The concept of culture has been defined in many different ways, and anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, and philosophers often have different definitions. We can speak of the ‘universal culture of mankind’ and at the same time of different ‘cultural circles’, of ‘nomadic and settled’ cultures in historical retrospect, of ‘tribal cultures’ (which at the same time exist in parallel with the modern world) but also of ‘sub-’ and ‘countercultures’ within modern culture.
The First Appearance of the Term Culture
The first appearance of the term culture (Latin: cultivation) is attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero, who used it in Tusculan Disputations, primarily in the sense of a ‘cultivation of the soul’ and applied it to philosophy (‘Cultura animi philosophia est’)[1], but its original and primary meaning is related to the cultivation of the land.[2] Such a figurative, ‘Ciceronian’ understanding of cultivation was not used again until the 1500s at the earliest, and it was only at the beginning of the 19th century that it acquired the meaning that can be described as ‘learning and taste, the intellectual side of civilization’.[3] The terms culture and civilization thus seem to be closely related.
In the medieval and ancient world, people generally did not believe in progress. In pre-Christian times, young people wanted to resemble their ancestors (who were cultural heroes at the same time)—hence, for most premodern peoples, comes the prominence of the cult of the ancestors. For the ancient and archaic man, culture was very closely linked to the ritual: all of life could be understood as a series of essentially ritualized acts. Most festivals were intended to bring to life—in the words of the religious scholar Mircea Eliade—in illo tempore reality[4], which ‘brings to the origins’ the person participating in or performing the ritual.[5] For them, the beginning was related to the creative forces and to creation, to that which was symbolically ‘closer to Heaven’ than to that which descended or deviated from the origins. They felt the origins to be a symbolic time ‘nearer the gods’ (or God) and from which man was ‘cast out’: this is precisely what is implicit in the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden, which pervaded every aspect of medieval Christian civilization’s thinking about history. For ancient and medieval man, the rite was the very ‘cultivation’ of culture. Rite, of course, not only in the literal sense of religious rites, but also extended to all spiritual effort, to spiritual learning, the spiritual ‘efforts’ of saints, monks and mystics, to the building of the temple of Apollo in Delphi, or the Gothic cathedral: everything was understood as a rite, which in some sense helped to cultivate matter through the spirit. Even such worldly acts as war and childbirth had a ritualistic characteristic.
The last 250–300 years have seen the predominance of a way of thinking according to which culture evolves: it is not ‘was’ but ‘will be’. Evolutionary thinking had already emerged in Germany and France by the 18th century AD: despite the increasing questioning of the general validity of progress, it still determines the way we think about history in the West today. With no distinction between civilization and culture, ‘the process of civilization’ has become the dominant narrative. Norbert Elias, in his famous work, The Civilizing Progress (the work was first published in Germany in 1939), outlined how the so-called ‘civilizing process’ has led to profound changes in human behaviour in modern times. According to him, it leads to the construction of the modern state and the transition of man from the medieval ‘warrior’ to the ‘civil man’ of the late 19th century. Elias sees a parallel between the way in which man’s bodily functions are controlled and the so-called ‘sociogenesis’ of the state, in which, he argues, in the process of civilization, human individuals have gradually sought to suppress within themselves the ‘animal instincts’ that, according to the author’s starting point, ‘originally’ dominated human nature. Only for this reason, for example, could ‘intimacy’ and the ‘new’ feelings associated with it, such as shame and modesty, appear.[7]
‘What is certain is that whatever one thinks about history, we all intuitively feel the meaning of the word “culture” without being able to define it precisely’
From the very moment that the ideology of progression was even born, it was challenged by the voices that would later (from the second half of the 19th century onwards) be called ‘conservative’. Conservatives, in line with a reminiscence on the human experiences of being and the historical time that preceded ‘enlightened’ rationalism and materialism, did not see culture as only and just emerging. Many among them saw what was happening not as a development but rather as a kind of demolition of an existing culture. In this sense, of course, culture itself is intimately linked to the dominant religion, for it is that which imbues spiritually, that which cultivates ‘matter’. Among the greatest names, Burke in the British Isles, de Maistre and de Bonald in France, and Donoso Cortés in Spain have sharply criticized the idea of an ‘evolving culture’ regarding ‘Enlightenment’.
Although not all authors, ‘real’ and ‘so-called’ conservatives explicitly denied cultural evolution,[8] most of them agreed that the gradual and then accelerating process of turning away from the metaphysics that still existed in the background of the Christian civilization, ie the spreading of rationalist philosophy and its inevitable consequences were not something that could be counted as ‘the construction of a new culture’. There was also a broad consensus that the political and economic consequences, such as the totalitarian democracy of the French Revolution (and the subsequent Napoleonic dictatorship) or the conditions created by early capitalism, mechanization and industrialism, were not what could be considered a real improvement on the previous conditions. These two tendencies, progressive and conservative, still define our thinking about the nature of culture; and the concept is, therefore, fraught with contradictions to this day.
What is certain is that whatever one thinks about history, we all intuitively feel the meaning of the word ‘culture’ without being able to define it precisely. For most people today, the word ‘culture’ means something like ‘a comprehensive system of the behaviour, of institutions, customs, and concepts of truth’ that defines one’s own place in the world. One does not usually question one’s own culture: culture is what makes something ‘right’ and something ‘wrong’, yet people generally agree that no human society is ‘without culture’. From this point of view, the various ‘savage’ (or ‘barbarian’) peoples once called ‘uncultured’—although this definition is now less used because of the spreading of political correctness—are rather ‘low-cultured’ peoples, even called as such by Greek and Roman authorities of antiquity, who, moreover, were fond of calling anyone ‘barbarian’ who was not Greek or Roman.[9] There is, therefore, no agreed definition of culture today, although ‘Western culture’ or ‘Far-Eastern culture’ are still common terms in various texts and discourses. The history of the relationship between culture and this civilization takes us back to the end of the 18th century, to the age of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’.
Today, culture and civilization are synonymous concepts, there is no sharp dividing line. Yet the word civilization is also used—implicitly—to include the concept of technology: the emergence of ‘civilized’ man is still seen as a long process. This is still the legacy of the developmentalist and evolutionist thought of the 18th century. The notion of civilization is most commonly associated with the beginning of urbanization, conceived of as a higher stage than a hunter-gatherer, nomadic or semi-nomadic economy: the first civilized peoples would be the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, or the first farmers of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, who ‘lived in the first centres of civilization’. The concept of civilization was derived from the Latin civitas (city) and the word civilis (city-dweller), which came into German and English through French mediation. However, it was only from the second half of the 18th century that it began to be used in connection with a state of progress or development.
Culture and Civilization: Kant and Spengler
The concept of culture was first equated with civilization by Kant. Kant used the concept of culture in the Ciceronian sense, ie ‘the (philosophical) cultivation of the soul’: culture is a means by which ‘man becomes man. ‘Kant also placed the two in a hierarchical relationship: civilization, he believed, was that which makes life—in the material sense—comfortable and pleasant.[10]
‘To a high degree, we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized—perhaps too much for our own good—in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality—for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honour and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required’.[11]
The creation of a true culture, then, for Kant, implies a kind of deeper morality, a kind of goal that still needs to be pursued. For Kant, the goal of ‘Enlightenment’ would be precisely to raise the level of civilization (ie technology) that has been achieved to the level of true culture. Typically, for evolutionists, Kant also saw the connection between the rise of technology and the rise of moral standards. Thinking in evolutionary terms of different ‘stages’ and developmental schemes, he assumed that there was only ‘one step left’ (whatever is hard to achieve) to the creation of ‘true culture’ since the developing and advanced order of life would, as it were, bring about the moral and intellectual rise of man.
One of the most important conservative philosophers of the 20th century, Oswald Spengler, defined the relationship between culture and civilization in a way that was precisely the opposite of Kant’s. In his view, it is culture that in all respects—in time, in ideas, in importance—is far superior to civilization—something that can only be compared to Goethe’s ‘primordial phenomenon’ (Urphänomen) of his ‘transcendental natural science’. ‘Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world,’[12] he writes; culture is thus the ultimate unity of history behind which there is no ‘going back’. According to Spengler, ‘cultures are organisms’, and world history is the accumulation of these different cultures with different archetypes. Human history consists of the emergence, contact, and struggle of cultures independent of each other, so that there is no single world history or progress, but only the coexistence of many cultures: their unfolding, flourishing, survival, and final decline.
‘A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality’
The birth of a culture cannot be traced back to purely material processes any more than the birth of human beings, animals, and plants requires an act of conception that presupposes a spiritual starting point and can be linked to a constitutive act of self-consciousness that cannot be derived simply from material processes.
‘A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens out of the protospirituality (dem urseelenhaften Zustande) of ever-childish humanity, and detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and mortal thing from the boundless and enduring. It blooms on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which plant-wise it remains bound.’ [13]
By making the emergence of cultures dependent on the notion of the soul, on a spiritual and non-material impulse of creation, Spengler completely contradicts all the ideas that explain the emergence of culture or civilization by some kind of mechanical, or at best, practical causes—such as Marx’s work, the contemporary Harari’s ‘agricultural revolution’[14] or even Kant’s ‘refinement of habits’. [15] Spengler sharply distinguished the concept, idea and phenomenon of civilization from culture. While culture is primarily an archetypal phenomenon, for him civilization is primarily a ‘mechanism’.
Thus, for Spengler, culture is indeed a kind of living being, an organism, which, like physical organisms, has a kind of spirituality, essence and individuality, while at the same time, because of its similarity to other cultures, it has a number of properties from which one can infer a universal concept of culture.
The very essence of Spengler’s theory of culture and his interpretation of the concept of culture is the idea of ‘organicity’, that is, its living, non-mechanical nature. Culture is like a living organism—not an artificial, rational objectivity modelled on a machine, but an extension of the generally characteristic structure of life, understood as the primordial subject’s constant self-creation, into a physical and spiritual space. Cultures are, for him, superlative human organisms[16 ], that is, organisms that have cycles of fertilization, growth, expansion, exhaustion and decay similar to those of physical living beings.
The series of different cultures is not connected like the interlocking chain of human or even animal generations. ‘These cultures, sublimated life-essences, grow with the same superb aimlessness as the flowers of the field.’[17 ] Yet certain cultural phenomena do repeat themselves, just as the cycles of human life repeat themselves between birth and inevitable death.
In the background of a culture, however, Spengler finds a specific archetypal symbol—a transcendental form conceived in the manner of Goethe’s Urphänomen or Plato’s Forms—which he assumes to be the initial fertilizing impulse. The different cultures, in his view, have different archetypal symbols in which the most characteristic aspirations of a given culture are expressed. For example, in the case of our Western culture—Spengler calls it, with reference to Goethe, a Faustian—the ‘desire to conquer infinite space’, to which, in his view, the building of Gothic cathedrals can be traced back just as much as the increased assertion and use of technology.
[1] Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes, II. 5. 13., Reclam, Stuttgart, 1997, p. 162.
[2] From Latin cultura ‘a cultivating, agriculture’ figuratively ‘care, culture, an honoring’, from past participle stem of colere ‘to tend, guard; to till, cultivate’, https://www.etymonline.com/word/culture, accessed 16 February 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion.
[5] There are also many traces of this in Christian culture. One of these is the ritual commemoration of the Last Supper during the sacrifice of the Mass.
[6] The so-called ‘Whig view of history’ (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from a past of ignorance and oppression to a ‘glorious present’. Simon Blackburn, ‘Whig view of history’ https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199541430.001.0001/acref-9780199541430-e-3300, accessed 16 February 2025. The origin of the term is linked to the Whig (liberal) party, of which, paradoxically, the ‘father of conservatism’ Edmund Burke was an active member (although after the radicalization of the party and his departure from it, Burke distinguished between ‘old Whigs’ and ‘new Whigs.’ Cf. Edmund Burke, Appealing from the new to the old Whigs and other writings.)
[7] Cf. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. In a manner very typical of the progressivist narrative, Elias also wrote about premodern societies, institutions and people in a way that drew his knowledge entirely from books. He certainly never met anyone who could be described as ‘premodern’ in any sense. The premodern society of the North American (Lakota) Indians, for example, is described by Lame Deer, a Sioux Indian shaman, in a way quite contrary to the processes Elias describes. A book of interviews with a white writer reveals much about what a truly pre-modern state of mind must have been like. In particular, the modesty of the Indians, still untouched by the modernistic white, ‘Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ civilization and their emphatic avoidance of vulgarity are emphasized in the chapter entitled ‘Two in a blanket’. According to Lame Deer, the Indians were repeatedly shocked by the rudeness and materialistic primitivity of the ‘civilized’ white man. (John Fire (Lame) Deer and Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, Simon and Schuster Inc., New York, 1972, pp. 139–154.).
[8] The ‘father of conservatism’, Burke, for example, postulated a development in human history that could be attributed to a chance interplay of favourable circumstances, analogous to the seedling of a plant falling in a place where all the conditions are present for it to grow into a huge tree. There is no automatism or inevitability about it, and what threatens it above all is revolutionary impatience.
[9] To all this, it should be added that in the processes of history, in the great cultures of pre-Christian (or non-Christian) antiquity, Greco–Roman, Persian or Chinese, the eternal struggle between the forces of light and darkness, culture and barbarism, order and chaos, was evaluated: this is what poets and chroniclers have depicted in the concept regarding ‘barbarian’ peoples. In the Christian formulation of the Middle Ages, theologians saw in history the symbols of the history of salvation, the dialogue of God and man, a destiny always going beyond itself towards transcendence, and in this sense, they raised the problem of Christian and ‘pagan’ (or ‘barbarian’) peoples.
[10] Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, https://web.itu.edu.tr/~girayg/comprehensive/docs/Kant%20-%20Idea%20for%20a%20Universal%20History%20….pdf, accessed: 16 February 2025.
[12] Oswald Spengler, The decline of the West, Transl. Charles Frances Atkinson, New York, A. Knopf, inc. 1926, p. 105.
[13] Spengler, 1926, p. 106.
[14] Cf. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens.
[15] Cf. Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View.
[16] Spengler, 1926, p. 101.
[17] Ibid., p. 21.
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