Abstract

The concept of culture is best understood from a genetic and functional point of view. To cultivate an object is to develop the potentialities of its nature with a view to a definite end or result. For example, agriculture is the process whereby the potentialities of the earth and of seeds are cultivated with a view to growing edible plants. Similarly, one may speak of pearl culture or bee culture to indicate the process of cultivation or production of pearls or bees through the agency of man. By transference, the term has historically been applied to man himself and refers to the process of self-cultivation of man by man. Human culture, or anthropo-culture as it may be called, originally comprised the various ways in which man has tended his nature so as to make it grow or develop in a specific way. In classical Western civilization, as man differentiated between his body and his soul, he came to attach greater importance to the cultivation of his soul and culture became identified with the culture of the soul. Genetically, human culture refers to the education, or cultivation, of the whole man considered as an organism and not only to the mental or spiritual aspects of his nature. Plato’s concept of paideia, which comprised the education of the body through gymnastics and that of the soul through the liberal arts, reflects this holistic approach to the human cultural process. In time, culture came to mean the state of being educated as distinct from the process of education and then, still later, came to refer to the whole intelligible world revealed by education, to wisdom as a product of a liberal education.