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RESPONSES TO

PHENOMENON OF
CULTURE
INTRODUCTION
Our discussion here is not about the history of
the ideas that has emerged from the past
regarding the phenomenon.
Our discourse would simply dwell on the types
of attitudes-responses vis--vis the
phenomenon of cultures.
Then we would attempt to outline the major
philosophical options that more or less arise
from it
TERMS
Terms like "culture" and "civility" are relatively recent
in their current use.
Civilization: The word "civilization" existed in the
French language in the 17th century.
It assumed a meaning used in judiciary practice, i.e.
the fact of rendering civility to a criminal process.
1757 Victor Riqueti of Mirabeau (the father of
Mirabeau of th French Revolution) adopted it in his
work LAmi de Hommes ou Traite sur la Population.
Ten years later was the English equivalent
"civilisation" used in the work of Professor Adam
Ferguson: "An Essay on the History of Civil Society".
Victor Riqueti of Mirabeau Adam Ferguson
TERMS
Culture: The word "culture" existed already in the
Latin Classic as substantive of "coltivare" (to cultivate)
the earth, metaphorically the spirit.
It did not become dominant until the 18th century.
The modern meanings of these two terms in
different languages are distinct from its other:
"culture" refers to the formation or refinement of
the spirit, therefore to the perfection of the
individual,
"civility" refers to the social organization and to
technique.
humanitas: the equivalent meaning in the classic
world.
TERMS
Humanitas: According to Paolo Filiasi
Carcano, it has the connotation of being
ethnocentric, aristocratic or selective, and
absolutist.
Ethnocentric because it refers itself to that which
belongs to specific group (nation or more nations)
or to groups which the speaker participates.
Selective, because it chooses among aspects of
the life of the group that which weighs more.
Absolutist, because it is valued as unique
and undisputed value
TERMS
Accurate meaning of Culture: The meaning of
the term "culture" developed into a more
accurate sense as it is used in ethnology and
cultural anthropology.
Cultural is distinct from the physical which
studies the organism and its biological
evolution.
And also the term "civility" was adopted at
one time by history (Arnold Joseph Toynbee),
as a result of their empirical content.
TERMS
Therefore, culture extends itself to the
whole different aspects of human
behaviour from one group to another.
This meaning cuts itself off from absolute
valuation, and take as point of reference the
group proper.
This understanding of culture deconstructs the
absolutist, aristocratic or elitist perspective that
dominated the previous centuries.
TERMS
Nota Bene: The meaning and the use of the term are
very recent.
However, the spread of it is very limited: it emerged
from the exigencies of historical research of the past
century, and of ethnology and cultural anthropology
in this century.
Based on the anthropological use of the term "culture",
we have presented the phenomenon of cultural
plurality, as it is observable from the outside.
And that which is observable from the outside of
individuals and human groupings is essentially their
behavior.
TERMS
Here,it is not only the case of behaviors, but
we also consider:
on the one part, also psychical acts
(believing, judging, understanding, concepts,
reasons, perceptions, etc.),
on the other part, the cultural objects (that is,
the modifications of natural environment and
of natural things, products, clothing,
ornaments, constructions, work of arts,
instruments).
They all belong to the common consensus
of a particular culture.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
We will now consider the attitudes and responses.
The spontaneous attitude of everybody which is
traditional because it is acquired but increasingly being
developed, and being lived in a determined human
grouping is that of identifying the human being with
those human variations or human realizations which we
know;
situating human behavior and his world within the
picture of the culture of the group,
coinciding within that picture is the structure, and the
limits of human nature, and of reality,
placing a sign of equivalence between the scale of
values inherent in those pictures and lines of perfection
in every human being.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Attitudes and responses more or less
elaborated and known according to the
intensity, duration and the extension of
the encounter and according to the
capacity set and character of each
individual they tend towards two poles
or fundamental types:
Confirmation of the Spontaneous
convictions
Curious Reception & Reflective Crisis
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
First type : confirmation of the
spontaneous convictions" precedent to
the encounter and of "defensive refutation"
to that which the encounter excludes.
There is a tendency of the individual to
identify himself as human being within a
given culture
And this includes his/her perfection with
the behaviors and the aspects of the
world, which this culture places in the
summit of the scale of values.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
The eventual reception of foreign elements will
be done in the measure in which these are in
conformity or in line with the development of
this particular culture.
For example, a culture that values war, it
receives also military techniques, a good
deal of it is new provided it is not against its
cult of honor, and its social structure.
This example was true with the so-called
"barbarians" of Europe in the Roman
Empire.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Such is also true in our time in our local
situation, the Filipino culture which value war
receives military training and weapons from the
USA, however without compromising our
national sovereignty, our honor as an
independent nation.
All that are excluded from that characteristic of a
human being in a given culture, will be
considered as strange, primitive, vulgar, deviant,
decadent, perverse, proper to the "damned
masses".
This kind of judgment is measured in reference
to the scheme determined by that very culture.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Such type of attitude includes basically a
distinction between nature and culture.
Culture and civility, as a better
manifestation of man in a given group,
come to be conceived as way of unique
extension of human nature, its perfection
and maturity.
This can assume itself in more or less
explicit philosophical perspective.
Rationalism will justify that culture, so
understood and actualized some how in
a group, ought to be the fruit of reason.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Illuminism and Positivism tend to conceive it as the
point of progress of humanity, which is decisive to all
that which existed and exist beyond it. It must be deep
and widespread in the future.
Idealism makes a stage more advanced or the
necessary process of the spirit, which reassures in
itself dialectically all the preceding stages.
Dialectical Materialism simply overturns the
underlying base of such process.
Evidently, the philosophical perspectives, which allow
the insertion of a given culture in a dynamic context,
offer the advantage of reabsorbing in appearance the
grouping of the phenomenon, which we have called
cultural.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Second type : Curious reception and
Reflexive Crisis
The encounter with the phenomenon of the
cultural diversity leads us back to the
question on what really is the human being.
If we look with openness to the diversity of
behaviors and of the cultural worlds, no
amount of refutation as simply human
deformations can really justify it.
In other words, no one set of human
behavior can simplify the complexity of
diversity of behaviors and cultural worlds.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
Therefore, one is placed on a dilemma,
at least apparently of one and of many:
One: the unity of human nature in
some common aspect, declared
essentially unique,
Many: the other is admitting the
radical multiplicity of the human being
himself/herself.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
First horn of the dilemma: This refers to an
aspect that is common and simple which is
essentially unique and is accessible to all,
This is individuated by some in an
indeterminate relation to the divinity
interdependently from social, moral, cognitive
contents.
Friedrich Schliermacher: considered this
as a pure religious sentiment.
Buddhism: the Nirvana of some theoretical
forms of Buddhism,

ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
First horn of the dilemma: This refers to an aspect
that is common and simple which is essentially
unique and is accessible to all,
Aldous Huxley: considered this as a vague
pantheism.
To some, this is only a tendency this thinking is
represented by the currents from the Imitation of
Christ - suspicious to the communitarian and
intellectual aspects of Christianity.
By others, it is in a purely formal moral like the clean
hands, which is so denounced by the existentialists,
Marxist, Christians.
it is in forms of heroism of Andre Malraux or
the stoicism of Henry Montherlant.
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
First horn of the dilemma: This refers to an
aspect that is common and simple which is
essentially unique and is accessible to all,
And finally by many, it is in various
historical epochs of decadence (Egypt,
Babylon of the century).
Or it is purely in the biological being of man:
pure vitalism, a return to pure nature
(Rousseau, Romanticists, primitivism of
Nietzsche?).
ATTITUDES & RESPONSES
The second horn of the dilemma that pure
multiplicity takes away whatever unity of human
nature, whatever similarity and commonality which
would not be only apparent to human beings of diverse
groups.
The other can be absolutely considered as non-
human or pure enemy as between the society of rats.
This justifies slavery, extermination or total isolation,
and in these extreme consequences, it reconciles itself
strangely to the limited-results of the first type of
attitude-response that of the proper identification of
man.
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
a) Biological Point of View:
Diversity of cultures is based on racial
differences
Another one is the evolutionary view which
indicates the dynamic moments of evolution.
b) Psycho-Social Point of View:
Many psychologists believe that man during

his plasmic development up to the time that


he/she becomes an individual, can become
anything: genius or criminal, artist or
mathematician or saint or desired personality.
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
Many sociologists affirmed that the human
individual depends without residue from the
society in which he/she belongs.
Margareth Mead (famous anthropologist)
tends to assert the same thing for
temperament and personality of the two
sexes.
Oswald Spengler: departing from history,
has conceived the great cultures as closed
organisms in which participants differ totally
from each other.
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
c) Moral Point of View:
No cultural group tolerates moral

transgressions moreover certain limits


Moral extends itself in some way to all

universal behaviors of the group (being


the distinction between "moral" and
"customs" and more that between
"natural laws" and "positive laws", slow
and rather limited to the theory).
The great diversity of cultural groups has

become the frequent motive for moral


relativism.
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
c) Moral Point of View:
The negation of contents and moral structures,

of a seducing disorientation in nihilism.


Examples:
the Greek Sophists,
Montaigne, and also Sartre (although it
would be difficult to prove the cultural
motivation of his affirmations).
For Sartre, freedom constitutes man as
such, being his existence without essence
or nature.
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
c) Religious Point of View:
The affirmations of radical diversity

among human beings do not count in


themselves.
Unity still prevails despite diversity. (1 st of

response & attitude)


Moreover, a complex factor does seldom

intervenes, situated beyond the human in


the transcendent initiative of the divine,
isolating therefore from our problem
DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEWS
c) Religious Point of View:
There is a need to take into account with

reservation the examples that come to us


in mind the three types of men:
the Gnostics,
the elect people (the chosen people)
the damned masses of the varied
Judaic and Christian deformations,
pariahs and the impure of Hinduism
In short, religious diversity

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