Society and Nature

A Sociological Inquiry

Hans Kelsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317833178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1998.This is Volume XIV of eighteen in the Sociology of Behaviour and Psychology series. This text is concerned with sociological inquiry into society and nature. Written in 1946, it investigates the idea that society and nature, if conceived of as two different systems of elements, are the results of two different methods of thinking and are only as such two different objects. The same elements, connected with each other according to the principle of causality, constitute nature; connected with each other according to another, namely, a normative, principle, they constitute society

Part I

Primitive Conception of Nature

Chapter I

Primitive Consciousness

1. PREVALENCE OF THE EMOTIONAL COMPONENT

THE consciousness of primitive man is essentially characterized by the fact that with him the rational component, which is aimed at objective cognition, lags far behind the emotional component, which arises from feeling and volition; originally this emotional component almost exclusively dominated the mind of early man.¹

A consideration of the peculiarity and function of these two fundamentally different attitudes of man toward his environment² is extremely important for a comprehension of primitive mentality. One leads to the idea of an objective connection between things, to reality as determined for civilized man by the laws of causality, to nature; the other leads to ideas which neither describe the world nor satisfy our curiosity and desire for knowledge but which serve subjective non-cognitive interests. These latter ideas, because they are related to objects which we desire or fear, are formed rather by productive fantasy than by receptive observation; ambivalent throughout, they decrease as well as increase the initial emotion, satisfy as well as re-excite desire, and allay as well as stir up fear. Upon these ideas are based concepts of value: of what is useful because desired, of what is harmful because feared, of what is morally good or bad because it is the expression of a group, rather than an individual, interest. These ideas are not concerned with explaining phenomena but with the need which primitive man feels for reacting to natural events, the justification of which action is the specific function of these ideas. Hence evaluations are expressed which establish a normative order of human behavior. Just as the rational attitude leads to nature governed by laws of causality, so the emotional attitude leads to society governed by norms. For civilized man these are indeed two different worlds, corresponding to fundamentally disparate mental attitudes.

It goes almost without saying that the emotional component is the older or, at least, originally the stronger element.³ This fact has been well expressed by saying that in the beginning man’s behavior was essentially determined by desire.⁴ Thence can be explained the preeminent position which so-called “magic” has in the life of primitive man. For it consists mainly in the fact that the less man technically dominates nature, the more he turns with his wishes, expressed in a peculiar sign-language, to superhuman beings. Especially because he hopes that their power will satisfy his needs does he imagine these beings.⁵ There is no reason to suppose among primitive men either a developed tendency to cognition or a direct desire for an objective explanation of the world—an explanation, that is, independent of his wishes or his fears and free of any evaluation; for even the average civilized man strives in a lesser degree after objective cognition than after judgments of value and thus after a justification of his individual interests in the light of collective interests (which present themselves ideologically as norms).⁶

The mentality of primitive man is characterized by a lack of curiosity.⁷ The best-informed ethnologists agree in depicting him as an individual who cannot easily be brought to that state of astonishment which is the first impulse to investigation. The quest for deeper causes is foreign to his nature.⁸ The new arouses in him fear,⁹ not curiosity.¹⁰ His mind, unlike that of civilized man, is not sensitive, so far as logical contradiction is concerned. Dudley Kidd writes:

With regard to the Kafirs, we must try and grasp the fact that they are capable of entertaining contradictory ideas at the same moment. Until some one points out the contradiction, a Kafir sees no difficulty in believing that his grandfather “went out like a candle” at death, while at the same time he will tell you that his grandfather visited the kraal yesterday in the form of a snake. Later he will tell you that all yesterday his dead grandfather was living below the ground in a splendid world of enjoyment, This grandfather’s spirit can be both material and immaterial, and it can exist and not exist at the same moment. When you point out how contradictory these statements are, the Kafir will re-examine the question, and his answer will turn on the mood he happens to be in. Opposing statements of fact vignette off in his mind into one another, apparently without passing through any region of conscious untruth or mental incompatibility.¹¹

W. H. R. Rivers reports:

During the course of the work of the Percy Sladen Trust Expedition to the Solomon Islands, we obtained in the island of Eddystone a long account of the destination of man after death. We were told that he stays in the neighbourhood of the place where he died for a certain time, when spirits arrive in their canoes from a distant island inhabited by the dead to fetch the ghost to his new home. On one occasion we were present in a house packed tightly with people who heard the swish of the paddles of the ghostly visitors and the sound of their footsteps as they landed on the beach, while for several hours the house was filled with strange whistling sounds, which all around us firmly believed to be the voices of the ghostly visitors come to fetch the man who had lately died. . . . . Later, after visiting a cave at the summit of the island, we were given a circumstantial account of its ghostly inhabitants, and we learnt that after death the people of the island inhabit this cave. Here the natives possess two beliefs which seem to us incompatible with one another: if the spirits of the dead go to a distant island, they cannot, according to our logic, at the same time live in a cave on the island where they died. Of course the natural interpretation is that the ghosts live in a cave in the interval between death and the setting out for the distant island, or that, while some go to the distant island, others take up their abode in the cave. It was clear, however, that the contradiction was not to be explained in these simple ways, but that the people held the two beliefs that the dead go to a distant island, and yet remain on the island where they died.¹²

Primitive man’s rational desire for cognition is weakly developed;¹³ and, wherever it does show itself, it is inseparably connected with, even fundamentally influenced by, the emotional-normative tendency. This tendency dominates his inner world. “Not contemplation but rather action is the center from which radiates man’s interpretation of reality,” remarks Cassirer;¹⁴ and he points out that in the first stages of mythical-religious consciousness “things exist for the ego only by becoming emotionally effective, that is, by causing emotions of hope or fear, of desire or fright, of satisfaction or disappointment. Nature, too, is presented to man in this way long before it can become the object of perception, or even the object of cognition.”¹⁵

2. LACK OF CAUSAL THINKING

The idea that events are determined by laws of nature, the concept of the principle of causality—a fundamental basis of scientific thought which develops slowly and with difficulty in men’s minds—is entirely beyond the grasp of primitive man.¹⁶ One can speak of “causal thinking” only if the regularity perceived in any succession of events is also considered necessary. But precisely this regular chain of events, by which primitive man’s behavior actually is guided and upon which he relies in his actions and omissions, gives him no cause for meditation: like a child, he accepts the chain of events without thinking about it. Indeed, one must be a Newton in order to discover the law of gravitation simply by observing that an apple loosened from the tree always falls to earth. Conscious reflection, from which alone can emerge the law of causality, occurs in the mental processes of primitive man only if extraordinary things happen through which the normal succession of events is unexpectedly interrupted—and, above all, if strong emotions are aroused.¹⁷ For this reason a concept of causality or a tendency to causal thinking is out of the question for primitive man. If some ethnologists attribute causal thinking to him,¹⁸ they impute our concept of causality to certain ideas which he has about the connection of events. Such an imputation can easily be induced, inasmuch as the modern law of causality originated, as we shall show, in the course of a gradual change of meaning, in primitive notions about certain social relationships according to which primitive man interprets nature. But neither this fact nor the fact that primitive man may actually utilize causal connections in his practical life—connections, that is, which civilized people interpret as causal—entities anyone to attribute causal thought, or a tendency to causal thinking, to him. For, like an animal, he uses these connections without being aware of their nature and without ever reflecting about them.¹⁹

Above all, one must not identify, as is often done, a need for explanation with the tendency to causal thinking. True, primitive man has a certain need for explanation, but only in a limited degree; this need is less pronounced than any other he may have and is subject to his desires and fears. If extraordinary events which, really or imaginar-ily, touch upon his vital interests attract the attention of primitive man, his immediate response will be not rational explanation but emotional reaction.²⁰ His entirely secondary desire for explanation, however, is satisfied when he can interpret the facts in question according to his social order which also comprises nature; for instance, he is satisfied when the facts requiring explanation can be interpreted as reward or punishment or their condition. An example of this is the interpretation which primitive man gives to a death which would be wholly natural to us but in his opinion is a punishment inflicted by a superhuman authority or a delict committed by magic,²¹ which consequently entails an act of revenge, justified by such an interpretation. Even though a warrior is killed in action and the cause of his death is obvious, the vengeance of his relatives is sometimes directed not against the killer but against a supposed faraway sorcerer, whom they try to discover by means of a strange ritual. On him retribution is exercised. Prejudiced in his belief in magic, primitive man does not assume a false or “mystic” cause. What interests him is, not the fact which is the cause of the death of his relative, but the individual responsible for it. Therefore, he need not go into an inquiry after the cause but can hold someone responsible for the death; that is, he can accuse some individual of the murder although, according to the modern view, there is absolutely no causal connection between the person held responsible and the death. The thinking of primitive man is dominated by this idea of retribution and not by the law of causality. It never occurs to him to find out the real causal connection, i.e., to attribute the result to some fact which alone can be considered the cause.

Schultze,²² who concedes causal thinking to savages, gives the following example as proof of his assumption: “A Kaffir, who broke off a piece from the anchor of a stranded ship, died soon afterwards. Since then the Kaffirs have ascribed divine character to the anchor, and when passing, honored it with greetings in order to avoid its wrath.” Schultze believes that “two events are subjectively brought into causal connection which have objectively no such relation, namely, the breaking off of a piece of the anchor and the death of the Negro.” But there is no causal connection in this case, for the simple reason that the assumed connection in the interpretation of Schultze is limited to two quite concrete events. The Kaffirs, interpreting this incident, do not suppose that damage to an anchor generally causes death to the in-jurer. If they see in this event any application of a general law, then it is that of retribution and not that of causality. The anchor, imagined as a personal being, has taken vengeance on the injurer, just as men, because of injuries done to them, take and are entitled, if not obliged, to take vengeance. Such an interpretation is also an “explanation,”, although not according to the law of causality. It is an explanation merely in the sense of a normative justification legitimatizing personal behavior.

Phillips writes of the natives of the Lower Congo:

In intellect we find the same stunted development as with the emotions; the relation of cause and effect, in all but the most patent and mechanical of cases, being beyond their grasp. Here again custom rules; just as many a school boy performs operations with fractions thus and thus because he has been told to do so, and believes the answer will be right because it is the rule, so the natives attribute known effects to the most inadequate causes, inadequate both quantitatively and qualitatively. Let us take a case. Some years ago, the chigoes, or burrowing fleas, were imported from Brazil; let us ask a Kabinda what is said as to their origin. He will probably say they have come because the King of Kabinda is not yet buried (a man who died forty or fifty years ago), and nothing will persuade him to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Primitive Conception of Nature
• Part II. Greek Religion and Philosophy
• Part III. Modern Science
• Notes
• Index