Lecture 15. Culture and civilization: the value foundations of being

1. The concepts of "culture" and "civilization": the nature and content.

2. The theories of values: the evolution and hierarchy of values.

3. Value and evaluation: the truth and the norm.

 

There is no universal definition of culture. Various functional descriptions of the cultural sphere, formulated to suit the goals of research, are possible but there is no integral definition of culture that would express its essence and be generally recognized, although the semantic extent of this concept is believed to be intuitively clear. The concept of culture (fr. L. cultura "tilling") is basically connected with something that is done well not only what is done but also how and what for. Doing is a mode of mastering the world. Culture is a kind of magic crystal that focuses all being. It is the creative principle of the life of the individual and of society as a whole; it is not just an ability taken to the point of art but a morally sanctioned goal.

What is the essence of present-day philosophical reflexion on the fate of culture? Our discussion of these problems will be limited to those aspects which will permit us, first, to correlate culture with other phenomena of life, and second, to outline the controversy concerning the prospects of mankind's cultural evolution, its direction, drawbacks and crossroads, its hopes and fulfilment.

The world of values. How can the concept of value be philosophically defined? Value is a fact of culture, and it is social in its very essence. Further, it is a functional and a necessarily objective-subjective phenomenon. Things and events as such, outside their relation to man and the life of society, do not exist in terms of value categories. This applies not only to humanize nature, i.e. to the entire area of civilization, but even to celestial bodies.

The concept of value is correlative with such concepts as significance, usefulness, and harmfulness. Significance characterizes the degree of intensity or tenseness of a given axiological relation: some things move us more than others, and some leave completely indifferent. Usefulness may be purely utilitarian. Material and non-material values clothes, dwellings, tools, skills, abilities, etc. can all have usefulness. Harmfulness is a negative axiological relation. We speak of truth as a cognitive value which is highly useful to human beings yet can also do them harm. Truth is not always rewarded people have been burnt at the stake or sentenced to hard labour for speaking the truth.

Culture and nature. The problem in the relationship between the natural and the cultural is that no clear-cut boundary can be drawn between them: culture is man's essential property, and man has not only a cultural but also a natural dimension. The cultural and the natural merge in a single whole in man, and the relations between them are so complex that they are not fully understood even now. What is stronger in man, the cultural or the natural element? Are cultural influences positive or negative? At different periods in history, different answers to these questions were offered.

The culture-man-nature triad is constantly present in philosophical works. It would be frivolous and naive to expect an unambiguous solution of the question, but the history of the development of this problem range permits the identification of certain obviously erroneous tendencies. When culture and human nature are absolutely opposed to each other, complacent, utopian, and essentially dangerous political tendencies often emerge; when culture and human nature are identified with each other, culture loses all independence and becomes a mere attribute of nature. Man is here simplistically perceived either as a purely cultural or purely natural phenomenon; he now controls the cultural process consciously and rationally, now becomes its unconscious and passive object, the plaything of anonymous symbolic structures of a given type of culture.

Culture and civilization. As distinct from the 18th and 19th centuries, when culture and civilization were mostly regarded as synonymous, characteristic of 20th-century philosophy of culture is gradual separation of these two concepts, of which the former continues to symbolize all the positive elements in this previously indivisible area while the latter is mostly used with neutral or downright negative overtones.

Civilization as material culture and mastery over the forces of nature undoubtedly carries a powerful charge of technological progress and promotes material affluence. The beneficial effect of the spreading of technological inventions is too obvious to need proof. At the same time technology and material affluence do not in themselves signify cultural and spiritual efflorescence; they cannot be regarded as absolutely moral or absolutely immoral: they are, in fact, neutral. The cultural value of technological achievements depends on the axiological context in which they are used, and this context may include, say, irrigation of formerly barren areas but also development of advanced weapons of mass destruction.

The attitude of some Western philosophers to civilization is flatly negative. The view of civilization as the "agony of culture" was formulated by O. Spengler, and it has only grown stronger since his time. The negative qualities usually ascribed to civilization are a tendency towards standardization of thinking, an inclination to treat generally accepted truths as absolutely correct, and a tendency to play down the independence and originality of individual thinking, which are seen as socially dangerous. From this standpoint, culture moulds the perfect personality, while civilization, the ideal law-abiding member of society content with the benefits offered him.

In order to better understand the entire complexity of the phenomenon of culture and its interconnections with material civilization, let us turn to yet another dilemma the problem of correlation between culture and consciousness.

Culture and consciousness. Can all cultural phenomena be reduced to the rational level of human consciousness? With all due respect for the achievements of reason, the answer to this question can only be negative: culture is a manifestation of man's properties in all their fullness. Can our emotional experiences in connection with some work of art, or our moral reaction to some event, be fully conveyed in the rational form of a scientific statement? Is the culture of emotions subject to the dictates of reason? The reverse is true: where reason usurps autocratic rights, culture degenerates into an ornamental pattern on the groundwork of life, instead of being its hidden essence.

The greatest value of cultural phenomena lies not so much in the community of their inner structure as in the unique content of these structures in each variety of culture. Here we have come to the central problem of the philosophy of culture, cultural typology.

The problem of the typology of cultures. How is the question of the correlation between Western and Eastern cultures solved now? If 19th-century culturology considered their systems of terms and symbols as basically closed, in the 20th century emphasis was laid on the culturological affinity of these traditions earlier perceived as disjoint. An indication of the tendency towards a synthesis between Western and Eastern cultures is the crossing of the two branches and the resultant new cultural varieties (of this nature is, e.g., the culture of Japan today or the cultural pluralism of numerous Buddhist communities in Europe and America).

The differences between European and Oriental cultures go back to remote antiquity. Of all the antithetic features distinguishing them that have been pointed out by culturologists, let us stress such basic elements as the attitude, first, to the human personality, second, to the possibilities of reason, and third, to socio-political activity. As distinct from Christian Europe, which deified the absolute personality of the Creator, and thus of man as the Creator's likeness, oriental religions are mostly based on the idea of falsity of the individual forms of spiritual life. The East cultivated the idea of rejection of the personal self in favour of the impersonal absolute. There is also a difference in the attitude to the possibilities of reason.

Any discussion of the phenomenon of culture calls for an analysis of the related concept of civilisation. Neither can be understood outside their contradictory unity.

The concept of civilisation. Historically the idea of civilisation was formulated during the period of the rise of capitalism in order to substantiate the principle of historical progress, the necessity for the replacement of the feudal system, when the claim that it was God-given no longer satisfied social and philosophical thought. Instead it was maintained that history was motivated by man's vital interests, his desire to realise the principles of social justice and legal equality. Thinkers became concerned with the future of world civilisation as a whole and this prompted them to create a different paradigm of philosophical thought.

On the other hand, the sharpening of social contradictions in capitalist society led some philosophers to believe that the "sun" of social progress was about to set. This idea was most fully expressed in Oswald Spengler's well-known book The Decline of the West, which stimulated such thinkers as Pitirim Sorokin and Arnold Toynbee to produce their own socio philosophical patterns of the global historical process. Sorokin attempted to reduce recurrence in the historical process to recurrence in the spiritual sphere by generalising the corresponding spiritual phenomena into a concept of "types of culture" (culture being treated as synonymous with civilisa tion), while treating the historical process as their fluctuation. According to Sorokin, the sensate society that we know today is moving towards inevitable collapse and this is connected with the successes of science and materialism. He sees the salvation of humanity in the victory of the religious and altruistic principles, which should be active and creative. According to Arnold Toynbee, there is no single unified history of humankind. We are concerned with a score or so of unique and self-contained civilisations, and all of them are equally valuable in their own peculiar way. In its development every civilisation passes through the stages of emergence, growth, breakdown and disintegration, after which it is replaced by another. At present, according to Toynbee, only five main civilisations have survived: the Chinese, the Indian, the Islamic, the Russian, and the Western. Civilisation's driving force is the "creative minority", which leads the "passive majority". In the stage of disintegration the minority imposes its will on the majority not by authority but by force.

The philosophy of culture. Civilisation depends on culture for its development and existence and, in its turn, provides the conditions for the existence and development of culture. Historically culture precedes civilisation. Usually culture is understood as the accumulation of material and spiritual values. This is a broad and largely correct interpretation but it leaves out one main fact, and that is the human being as the maker of culture. Culture is quite often identified with works of art, with enlightenment in general. This definition is too narrow.

This contradiction between culture and civilisation may also be found in the individual, the self. The adjective "cultured" presupposes something more than the acquisition of the ability to solve complex intellectual problems or to behave properly in society. Culture in the true sense presumes the observation of all the formal elements of socially accepted standards not as something external but as an integral part of the personality, of consciousness and even subconsciousness, of its habits. These standards then acquire a true and lofty spirituality, which is something more than obedience to certain rules. The culture of both the individual and society has various degrees of sophistication.

The contradictory nature of culture finds expression also in the fact that every culture has progressive, democratic and antidemocratic, reactionary, regressive tendencies and elements. The expression "mass culture" is today extremely popular in the West. It is mostly used with a tinge of scorn, meaning something "watered down for the majority". What is imposed or implanted under the guise of "mass culture" in the western countries has a political and ideological implication-the reinforcement of the power of the middle class, typically with reference to its perceived materialistic values or conventional attitudes.

The term "mass culture" becomes negative when the masses are not raised to the level of real culture, when "culture" itself is refabricated to suit the primitive tastes of the backward sections of the population and itself declines, degenerates to a level so low as to be an affront to all real cultivation of the senses. The mass of the people with its great fund of folk wisdom is presented with stupidity in the guise of culture and the sacred majesty of true culture's historical mission is insulted in the process.

Man in the system of culture. Culture is the living process of the functioning of values in the context of the existence of the individual and society. It is the process of their creation, reproduction and use in historically changing ways. Culture arose and is developing together with society, creating an enormous tradition. The history of culture is full of stagnant phenomena, rigid dogmatic systems and conservatism, and also of revolutionary innovations. The previous achievements of culture are not parted from us. Their finest examples continue to live and "work". No child can become a developed personality without absorbing some of the treasures of culture. Culture always survives those who have created it and that which it originally served.

Modern civilisation has enormously expanded the opportunities not only of human knowledge, of physical, biochemical, physiological and intellectual forms of activity, but also the various ways of developing them. Here an important role has been played by such disciplines as psychology, neurobiology, and medicine, which have long made humanity their study. They are constantly perfecting their research techniques in order to penetrate the mechanisms of life.

Oriental culture is full of beliefs about the role of the way of life and its various components-breathing techniques, diet, self-training, cultivation of the skin, physical mobility, the ability to commune very subtly with nature, acupuncture, cauterising, and other ways of influencing the biologically active centres of the organism, herbomedicine, diagnostics by means of the iris of the eye, pulse and olfactory diagnostics, consideration of the position of the earth in relation to the celestial bodies in medicine, the time of year and day and of the properties of water in relation to the state of the earth strata and the character of its flow in connection with geomagnetic phenomena-all this and much else has contributed to the great wisdom of the Eastern peoples, the wealth of their culture and man's place therein, their understanding of the mechanisms of regulation of his life activity and vital potentials.

The gap between Western and Oriental cultures and the ignorance that exists on both sides often results in a representative of one culture becoming overenthusiastic about the other and forgetting his roots. For example, he may become dedicated to yoga or karate without taking into account the specific features of his own culture or the genetic and other natural factors of his psychosomatic structure. This may have a result that is directly opposite to what he desires. Resorting to the East in search of exotic variants of cultural values merely for the sake of the current fashion usually indicates a low level of culture. It is like a person chasing in the darkness of the unknown for something that he does not know.

The thinking mind of culture is philosophy. Philosophy is its focus and, without it, no real culture of the mind or heart, no true intellectual achievement is possible. Philosophy is a fact of culture, its nucleus, its self-consciousness; at the same time it is an examination of culture as the human factor, the highest of all values known to man.

 

Required reading:

1. Dancy, Jonathan, 2004. Ethics without Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2. Darwall, Stephen, 2002. Welfare and Rational Care. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

3. Kraut, Richard, 2007. What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

4. Rönnow-Rasmussen, Toni, 2009. Personal Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5. Hurka, Tom, 2010. “Asymmetries in Value”. Nous, 44: 199–223.

Optional reading:

1. Bradley, Ben, 2006. “Two Concepts of Intrinsic Value”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 9: 111–130.

2. Brown, Campbell, 2007. “Two Kinds of Holism About Values”. Philosophical Quarterly, 57: 456–463.

3. Bykvist, Krister, 2009. “No Good Fit: Why the Fitting-Attitude Analysis of Value Fails”. Mind, 118: 1–30.

4. Dorsey, Dale, 2012. “Intrinsic Value and the Supervenience Principle”. Philosophical Studies, 157: 267–285.

5. Langton, Rae, 2007. “Objective and Unconditioned Value”. Philosophical Review, 116: 157–185.

6. Olson, Jonas, 2009. “Fitting Attitudes Analyses of Value and the Partiality Challenge”. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 12: 365–378.

7. Portmore, Douglas, 2007. “Consequentializing Moral Theories”. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 88: 39–73.

8. Rabinowicz, Wlodek, 2008. “Value Relations”. Theoria, 74: 18–49.

9. Suikkanen, Jussi, 2009. “Buck-Passing Accounts of Value”. Philosphy Compass, 4: 768–779.

Note

Texts online

1. Works by thinkers at Project Gutenberg

2. Works by or about thinkers at Internet Archive

Audio

Works by or about thinkers at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Video

Video reels, video texts on all philosophical issues at http://www.youtube.com

 

Seminar 1.

1. The philosophy as a unity of knowledge and wisdom.

2. The philosophy as a self-consciousness of culture.

3. Philosophy, science, art and morality.

 

Seminar 2.

1. Features of Eastern philosophy in the comprehension of the world and man.

2. The philosophy of the Upanishads.

3. The problem of man and the state in the philosophy of Confucianism.

4. Man and Space in the philosophy of Taoism.

Seminar 3.

1. Conceptual thinking: from natural philosophy to Parmenides.

2. Atomism of Democritus as the pinnacle of Greek natural philosophy.

3. From the philosophy of nature to human philosophy: sophistry, Socrates.

4. The world of ideas of Plato and the doctrine of Aristotle.

3. Hellenistic-Roman philosophy: cynicism, skepticism, stoicism and neo-platonism.

Seminar 4.

1. Scholasticism and its off-shoots: thomism and scotism. Scholastic method.

2. Main problems of medieval philosophy in the works of St. Augustine and Th. Aquinas.

3. Al-Ghazali and his refutation of the philosophers.

4. Sufism: the selfless experiencing and the actualization of the truth.

Seminar 5.

1. Undermining the monopoly of the church and emergence of the secular culture.

2. The mystical pantheism of Nicholas of Cusa.

3. Natural philosophy of G. Bruno and Copernican revolution.

4. Machiavellism and utopian thought.

Seminar 6.

1. The priority of epistemology and methodology in modern philosophy.

2. Scientific and rationalist paradigm and the "war of all against all".

3. Nature, society, people in the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

4. Voltaire: Common sense, religious tolerance, freedom of thought.

 

Seminar 7.

1. The antinomies of the human mind and the agnosticism of Kant.

2. The parallelism between the development of nature and the development of knowledge in philosophy of Schelling.

3. The problem of the alienation of the human essence in the philosophy of Feuerbach.

4. "Capital": goods as alienated result of alienated labor.

 

Seminar 8.

1. Voluntarism and pessimism of the philosophy of Schopenhauer

2. Irrationalism and existentialism of S. Kierkegaard.

3. Immoralism and individualistic character of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Seminar 9.

1. A. Camus’ man of absurdity as an expression of alienated consciousness.

2. Fundamental ontology of M. Heidegger.

3. E. Husserl: phenomenological reduction.

4. The emergence of hermeneutics: the attempt of overcoming of alienation.

5. The culmination of the exclusion and decline of civilization in postmodern philosophy.

 

Seminar 10.

1. Phenomenon akyn-zhyrau in Kazakh culture.

2. Sufi ideas in the works of Abai and authentic human existence in the philosophy Shakarim.

3. Existentialism of F. Dostoyevski, L. Shestov and N. Berdyaev.

4. Russian cosmism and Russian eurasianism.

Seminar 11.

1. The philosophical content of concepts "being", "non-being" and "nothing".

3. Classical and non-classical understanding of being.

4. Matter and its attributive properties: the problem of the finite and the infinite.

Seminar 12.

1. The problem of development in the history of philosophy.

2. Determinism and indeterminism.

3. Dialectics and modern scientific thinking.

Seminar 13.

1. Science as a form of cultural production.

2. Positivistic ideal of science.Scientific traditions and scientific revolution.

3. Consciousness and reflection: language, speech and thinking.

4. Consciousness, preconscious, unconscious.

Seminar 14.

1. The theory of social progress: summative and substantial approaches.

2. Classical and non-classical interpretation of human being.

3. Contradictions of humanism, freedom, the meaning of life, fate and predestination of man.

Seminar 15.

1. Culture as "intermediate state" between barbarism and civilization.

2. The idea of enclosed cultural-historical types and the theory of enclosed local cultures.

4. Civilization and culture in the concept of “axial time”.

5. Universal and national values in the conditions of globalization.

Methodical recommendations of lectures topics on course “Philosophy”

The course “ Philosophy ” includes two parts, first the history of philosophy, then the problems of ontology, epistemology, axilogy, social philosophy. The following tips are intended to help students master the course content.

Learning outcomes

1. An understanding of some of the problems and issues addressed in philosophy and of the most important answers to these problems and issues.

2. Critical thinking and analytical abilities, and the ability to use these skills to develop oral and written arguments about philosophical problems.

Required Readings: Almost every lecture will have some ‘required reading’, usually from one of the two text books and primary sources. Students find learning easier and the course more enjoyable if they read the required readings before the relevant lectures.

Optional Readings: The optional readings include authors that take a wide range of approaches to philosophy. If you find one secondary source author hard to understand, there is probably an alternative author on the list who will suit you better.

Many relevant works are listed here, and many other useful books and articles are available online.

Dictionaries of philosophy are available electronically. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy has many useful, introductory articles.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/ is a freely accessible, peer-reviewed, high quality encyclopedia, but can be more difficult to read than Routledge.

Wikipedia, blogs, and random web postings provide useful examples and background reading, but only use peer-reviewed books, articles, and encyclopaedia entries for serious research for essays.