“ Thus, in this book I locate primitivism first of all in the human sciences, noting how the emergent disciplines of ethnology, child psychology, and psychopathology conceived of children, indigenous cultures, and the mentally ill as contemporary incarnations of the ‘primitive.’ The heterogeneity of the three groups makes plain that this conception was not motivated by scholarly interest in any one of these figures in particular. Instead, their shared interest in the ‘primitive’ (and classification of these groups as ‘primitive’ in the first place) concerned their supposed representation of a presence of an origin marked, among other traits, by ‘primitive thinking.’

Based on these premises, the book focuses on the relevance of epistemological primitivism for the theory and practice of the arts in early twentieth-century Europe and for German literature in particular. The search for humankind’s origins and the widespread fascination with other modes of thinking, both of which were shaped by the paradigm of the ‘primitive,’ intersected with contemplations on the arts to yield a new perspective on both. Interest turned to art’s beginning, which was supposed to shed light on the origins of modern civilization and the essence of humanity.’ Even more importantly, a new view of contemporary art

3 This runs counter to what most scholarship on literary primitivism has assumed. However, since the publication of the German edition of this book, two studies have appeared that offer a corrective: the exhibition catalog edited by Anselm Franke and Tom Holert, Neolithische Kindheit: Kunst in einer falschen Gegenwart, ca. 1930 (Zurich: HKW, 2018); and Barbara Wittmann, Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien: Eine Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte der Kinderzeichnung, 1500-1950 (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2018).

4 These three figures are only the most conspicuous. Others — with a range of different connotations - include women, the working class (cf. Gina M. Rossetti, Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature [Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006]), ethnic minorities (cf. Eva Blome, Reinheit und Vermischung. Literarisch-kulturelle Entwiirfe von “Rasse” und Sexualität [1900-1930] [Cologne: Böhlau, 2011]; Sieglinde Lemke, Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998]), and rural populations.

5 In respect to the fine arts, see Susanne Leeb’s approach in Die Kunst der Anderen: “Weltkunst” und die anthropologische Konfiguration der Moderne (Berlin: b-books, 2015).

The ‘Primitive’ as a Narrative of Origins — 3 emerged insofar as it was supposed to have preserved ‘primitive thinking,’ which was thought to be observable also in children at play, the delusions of the mentally ill and the rituals and myths of indigenous peoples. In these contexts the arts enjoyed a new form of legitimacy. They became a privileged site to which questions of origin were addressed and a starting point for utopian efforts promoting ‘primitive thinking’ against a disenchanted modernity.

In this introduction I would like to accomplish three goals: The first is to address the question of why the ‘primitive’ held such an abiding fascination for European modernity. To do so, I approach the category of the ‘primitive’ as a narrative of origin, an instrument for critiquing civilization, a literary utopia, and a diagnosis of the present (of that time) - four assumptions that I consider to be fundamental to understanding the early twentieth century’s primitivist discourse. The second goal is to reconceptualize the ‘primitive’ as a paradigm, a figure of thought, and a poéme. Third, and finally, I offer a brief overview of existing research on literary primitivism before moving on to preview the structure of this book.

The ‘Primitive’ as a Narrative of Origins

“They are what we were” - Friedrich Schiller’s famous dictum in “Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung” (1795-1796; “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” 1861) summarizes a view that has recurred time and again throughout European history: a primordial condition of human existence may be found among peoples living elsewhere, and also among children, animals, and parts of the natural world.® “We were nature just as they,” Schiller writes, referring to “plants, minerals, animals, [...] landscapes, [...] children, [...] the customs of country folk, and [...] the primitive world.” At a basic level, this figure of thought transfers the foreign of the present into the past of the familiar - what Johannes Fabian has called “allochronic discourse.”® The ‘foreign’ can appear in any number of roles here, but always in contrast to the culture in which it is pronounced. Either it is essentially undeveloped, or it stands at the very beginning of a developmental process. In

6 Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” trans. Julias A. Elias, in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: Winckelmann, Lessing, Hamann, Herder, Schiller, and Goethe, ed. H.S. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 181. Italics modified to reflect German publication.

7 Friedrich Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” 181, 180.

8 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

any case, its ‘proper’ place lies at the point of origin, and inasmuch as it persists in the present, it constitutes an anachronistic survival. Such a view readily translates into the opposition between nature and culture, whereby the foreign, located outside or at the beginning of history, is understood as nature and European society, which is thought to display history and progress, as culture.

Reflecting its durability, this figure of thought has varied with historical and scientific circumstances.’ Medieval accounts of travel - undertaken in the hope of discovering a paradisiacal world far from Europe - clearly differ from what Schiller had in mind. The decisive difference is that from a medieval and biblical perspective, the origin did not represent the beginning of a historical development; rather, it was seen to lie outside of history (i.e., in paradise). The border between nature (that is, the “state of nature”) and culture (“history”) was drawn just as clearly. This is, for example, still true for Rousseau and his idea of the ‘noble savage,’ but not for Schiller.'° According to Michel Foucault, around 1800 the “age of representation” passed into the “age of history,”™ at which point the primal source ceased to be located outside the sphere of historical development. In Foucault’s words, “In modern thought, such an origin is no longer conceivable.”'” The contemporary world and the birthplace it was supposed to have left behind were no longer opposites — instead they were connected, even continuous. This also holds for Schiller’s reflections, as Sven Werkmeister has demonstrated.” In the foreign identity of “they are,” Schiller finds his and his intended readers’ own past: “what we were.” The study of faraway peoples now furthers self-understanding. He declares, “A wise hand seems to have preserved these raw tribes for us down to our times, where we would be advanced enough in our own culture to make fruitful application of this discovery upon ourselves, and to restore out of this mirror the forgotten origin of our species.” Engagement with “raw tribes” then serves a reassuring function. Simultaneously,

9 For a summary and discussion of this figure’s evolution, cf. Wolfgang Riedel, “Wandlungen und Symbole des Todestriebs. Benns Lyrik im Kontext eines metapsychologischen Gedankens,” in Sigmund Freud und das Wissen der Literatur, ed. Peter-André Alt and Thomas Anz (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 111-112.

10 See Sven Werkmeister, Kulturen jenseits der Schrift, 59.

11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 217.

12 Foucault, The Order of Things, 329.

13 Werkmeister, Kulturen jenseits der Schrift, 59-65.

14 Friedrich Schiller, “What Means, and for What Purpose Do We Study, Universal History?”, in Complete Works in Two Volumes, ed. and trans. Charles J. Hempell, M.D. (Philadelphia: Kohler, 1861), 2: 348 (translation slightly modified). Also quoted in Werkmeister, Kulturen jenseits der Schrift, 60.

The ‘Primitive’ as a Scientific Paradigm — 5 however, it destabilizes identity by confronting the unassimilably alien that lies at the foundation of the self.

According to “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” knowledge of what one was does not inspire alienation so much as melancholy. For Schiller, what one loves in nature is “quietly working life, the calm effects out from itself, existence under its own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal unity with itself.” This idealization bears clear traces of the paradisiacal tradition mentioned above. Following the triadic scheme of history, Schiller expresses the wish to ultimately return to the Golden Age.'° That said, Schiller’s inaugural address at the university in Jena presents a rather different picture of humankind’s origins when he states, “how shaming and sad is the picture these people give us of our childhood!” Speaking of civilized man’s supposed counterpart, Schiller declares, “His crude taste seeks joy in stupor, beauty in distortion, glory in exaggeration; even his virtue awakens horror in us, and what he calls his bliss can only arouse our disgust and pity. So were we.”” The ambivalence of modern thought concerning human origins is in full evidence here. On the one hand, faraway peoples epitomize the other, that is, the opposite of one’s own self-image. Schiller’s and other contemporaries’ self-understanding as mature, reasonable, self-disciplined, socialized, and cultivated contrasts with ‘children of nature’ who are portrayed as irrational, governed by emotion and drives, and potentially antisocial. In this manner, indigenous peoples are used as a screen for projecting everything that must be excluded from one’s own sense of identity. On the other hand, these foreigners are supposed to represent modern society’s point of departure. In this way, encounters with others who are meant to affirm one’s own identity by revealing one’s origins actually also unsettle this same sense of self.

The ‘Primitive’ as a Scientific Paradigm The formula exemplified by Schiller’s phrase, “They are what we were,” ran through the cultural history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, it assumed a new form in the context of the emergent human scien-

15 Schiller, “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” 181 (translation slightly modified).

16 The triadic model of history premises that humanity developed in three phases: a paradisical original condition, a state of alienation and disharmony between nature and society, and finally an anticipated reentry to paradise, which, however, is not a mere return but is thought of as a return to a higher level (e. g., through reflection by means of art), especially in theories of history around 1800.

17 Schiller, “What Means, and for What Purpose,” 348.

ces.'® Around 1800, equating humanity’s origins with indigenous peoples, children, and even animals amounted to no more than an analogy. Schiller recognizes as much and advocates caution: “The method of drawing conclusions by analogies is as powerful an aid in history, as everywhere else, but it must be [...] exercised with as much circumspection as judgment.”'? But in the anthropological configuration of modernity and the new human sciences, it soon achieved the status of scientific fact. Ethnologists, developmental psychologists, and psychopathologists now believed they had found empirical evidence that the origins of humankind really were present in indigenous cultures, children, and the mentally ill. Indeed, the ‘primitive’ - understood as the presence of an origin — was the very paradigm that framed and organized their questions and answers.

Ethnologists and social anthropologists believed they had discovered that the thought and behavior of indigenous peoples corresponded to those of early humans. The supposed simplicity of these cultures was seen as evidence that they had not developed, thus had no history of their own, and were still living in a ‘state of nature.’ Developmental psychologists and biologists claimed the same of children, who, in the process of maturation, were thought to recapitulate the development of the species (in keeping with the biogenetic law established by the physician Ernst Haeckel). Finally, psychologists and psychiatrists exposed the ‘primitive’ in the mentally ill (especially schizophrenics), whom they considered to have regressed to an earlier stage of human development archived in the unconscious mind and specific organs of the body, such as the brain stem.

This pattern of reasoning secured the ‘primitive’ as a common point of reference among the different disciplines. Identical mental operations (‘primitive thinking’) were supposed to prevail across the board: scientists assumed that the mentally ill think like members of indigenous tribes, who think like children, who think like the mentally ill, and so on. In other words, the ‘primitive’ provided a platform for homogenizing objects of study. At the same time, it offered a paradigm for speculating about the origins and essence of humanity. Thus, Heinz Werner’s Einführung in die Entwicklungspsychologie (1926; Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, 1940) identifies indigenous peoples, children, and the mentally ill as “primitive types” whose common features were supposed to shed light on the “general developmental laws of mental life.”?° These three groups were the epistemic objects where the search for first beginnings was car-

18 Foucault, The Order of Things, 330.

19 Schiller, “What Means, and for What Purpose,” 352 (translation slightly modified).

20 Heinz Werner, Einfiihrung in die Entwicklungspsychologie (Leipzig: Barth, 1926), 150, 23, 3. Tellingly, his 1919 study was devoted to the “origins of metaphor” (Urspriinge der Metapher).

The ‘Primitive’ in the Service of Cultural Critique — 7 ried out. And what began as an evolutionary enterprise quickly became an ontological one focused on the ‘essence of man.’ Since the 1910s, this ontological orientation was particularly pronounced in the study of art. A late, but well-known example is Martin Heidegger’s 1935 lecture, “Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” 1971), which understands “origin” to mean essence. From this perspective, the ‘primitive’ no longer represents a historical beginning so much as an a-historical core, on the basis of which general rules and tasks of art may be formulated.

The ‘Primitive’ in the Service of Cultural Critique

In 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber delivered his lecture, “Wissenschaft als Beruf” (“Science as a Vocation,” 1946), to the Freistudentischer Bund (Union of Free Students) at the University of Munich. The speaker was addressing an audience he believed to be deeply disillusioned with modernity. Members of the rising generation, Weber observes, want “to return to their own nature and hence to nature as such” — “a life in communion with the divine” — and are hoping for “release from the rationalism and intellectualism of science.”*” They are cultivating a cult of “experience” and “personality”” and yearning for a prophetic “leader” in contempt of the “realm of artificial abstractions.”” Instead of accepting the “destiny of our culture,”?° they are fashioning “idols””” and looking for “professorial prophets””® to relieve them of thinking for themselves. Such “intellectualist romanticism of the irrational,””” Weber continues, amounts to “interpret[ing] human communities in religious, cosmic, or mystical terms,” “furnish[ing] their souls, as it were, with antique objects,” and “decorating [their] private chapel with pictures of the saints that they have picked up in

21 This shift also involves a change of historical models: “At the beginning of the twentieth century, the evolutionism proceeding by steps was increasingly replaced by synchronic approaches [...]. Now, reference to the primitive and the archaic could perform a critical function by opening the possibility for reversal [of perspective]” (Franke and Holert, Neolithische Kindheit, 319).

22 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 15.

all sorts of places,” “creat[ing] a surrogate by collecting experiences of all kinds that they endow with the dignity of a mystical sanctity.”*°

According to Weber’s psychological sketch then, a comprehensive critique of civilization, progress, and rationality took hold among young people toward the end of the First World War. It was accompanied by a yearning for a different relationship to the world, which he describes in terms such as “nature,” “life,” “experience,” “personality,” “soul,” “community,” and “religion” — diction that also features prominently in artistic primitivism of the interwar period.” Indeed, Weber himself refers to the ‘primitive,’ but not in his characterization of youth so much as his analysis of the state of society as a whole.

Weber criticizes the cowardice of the young generation, but he shares its disillusionment, expressing the conviction that the “process of intellectualization [...] at work in Western culture for thousands of years” - that is, “rationalization through science and a science-based technology” — leads to the wholesale “disenchantment of the world.” In order to understand what “disenchantment” means in this context, it is important to note that he employs the term ex negativo, that is, by way of a counterpole predicated on the phantasm of the ‘primitive.’ By disenchantment, he means that “[uJnlike the savage for whom such

30 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 30. The critical edition of this text notes oblique reference to the ideals of the youth movement surrounding Gustav Wyneken and particularly the “neo-mystical” publishing house Eugen Diederichs, which provided a forum for critics of modern rationalism (Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Gesamtausgabe, ed. Horst Baier et al., vol. 17, section 1, Schriften und Reden [Tiibingen: Mohr, 1992], 109n61 and 62).

31 Franke and Holert describe the interwar period as a time when “the loss of a unifying collectivity through the dividing processes of labor, scientification, and the ‘liberal’ individualization of capitalist modernity [...] led intellectuals and artists [...] to ideologically extreme and diverging scenarios of flight and evasion” (Franke and Holert, “Einfiihrung,” in Neolithische Kindheit, 10).

32 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 30 — 31. Weber could “only grasp the rationalization process after he had discovered the process of disenchantment. Therefore, the question of when and where this happened leads to the heart of his sociology” (Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 69, Suppl. 1 [2017]: 384) - and also leads, I would add, to the counter-image of “disenchantment” or the paradigm of the ‘primitive’ in which the latter takes shape. As Hartmut Lehmann has put matters, “As of now, nobody has been able to explain the origin of the term ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Die Entzauberung der Welt: Studien zu Themen von Max Weber [Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009], 13). The answer, in my estimation, may be found by examining the discourse of the ‘primitive.’ Thus, Fuyuki Kurasava observes that “[t]he ethnological imagination is [...] essential to Weber’s identification of the dynamics of rationalization that distinguish modern Euro-American societies from other sociohistorical formations” (The Ethnological Imagination: A Cross-Cultural Critique of Modernity [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004], 84).

The ‘Primitive’ as a Figure of Thought — 9 forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends.”? Weber’s reflection is preceded by another direct comparison between “the savage” and “us”: “The savage has an incomparably greater knowledge of his tools” and “knows how to obtain his daily food and what institutions enable him to do so.” “We,” on the other hand, know that we could arrive at the same understanding “if only we wished to.”** Later in the lecture, Weber again speaks of a time “before the world had been divested of the magic of its gods and demons” and the “bygone days” when a “prophetic spirit [...] swept through great communities like a firestorm and welded them together.” Weber’s diagnosis of the “disenchantment of the world” is predicated on its opposite, then: the idea of a primitive worldview under the spell of magical plenitude.*°

The ‘Primitive’ as a Figure of Thought

The paradigm of the ‘primitive’ determining Weber’s conception of modernity as its counterpole is characterized by the assumption of a distinct form of non-rational thinking and thus a fundamentally other relationship to the world. Therefore, the concept of the ‘primitive’ functions not only as a paradigm, but also as a pervasive “figure of thought” in primitivist discourse in the early twentieth century. The adjective “primitive” (like the German primitiv and French primitif) comes from the Latin noun, primitivus, or “first of its kind.”?* Turned back into a

34 Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 12. Whenever two or more quotes in a paragraph derive from the same page number of the same source, they will be cited together with a concluding note. Thus, the citation in this note documents material from the previous two sentences.

36 That said — and in contrast to the thinkers discussed below — Weber himself did not think of such a worldview as a utopian ideal, but in terms of an irretrievable loss.

37 “Figure of thought” is used here in the sense defined by Jutta Miiller-Tamm, “Die Denkfigur als wissensgeschichtliche Kategorie,” in Nicola Gess and Sandra Janssen, eds., Wissens-Ordnungen: Zu einer historischen Epistemologie der Literatur (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 11-78, Müller-Tamm draws on Erich Auerbach’s “Figura” as well as on the essays collected in Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, eds., De figura: Rhetorik - Bewegung - Gestalt (Munich: Fink, 2002). See also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), and Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).

38 “primitiv,” in Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1995), 647.

noun in modern languages, the adjective yields the ‘primitive,’ i.e., a human being in the primal state, which, as mentioned above, was ‘rediscovered’ around 1900 in indigenous peoples, children, and the mentally ill. The result was a flexible anthropomorphic figure that organized scientific thought about the origins of humanity, culture, and nature. And the most important feature of this figure was that they were supposed to embody a different kind of thinking and mentality. According to early twentieth-century human scientists, this other frame of mind was defined by alogical relations and associations that determined how indigenous peoples, children, and the mentally ill perceived and understood the world. For the ethnologist Karl von den Steinen, this meant, for example, that members of the Bororo tribe in Brazil believed they were humans and parrots at the same time. Or for the psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, that schizophrenics thought distant magical powers control their lives. And for the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, that children believed they could talk to animals, steer the path of the sun, or transform one object into another.” By turns, such thinking is characterized as ‘magical,’ ‘mythical,’ ‘prelogical,’ or ‘mystical.’ In 1925, for instance, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer offers a comprehensive philosophical assessment of what he calls “mythical thought.”“° For him, such thought does not differentiate between perception and imagination. Also, it entails a different sense of causality insofar as all things that seem similar or were once in contact with each other are believed to exercise necessary and reciprocal influence on each other.

Significantly, Cassirer and other scholars in the human sciences affirmed a direct connection between ‘primitive thinking’ and the essence of art and artistic creation. For instance, in his foundational study, Primitive Culture, the social anthropologist Edward B. Tylor presents the mental constitution of indigenous peoples as the key to poetry and literature:

39 I will return to these examples in Chapters 2-4.

40 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955). For another good example, see Richard Thurnwald’s entry, “Primitives Denken,” in Max Ebert, ed., Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1927/1928), 10: 294-316. From a resolutely ethnological perspective, Thurnwald describes ‘primitive thinking’ as “adhering predominantly to a complex of phenomena without discrimination, [that is,] without having learned to distinguish between the reality of thought and that of its object” (296).