The beginnings of thinking are closely related to a person's idea of a certain supersensible reality, but it is extremely difficult for us - creatures torn from the era of the origin of thinking for several tens of millennia - to understand this connection. The traditional point of view, which considers philosophy as an act of overcoming myth, can be supplemented with the provision that the very foundation of myth, premythological thinking, is an attempt by the subject to endow the world with meaning, to create a worldview - in fact, metaphysical - concept. After all, the being, who had just opened his own consciousness, immediately had to face reality, with the fact that his time would inevitably come to an end. Here, perhaps, the process of understanding the world began - as a desire in one form or another to prolong its existence, displacing the fact of its finiteness from consciousness. And another was discovered,the invisible world that defines reality itself and subordinates it to itself. We will now try to consider this process. In our analysis, we will rely on the concepts of archaic thinking by Mircea Eliade and Lucien Levy-Bruhl, as well as cognitive and archetypal psychology.
The world's oldest rock art in the Chauvet Cave, France. Image: Thomas T., CC license.
We used the words "thinking" and "comprehension", but is their use justified where the process of constituting being was carried out, in fact, spontaneously, without reflection? Such “thinking” does not occur on the surface of consciousness, but on a deeper level. Perhaps we will not be mistaken in calling it unconscious thinking, which has its own, special logic.
To understand the thinking of a person as a whole, it is worth identifying two ways of forming representations in consciousness: visual-figurative (pre-conceptual) and verbal-logical. In an archaic person, a figurative representation prevails, which is expressed in phenomenal perception, which encodes information about the surrounding reality in the smallest detail and stores it in memory. The downside of this type of thinking is the subordination of the verbal representation to the figurative, which forces an archaic person to reproduce in language the smallest details of reality perceived through the senses in order to make it understandable. Let's try to explain with an example: if you say the word "yurt" to a primitive man, he will not understand what is meant. To understand, he needs to know where this yurt is located, who is its owner, what color it is, and so on. That is, the thinking of a primitive person is holistic, it is extremely difficult for him to separate a part from a perceived holistic image. It can be assumed that language initially has an attachment to direct perception, from which it is subsequently freed, which makes it possible to create symbolic images.
The holistic thinking of an archaic person does not yet allow the formation of abstractions, thought is not yet divorced from the phenomenon. Reality appears to him as a single interconnected universe in which the subject is inscribed; there is still no difference between him and the world. An archaic man does not live in the world, he experiences it. There are no natural (in our understanding) reasons for him; he finds an explanation of any events in the action of a single numinous force that binds reality into the living Cosmos. All the phenomena surrounding a person are explained by the action of this force and its relation to a person.
There is no place for formal logic where consciousness grasps feeling and thought in a single impulse, but sees itself as inseparable from the experience of the world. The events are interconnected in the most paradoxical way: violation of the taboo can serve as the "cause" of the failure on the hunt, which occurred before the very offense. It must be emphasized that the primitive man perceived the phenomenon of supersensible reality as primary in relation to the material world and constituting the latter. This supersensible reality is not something static; it is not some ideal construct, but a living being-in-becoming, constantly changing its attitude towards a person, reacting to his actions and appearing to him in the world. Such a vision of reality, so difficult to accept by the mind, crystallized during the development of Western civilization, was natural for an archaic person.
Wherever we look, everywhere among the archaic peoples we find an energetic idea of the numinous force that constitutes the Cosmos (taboo and mana are the Polynesians, the oud are the Baka pygmies, the Wakan are the Sioux Indians, the Orenda are the Iroquois). This power determines the subject's attitude to phenomena, usually associated with something sacred, with what is part of the invisible world. This invisible world is perceived by an archaic person directly, he experiences his presence in his being. The action of this force immanent in archaic consciousness, perceived as a hierophany (manifestation of the sacred), has an emotional and affective character and is, in fact, dichotomous: either reverent reverence, or "fear and awe."
Promotional video:
What initially appears before the archaic consciousness as an impersonal force gradually begins to thicken around the phenomena most often encountered by the subject (luminaries, weather phenomena, plants, animals, man himself and his being). These phenomena, according to the law of analogy, are overgrown with connections (sky-rain-fertilization-man), binary oppositions are formed between them (sun and moon, eagle and snake, fire and water). The perceptual image, overgrown with meaning, turns into a symbolic (or archetypal) image. We emphasize that, apparently, symbolic representations are formed by the synthesis of information coming into consciousness from the outside (perceptual images), and some archetypal basis of the psyche (the very numinous force, the nature of which is transcendental to discursive thinking). The image is no longer thought of in connection with perceptual perception,but in the structure of analogies and oppositions given by archaic thinking. Interacting with each other, symbolic images form a sacred universe, in which a person feels the connection between "everything with everything."
Dichotomousness - division into opposites - is one of the properties of thinking in general, which we can easily find in modern man. A dichotomy is also inherent in archaic consciousness: the division into the sacred and the profane, the duality within the sacred itself, the motive of separation (for example, heaven and earth) in cosmogonic myths, the division of the community into male and female parts, and so on. The difference between modern and archaic thinking is that if modern consciousness identifies itself with only one of the biner elements, completely devaluing the other, then archaic thinking tries to recognize both opposites, to balance them. Moreover, to balance it without reducing it to identity: death, a state opposite to life, is endowed with a different qualitative meaning (for example, the spirit of an ancestor,"Attached" by a tombstone to a certain area, makes the soil fertile); the triad "day-sun-being" as opposed to the triad "night-moon-becoming". Archaic consciousness cosmizes every significant phenomenon around itself, endowing it with meaning and not trying to exclude it from the universe. With the development of thinking and the appearance of myth between the two opposites, a third idea often appears, designed to balance them (a dying and resurrecting god transcends the idea of life and death, a certain androgynous creature - the difference between the sexes, and so on). Note that the features of archaic thinking described above are just a very generalized principle: when analyzing specific examples, deviations will inevitably be found.the triad "day-sun-being" as opposed to the triad "night-moon-becoming". Archaic consciousness cosmizes every significant phenomenon around itself, endowing it with meaning and not trying to exclude it from the universe. With the development of thinking and the appearance of myth between the two opposites, a third idea often appears, designed to balance them (a dying and resurrecting god transcends the idea of life and death, a certain androgynous creature - the difference between the sexes, and so on). Note that the features of archaic thinking described above are just a very generalized principle: when analyzing specific examples, deviations will inevitably be found.the triad "day-sun-being" as opposed to the triad "night-moon-becoming". Archaic consciousness cosmizes every significant phenomenon around itself, endowing it with meaning and not trying to exclude it from the universe. With the development of thinking and the appearance of myth between the two opposites, a third idea often appears, designed to balance them (a dying and resurrecting god transcends the idea of life and death, a certain androgynous creature - the difference between the sexes, and so on). Note that the features of archaic thinking described above are just a very generalized principle: when analyzing specific examples, deviations will inevitably be found. With the development of thinking and the appearance of myth between the two opposites, a third idea often appears, designed to balance them (a dying and resurrecting god transcends the idea of life and death, a certain androgynous creature - the difference between the sexes, and so on). Note that the features of archaic thinking described above are just a very generalized principle: when analyzing specific examples, deviations will inevitably be found. With the development of thinking and the appearance of myth between the two opposites, a third idea often appears, designed to balance them (a dying and resurrecting god transcends the idea of life and death, a certain androgynous creature - the difference between the sexes, and so on). Note that the features of archaic thinking described above are just a very generalized principle: when analyzing specific examples, deviations will inevitably be found.
What destroyed this primary coherence in the existence of primitive man? We have already said that archaic consciousness was transcendental to nature, it was in the world of supersensible ideas. In a world flooded with a certain elusive meaning for us, where there was no place for chance and there was no gap through which a person can see himself. In such a space, awareness of oneself as an individual cannot appear. But what makes this awareness possible? What allowed a person to question these initially collective ideas and offer their own? The traditional point of view, which states that the development of consciousness occurred as a result of the development of new tools and the complication of language, only obscures the question itself. Let's try to assume that the very appearance of awareness is associated with a certain numinous experience,manifested in various forms. If the goal of religious practices and rituals in archaic societies was the introduction of consciousness into ecstasy (going beyond oneself), then the opposite state, the extreme degree of this new experience of the world can be described as entaz (return to oneself), meditation.
There is a gap between man and space. This is especially clearly expressed in the Sankhya Hindu philosophical school, where the Spirit (Purusha) is thought of as a completely passive substance, in contrast to Nature (Prakriti). Similar trends were observed in ancient Greece and reached a peak in the era of Socrates. Indeed, before Socrates, the human phenomenon did not attract much attention to itself, but even then philosophers began to be fascinated by the mysterious Being (and Non-Being), which they felt especially keenly: the dark logos of Heraclitus, least of all resembling the spoken word, on the one hand; and the thinking of Parmenides, which reveals Being to us and rests itself on it, on the other. The ancient philosophers were still seized with a sense of mystical involvement, but they had already discovered that the comprehension of the Cosmos is the creation of man.