It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a _mystical_ mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and _prelogic_, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (_p_ or not-_p_) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’.
Lévy-Bruhl drew on Plato’s concept of _methexis_, as adapted by medieval scholastic theologians (_participatio_), to argue that in the thought of these ‘primitive’ peoples there was a readiness to participate in others – that is, to experience a sharing of being not only among persons in close relation, but also between persons and the surrounding world. The atomistic forms of thought characteristic of post-Enlightenment philosophy, which led to an individualistic conception of personhood, simply did not apply in their case.
Were these modes of thought to be interpreted as signs of confusion – a genuine cognitive deficit? Lévy-Bruhl rejected this view. He was clear that the issue was not one of rationality: these persons were as capable of thinking and of resolving everyday problems as anyone else. Yet there seemed little doubt that the principles of Aristotelian logic were being disregarded in their modes of reasoning.
Having established this, Lévy-Bruhl faced a problem: how was this mode of thought to be named? He debated at length with Durkheim whether such groups should be described as ‘inferior’ (in the sense of being less sophisticated than ‘us’) or ‘primitive’ (in the sense of not yet having attained modernity). They initially adopted the former term, but soon recognised its potentially discriminatory implications and opted for the latter. From the outset, however, the issue was not straightforward, as these observations seemed to cast doubt on the very humanist universalism that underpinned their theoretical enterprise.
Was Lévy-Bruhl simply mistaken in his interpretation of the ethnographic reports available to him at the time? As we shall see, from our present perspective he had grasped something real – something that subsequent developments have allowed us to conceptualise differently. In any case, we can now understand why Boas, while accepting the empirical basis of the argument, could not agree with its formulation. As Lévy-Bruhl’s biographer observes:
> When read from Boas’s side of the Atlantic, where racism had very direct effects on education, the assertion that ‘primitive mentality ignores contradiction’ resembled the racist idea of a congenital incapacity to think in an intelligent way.
The issue was serious – and, unfortunately, remains so today.
Both Lévy-Bruhl and Boas were Jewish, both deeply committed to the unity of humankind, and both profoundly respectful of the peoples about whom they wrote. Yet Boas worked within the settler culture of the Americas, where human difference was framed in terms of ‘race’ (phenotypical features), and where variations in behaviour were taken to diminish the essential humanity of others. A century later, we can still find prominent public figures in the United States casually endorsing deeply mistaken views about the ‘intelligence’ of different human groups. In short, the disagreement between the two anthropologists concerned not the facts themselves, but what readers were likely to infer from them. Their presumed audiences differed.
French academic universalism, shaped by late-19th-century thinkers such as the Haitian scholar Anténor Firmin, readily rejected biologising conceptions of race. Differences among humans were instead approached as variations in behavioural dispositions arising from what Lévy-Bruhl called ‘mentality’ – distinct cognitive orientations that were not biological essences but historically constituted pathways of thought. Boas’s defence of a radical cultural relativism (according to which cultures are intrinsically incommensurable) and Lévy-Bruhl’s defence of a common evolutionary trajectory for humanity converged ethically and politically, yet led to divergent intellectual interests.
By the mid-1930s, as the Second World War approached, Lévy-Bruhl had already foreseen the catastrophe that would suspend the highest achievements of European modernity. Retired and in declining health, he was working on a book intended both to overturn and to crown his life’s work. He became increasingly troubled by the implicit use of the first-person plural (‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’) in characterising human difference. Were ‘they’ – the so-called exotic others – really so different from ‘us’? Are ‘we’ not also, in less guarded moments, moved by participatory affects and inclined to disregard contradiction? In the 1930s, as fascism took hold in Europe, the very populations that had developed modern science were behaving in ways that flouted the law of non-contradiction and emphasised participation. As he wrote in his notebooks, if all French people are capable of participation, then no one is primitive. He concluded, first, that non-moderns do employ logic when needed and, second, that moderns are not as consistently individualistic as supposed. There are, therefore, no ‘primitives’: the condition he had identified among non-modern peoples must be understood as universal. In sum, it is not ‘primitive’ peoples who are mistaken, but rather Aristotle’s logic that fails to account for human attitudes in our less controlled moments.
Participation is not merely a mode of thought; it is also the condition through which persons come into being
One thing was clear to him: it was necessary to abandon the idea that ‘we’ (moderns, non-primitives) always think according to logically non-contradictory modes. Similarly, the modernist notion – defended, incidentally, by Durkheim – that individuality constitutes the hidden core of all human persons had to be set aside. Moreover, this line of thinking was consistent with the most advanced scientific theories of the time: relativity in physics and mathematics had come to occupy centre-stage. In fact, Lévy-Bruhl and his circle were personally acquainted with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, and discussed their work. This form of universalist relativism seemed to offer a way of resolving the disagreement that had marked his earlier discussions with Boas.
Participation, then, was a mode of thought that applied to all humans, not only to ‘primitives’. But, beyond this, his notebooks articulate something even more radical: participation is not merely a mode of thought; it is also the condition through which persons come into being. We first participate in the persons around us (we are, in a sense, one with them), and only subsequently do we construct our singularity as persons. Participation – that is, the sharing of being among embodied, affective and co-responsible living beings – is the very ground of personal identity. As he scribbled in the margin of one of his notebooks: _Être, c’est participer_ (‘To be is to participate’).
Thus, on the one hand, our singularity as persons is not individual in the atomistic sense, since it emerges from participation in others; on the other hand, it is never complete, because it is never free from further participations in new beings and objects – namely, in the companions with whom we share an ethos of co-responsibility in everyday life. We know that his colleagues were aware of the revolutionary implications of this idea, even in its unpublished form, because Durkheim’s nephew, the great sociologist Marcel Mauss, refers to it in his 1939 obituary of Lévy-Bruhl.
Tragically, Paris was occupied, and the old man’s notes remained forgotten until 1949, when his former students unearthed, from the ruins of his ravaged home, a small bundle of moleskin notebooks tied with string. There, he had sketched what would prove to be his most revolutionary insights. In fact, it was not until the mid-1980s, particularly in England, that anthropologists and philosophers turned their attention once again to his work. The influence of French Marxism in the 1970s contributed to this renewed interest. In particular, Pierre Bourdieu’s reworking of the concept of _habitus_ – as the environment of meaning within which persons come to constitute themselves – proved to be an important precondition for this reassessment.
The growing influence of phenomenology in the social sciences also played a role in this rediscovery. French phenomenologists had never ceased to engage with Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation. The work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida became increasingly influential in the 1970s and ’80s, bringing with it a view of personhood as something that must be ethically constituted. Anthropologists such as Julian Pitt-Rivers and Marilyn Strathern drew on these ideas in their foundational discussions of value and of gender, respectively.
Personhood was not ‘individual’ in the atomistic sense: persons remain intrinsically related to others
At the same time, important developments were taking place in cognitive science and developmental psychology. Researchers such as Boris Cyrulnik in France and Colwyn Trevarthen in Scotland demonstrated empirically that the individualist model fails to account adequately for how children come to develop reflexive thought. They showed that children initially exist in a state of participation with their caregivers, and only subsequently come to recognise themselves as singular persons. In other words, contrary to what the term might suggest, intersubjectivity is not an encounter between pre-formed subjects; rather, the subject – as a self-conscious entity – emerges from within intersubjective participation in already existing persons, namely its caregivers. This process unfolds within contexts of dwelling shaped by historically sedimented dispositions that constitute an environing _habitus_ of human communication. This shift made it possible to move beyond the limitations of the earlier concept of ‘culture’ that had structured the work of Boas and his relativist followers. It became easier to reconcile a universalist account of personhood with the existence of diverse local traditions of personhood.
These developments vindicated Lévy-Bruhl’s insights, provided that personhood is understood as an achievement of each and every individual – both locally specific (as each child acquires language and becomes a person) and universally shared across human societies. In 1988, Strathern demonstrated that this perspective had far-reaching implications for the study of gender. She argued that the personhood of the peoples she studied was not ‘individual’ in the atomistic sense: persons remain intrinsically related to others (they are _partible_) and are continually constituted through participation in others (they are _dividual_). In the 1990s, anthropologists such as Tim Ingold further developed this line of enquiry, exploring how persons are simultaneously partible and participatory.
Christina Toren, for example, has studied the processes through which Fijian children come to integrate the hierarchical values that are fundamental to local conceptions of what it is to be human. These children do so from within participation in already structured social environments (notably, the home and situations associated with food-sharing in Fiji). The sense of responsibility they develop – which enables them to enter into the hierarchical relations that structure local society – is not the result of a conscious internalisation of ‘rules’ or ‘laws’ of behaviour. Rather, it arises from their formation as conscious agents (as subjects) within the forms of sociality in which they are raised. As Lévy-Bruhl had already noted in his doctoral thesis more than a century earlier, the embodied participation in others is the ground upon which arises our disposition to experience responsibility. This, in turn, is what makes us follow norms and laws, not the other way around.
By the early 2000s, these insights converged with important new developments in the philosophy of cognition. Younger phenomenologists like Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo began to develop accounts of human thought that move beyond the mind/body dualism in ways the earlier generation could scarcely have anticipated. They argued that perception itself is fundamentally participatory: it is a social function, a form of ‘participatory sense-making’. In other words, perception is not merely the impact of the external world on our senses, as if we were photographic plates. Rather, it is ‘the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby \[personal\] sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own.’ Such an insight both confirms and significantly extends the implications of Lévy-Bruhl’s remarkable discovery – formulated in 1939, shortly before his death – that:
> A participation is not only a mysterious and inexplicable fusion of things that lose and preserve their identity simultaneously. Participation enters into the very constitution of these things. Without participation, they would not be _given_ in experience: they would not exist … Participation, is thus _immanent_ in the individual.
In 2011, Marshall Sahlins, one of the doyens of US anthropology, published a groundbreaking paper in which he began to open up this line of enquiry. His aim was to relaunch the anthropological theory of kinship and family by proposing that personhood be understood in conjunction with participation. He argued that close relations between persons can be understood only if we consider how persons come into being in the first place – within environments shaped by prior historical processes and by caregivers who are themselves products of those same environments.
Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges
This insight has a rather unexpected and far-reaching implication. Rather than learning how to be together with their early companions, children must first learn to differentiate themselves from them. At the outset, children participate in their caregivers – they are, in a sense, part of them: ‘kinsmen are members of one another,’ as Sahlins puts it. What this suggests is that the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
> Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, \[persons\] find themselves as members of families, associations, \[socialities\], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from _their_ world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, \[and\] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves.