Culture: A Guess at the Riddle

Critical Inquiry 4 (2):299-329 (1977)
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Abstract

It is necessary to realize first of all that the concept of culture is founded upon two closely related dichotomies: that between the natural and artificial and that between the chaotic and the orderly. In its most primitive signification, culture means simply the imposition of an exquisite order upon the raw givenness of experience. In this sense, nature represents the immediacy of need, culture its formalization. Man may be "a rational animal," as Aristotle said, but in possessing the rational potential which he intermittently actualizes, he never ceases to remain an animal grounded immediately in hunger, lust, and the multiple instances of natural desire. Plato waged a never-ending struggle against the lawless outbreak of the natural appetites, and his efforts to curb, discipline, and form them is a primitive paradigm of the activity of culture. Man's capacity for thought and reason, for sociality and humane consideration has made him a sculpture-building animal and has made it possible for him, as Cassirer said, to live in a symbolic universe which he has himself created. But while his basic reality is not physical but cultural and spiritual, his anchorage forever remains that of nature and of animal need. The measure of culture is, therefore, a measure of artistic transformation. Albert William Levi is the author of The Idea of Culture, of which this essay is a part. The David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, St. Louis, he is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and Philosophy as Social Expression. His "De interpretatione: Cognition and Context in the History of Ideas" appeared in Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1976

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