The philosopher defined civilization as a cultural type. Culture and civilization. their philosophical understanding. Attitude to the problem of "culture-civilization" in the history of philosophy. Department of Social and Humanitarian Disciplines
1. The concept of culture and civilization.
2. Patterns of the cultural-historical process.
3. Scientific and technological progress and development of culture.
For the first time the concept of culture was used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero (106-43 BC). By culture, he understood the beneficial effect that philosophy has on the human mind.
In the Middle Ages, culture was associated with the personal perfection of a person. In the Renaissance, a universally developed, active person was considered cultural.
In the Age of Enlightenment (XVIII century), culture was understood as the embodiment of a reasonable , measured by the achievements of sciences and crafts.
Since the Renaissance, the concept of "culture" has come into use, has become widely used. At the same time, culture is comprehended as something opposite to "nature", nature. I. Herder, who considered culture as the development of the abilities of the human mind, belongs to the definition of culture as a second nature.
culture-it is a set of values created by man. This is a certain level of development of society, as well as the creative abilities and forces of man, which are embodied in the historical forms and types of organization of people's lives and activities, in the material and spiritual values created by them. Culture covers the life and activities of the individual, the system of social production, social ties and relationships, forming society as a whole. Culture, as A. Florensky noted, is a language that unites humanity; the environment in which the individual grows up.
When they talk about culture, they mean something valuable for a person not as a physical, but as a spiritual being. Because of this, culture means ethical, aesthetic, religious values. They are called spiritual values, and the areas of their functioning - spiritual culture . spiritual culture- this is the content of human consciousness in the form of meanings, values, thoughts and ideas, creative ideas, fantastic images, which is embodied in the forms of social consciousness (mythology, religion, morality, art, science and philosophy) and in the elements of the objectified spiritual (language and writing, social values and norms, cultural traditions, information and knowledge, religious and socio-political ideologies).
Values penetrate into the sphere of production and into the sphere of everyday life, therefore, the concept of " material culture » . material culture- this is the world of material things or artifacts of culture (lat. arte- artificial; factus- created), its substantive state. Material culture covers: objects and tools of labor, material conditions of human life and activity, its technique and technology, property, that is, everything that is aimed at optimizing the physical existence of a person, at reproducing the material conditions of his life.
Spiritual and material culture are united by the fact that they are not only created by man, but also exist for man, i.e. culture embodies not only labor, but also human spirituality.
There is also the concept social culture ». social culture- represents the sphere of interpersonal connections and relationships. The social forms of life and activity of people include: clan, tribe, family, class, social group, social communities: nationality, people, nation, as well as state, formal-bureaucratic and informal organizations, social institutions and public associations. Among the varieties of social culture, one can note: folklore or ethnic, national, elite, mass, youth subcultures. Examples of social culture can be: the culture of communication, the culture of family relations, legal culture, rituals, customs, traditions (as structural components of any culture).
Culture as a system encompasses human achievements in the field of material and spiritual production, as well as in the organization of social life. Man creates culture, but culture also forms man himself.
Any phenomenon of culture is sensual-supersensible, carrying a system of natural and socio-spiritual properties. Culture includes the process, result and motivation of human activity, directed both outside and inside the person himself..
A person, as a subject and as a result of the cultural process, lives and develops in society, therefore culture is a specifically social way of life and self-development of a person. It's not only the totality of the results of human activity, but also its process itself, as well as truly human relations between people.
The multidimensional essence of culture is manifested in its following main functions that determine the social and individual-personal being of a person: social (humanistic), cognitive, creative, meaning-forming, axiological, semiotic, normative , integrative, emotional-psychological, compensatory, as well as the function of continuity of socially significant cultural experience.
Social or humanistic function It is manifested in the fact that culture contributes to the transformation, improvement, humanization of a person and relations between people, and, consequently, the spiritualization of society. cognitive function It is realized in the fact that through culture a person receives knowledge about the world, about himself and about other people. In addition, self-awareness of any culture is impossible without interest in another culture and without an attempt to understand it, without a dialogue of cultures. T creative function - culture is a way of human activity to transform and streamline the natural and social environment, as a result of which the environment of human existence is created and improved, the development of the person himself and his abilities as a creator of culture takes place. Meaningful function - there is a development of cultural meanings that are relevant to a person, motivating his life and work, material and spiritual production. Axiological (gr. axio - value)function expressed in the fact that culture authorizes the system of value orientations of human life and society. semiotic function (semiotics - the doctrine of signs and sign systems) - culture consolidates through a system of generally accepted signs and symbols, the content of its spiritual and moral meanings and values. normative function finds its expression in the fact that the rules of communication are formed within the culture between people, norms, characteristics and standards of their behavior. Integrative function - culture forms a system of stable social ties, uniting people into families, social groups and communities. Emotional-psychological function - development of a "culture of feelings", enrichment of the emotional sphere of human existence, without which a full life is impossible. Compensatory function - culture is able to distract a person from the hardships and routine of everyday life, to create such a virtual reality that compensates for the shortcomings of life reality (this function is especially characteristic of modern mass culture). Succession function is expressed in that culture is the collective memory of society, the sphere of accumulation of experience. Each new generation of people does not begin their lives from a “clean slate”, but taking into account the positive and negative aspects of the life experience of previous generations; which are fixed in cultural traditions and transmitted from generation to generation (for the functions of culture, see also topic 31).
Modern culture is also formed as a system consisting of images or lifestyles. There is a common - dominant type of culture, which is transformed in different strata of society, reaching the opposite in these transformations. Every culture has its own anticulture , representing the reality where the principles prevailing in society are not rejected, but appear in a different - antagonistic form of expression. For example, escapism, a pathological lifestyle, the socioculture of poverty.
Along with the concept of culture, in philosophy, starting from the 18th century, the term " civilization» (lat. civilis- civil, state). Civilization - this is a certain type of social organization of society, aimed at the reproduction, increase of social wealth and the regulation of civil life.
concept "civilization" arose in France in the XVΙΙΙ century, and denoted the optimal, based on rational grounds, social structure. The term civilization was first introduced by a French thinker V. Mirabeau in "The Friend of the People, or a Treatise on Population" (1757). French philosophers of the Enlightenment strive to replace the concept of "culture" with the concept of "civilization", seeing its meaning in improving the natural mechanisms of people's behavior that affect the historical development of society. So, P. Holbach wrote about the “civilization of peoples” taking place in the course of history, meaning by this the process of improving their way of life.
German educators (I. Herder, G. Lessing), emphasizing the importance of moral education, associated the concept of "culture" with the development of the human personality, while they identified civilization with citizenship and activist socio-political life.
In the 19th century, civilization began to be understood not only as a socio-historical process, but also as an already achieved state of society. Thus, the American scientist L. Morgan considered civilization as a stage of social progress following savagery and barbarism. At the same time, the standard of civilized development was the type of society that developed in Europe during the Enlightenment. However, by the end of the XX century. faith in the progress of European civilization wavered, and gradually civilization began to be distinguished from culture. The idea of civilization as a set of material and social benefits provided to man by the development of a system of social production has come into use. There has even been a tendency to oppose culture and civilization (O. Spengler, G. Marcuse).
In modern literature, civilization, as a rule, is considered from the point of view of the level of social organization of society, its dependence on technology and technology, and technological progress comes to the fore. Therefore, civilization is understood as an analogue of material culture, especially the modern modernized society of the era of scientific and technical progress. It symbolizes the modern urban lifestyle, pragmatism and comfort brought about by technological advances.
In the history of mankind, various types of civilizations have developed. A well-known English researcher of the philosophy of history A. Toynbee claims that at present there are five civilizations: Western, Eastern Orthodox, Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern. O. Spengler defines civilization as the final stage in the development of any culture: it is evidence of its decline and degradation due to the urbanization of the world itself and the mechanization of man. Dying, culture is reborn into civilization.
In philosophy and sociology, there are four approaches to understanding civilization: 1) the identification of civilization and culture, when these concepts are considered synonymous; 2) civilization is interpreted as the ideal of the progressive development of mankind; 3) civilization acts as a certain stage in the development of local cultures; 4) civilizations are considered as qualitatively different ethnic (associated with belonging to any people) social formations that characterize the level of socio-material development of certain regions of the planet.
Each civilization arises on the energy field of culture. Civilizations in history could approach or move away from culture to varying degrees, but never existed separately from it. When talking about civilization, its beginning is associated with a qualitatively new stage in the development of material culture - the use of technology. In science, the division of the early history of mankind into savagery, barbarism and civilization is known. The beginning of the latter is associated with the ability to use metals in production.
The concepts of culture and civilization are often used as synonyms, but sometimes they are opposed, declaring the hostility of civilization to culture. It was first mentioned in the 18th century. Rousseau, who criticized civilization for the fact that a person lives in it not by natural, but by values imposed on him, obeying external, and not internal, factors of being. In the 19th century Nietzsche expressed a similar thought: progress gives birth to a small person, the further progress progresses, the more the person decreases. Thinkers of the 20th - early 21st centuries. no longer doubt that, having made a person's life more convenient, progress did not make him happier, but made lack of spirituality the main problem of culture.
Today, researchers often interpret the relationship between culture and civilization in the following way. Culture is understood as the spiritual life of the individual and society or spiritual culture. Under civilization - material and technological production or material culture. According to this position, culture is the inner spiritual content of civilization, while civilization is the outer material shell of culture. If culture can be compared with the brain of a society, then civilization is its “material body”. Culture creates means and methods for the development of the personal principle in a person, it is aimed at the formation and satisfaction of his spiritual needs; civilization supplies people with the means of subsistence, it is aimed at satisfying their utilitarian needs. Culture is spiritual values, morality, achievements of philosophy, art, science, education, and civilization is the degree of technological, economic, socio-political development of society.
Such an interpretation of culture and civilization in anthropological terms suggests the idea of a mismatch of concepts cultural and civilized human. What makes a person cultured is "internal culture" - the transformation of the achievements of human culture into the fundamental settings for the experience, thinking and activity of the individual. A civilized person is one who has only an "external culture" consisting in observing the norms and rules of decency accepted in a civilized society. If this has not become an internal (existential) need for him, then he cannot be considered truly cultural.
In connection with the rapid pace of development of industrial-technogenic civilization, the idea of distinguishing between culture and civilization has acquired particular relevance. It can be said that the understanding of what is leading and what is subordinate in the relationship between culture and civilization determines the paradigm of society's values. If culture is subordinated to civilization and serves its needs, society, as a rule, tends to tilt towards material values and material prosperity, but there is a certain spiritual impoverishment, the dominance of pragmatism and utilitarianism.
If civilization serves culture and contributes to its development, then sufficient harmonization between material and spiritual values is possible in society, which ensures genuine, not imaginary progress, which at the present stage of scientific and technological progress has turned into global problems that threaten the existence of mankind.
The difference between civilization and culture in the modern era acquires a qualitative character. So, civilization can be understood as the creation of a material and technical basis capable of ensuring the development of society and its culture, increasing the overall comfort of human existence. Such an understanding of civilization is due to the fact that here priority is given to scientific and technological progress, but not to moral development, technology and technology, but not to spiritual improvement.
The dominance of cultural values over the utilitarian values of civilization creates a prerequisite for determining the nature of human needs, separating genuine and original human needs from fictitious and imaginary ones. The goal of cultural development makes a person reconsider his guidelines in relation to nature, society and himself, contributes to the implementation of humanistic values and ideals, addressing the problems of the person himself, and not just the problems of developing production, economics, management in their technological aspect.
Thus, the problem of correlation between civilization and culture has both theoretical and practical implications. The first one is aimed mainly at satisfying material needs, while the second one, one way or another, expresses the desire for super-utilitarian value priorities of truth, goodness, beauty, which ensures the emancipation of the personal beginning of a person, on which the building of human culture is based. The realization of these values and the need for them can take historically changing forms, due to ideas about beauty, goodness, or the interpretation of truth, but their awareness as the main meta-values remains unchanged.
Each people creates its own distinctive culture, taking into account the fact that every culture has a stable, conservative side in the form of tradition and an innovative side in the form of creativity.
The clash of culture and civilization leads to the need to understand the patterns of movement of the cultural-historical process, to correlate them with the patterns of social development as a whole.The idea of the development of society, as a rule, is considered in connection with social progress. If we proceed from the fact that the determining factor in the development of society is progress in the productive forces, then the idea of progress acts as a universal one, as a regularity in the development of society from simple forms to more complex and perfect forms. However, if the definition of the level of civilization by the degree of development of its technical potential is beyond doubt, then the situation with culture is not so simple. Often the cultural value of a phenomenon is determined by its antiquity. In other words, the true values of culture are determined by time.
Attempts to identify the patterns of the cultural process lead to the need to answer the following questions: what underlies culture, what determines the stages of its development, what are the relationships between its elements, the nature of relations with other cultures.
Starting from the Enlightenment (XVIII century), on the basis of identifying certain patterns objectively inherent in culture, the following basic concepts of the cultural process have developed in science: evolutionary, diffuse, and the theory of cultural cycles.
Supporters evolutionary theories believe that cultures evolve, overlap one another and can only exist layer by layer. Evolution in culture and nature has common patterns, but culture has its own energy potential, therefore, falling into culture, a person receives a positive or negative charge. Evolutionism insists on the unity of cultures. Different cultures are equal and equal, and can be understood only as parts of such a unity.
Diffusionism as a culturological trend, it believes that cultures do not evolve, but spill over, interpenetrate, forming cultural circles or cultural autonomies. The ethno-cultural map of the world does not coincide with the political one. The basis of cultural autonomy is the elements that make the cultural type sustainable: language, everyday habits, residential buildings, ceramics, clothing.
Theory cultural cycles (cultural-historical typology, local civilizations) proceeds from the fact that culture is represented by different types of cultures that replace each other. Each type has a certain stability, goes its own way and dies. Elements that make a cultural-historical type sustainable: language, political independence, cultural identity; the richness of culture, achieved through the diversity of its national features; preservation of relic crops; lack of borrowings in the infantile period of culture.
The variety of theories of cultural development testifies to the difficulty of comprehending the patterns of cultural development, and attempts to identify them are often associated with specific crisis situations experienced by culture. This predetermined the following philosophical models of understanding culture:- naturalistic model reduces culture to its substantive forms and sees in it a human continuation of nature (antique philosophy, J.-J. Rousseau, G. Spencer, etc.). The nature-centrism of this model represents culture as the highest stage in the evolution of nature, associated with the development and implementation of the abilities of a “natural person”. According to this model, man, as the highest link in the development of nature, acts expediently, based on his natural needs.
- classic model culture developed in the XVIII-XIX centuries (the Age of Enlightenment in Europe). This model is the result of the growth of the self-consciousness of the European man, and is largely anthropocentric. She considers a person as a rational and active being, developing his spiritual potential in every possible way. The classical model of culture is based on the principles of humanism, rationalism and historicism.
In cognitive terms, this model is characterized by the separation of the subject and object of knowledge. In the philosophical sense, it is idealistic, because the main sphere of human development is the spiritual. Culture is accepted as a spiritual education, integral to the creative potential of human consciousness.
The identification of culture with spiritual phenomena led to criticism of the classical model of culture for its abstractness. Thus, in the philosophy of Marxism, the classical model of culture received a materialistic interpretation. Culture is presented here not as a purely spiritual sphere of upbringing and enlightenment of the individual, but as the sphere of creating the necessary conditions (primarily material ones) for the life and development of a person. Culture can be understood not from itself, but only in connection with society, with social production.
Later it turned out that within the framework of the classical model it is not possible to overcome the difficulties of a purely rationalistic knowledge of culture. The inconsistency of claims for strict scientific objectivity in the study of culture was discovered, and the need to take into account interests and values in its understanding was outlined. This led to the conclusion that humanitarian knowledge about culture is formed in unity with the self-consciousness of its researcher.
The crisis of the classical model was also caused by the fact that it embodied the ideology of Eurocentrism: all non-European forms of culture were considered underdeveloped, inferior to the European one due to the lack of scientific and technological achievements and liberal democratic values in them.
The development of contacts with non-European cultures, the crisis of colonialism, doubts about the linear progressiveness of the development of culture, the relative independence of cultures contributed to the emergence of the idea of the equivalence of cultures, their local coexistence and cyclical development (O. Spengler and others). As a result, the idea of a "dialogue of cultures" is affirmed, which led to the emergence of new - "non-classical" philosophical models of culture.
- Non-classical or modernist model culture is focused on the daily life of a person. The culture of an individual, people, nation, society is considered here as separate elements - the "worlds" of the socio-cultural sphere, interacting with each other and perceived by a person in his direct experiences, and not in purely rational concepts. This model is characterized by: the priority of the individual over the public, ideological skepticism, the idea of multidimensionality and spontaneity of the world. It, like the classical model, is based on the absolutization of the subjective principle.
- postmodern model rejects the possibility of adequate knowledge of the world and its rational transformation. In ontological terms, it is connected with the idea that the world, as it were, resists the influence of man on it, its claims to rational creation and transformation.
Skepticism about the possibility of a rational transformation of the world entails the rejection of attempts to systematize it: the world does not fit into any theoretical schemes (J. Baudrillard). Here, the subject of culture as the subject of rational ideas about the world is generally abolished and a new way of understanding culture is formed - philosophizing without a subject, suggesting the idea of a spontaneous and spontaneous arrangement of being. Unlike the classical one, the postmodern model denies the possibility of reducing all manifestations of culture to some single fundamental principle.
Various models of culture indicate that the concept of "culture" cannot be expressed by any one definition. Definitions of culture are its interpretations depending on one or another aspect of its consideration. The philosophy of culture has always solved the problem of what culture is in its essence. It is possible to single out the main philosophical approaches to the understanding of culture.
- Activity approach represents culture as a specific way of human activity. He emphasizes the generic way of human existence - creative activity (labor) as the substance of culture. Culture appears here as a "way of activity" (V. Davidovich, Yu. Zhdanov) or "technological context of activity" (Z. Fainburg). Thus culture is understood technology of production and reproduction of man and society especially in terms of their basic needs.
- Axiological an approach in the study of culture, he singles out such a sphere of human existence as world of values(gr. axio- value). According to the supporters of this approach (V. Windelband, G. Rickert, M. Scheler, M. Weber and others), the concept of culture is applicable to the sphere of values. Culture appears here as a combination of material and spiritual values, that is, as the result of human activity. But at the same time, values as a person's awareness of his needs and interests and the correlation of objective reality with them are considered here as incentives for the activity itself. Therefore, culture itself is considered here in the form of a hierarchy of values that are significant for the individual and society as a whole.
According to the axiological approach, culture is the realization of ideal goals, the world, taken from the point of view of its significance for a person. This approach emphasizes the subject-object relationship. His main accents are understanding the essence of values, their cultural significance. Here, the value-worldview representations of a person are taken into account, and his culture-creating activity is considered as the objectification of values.
- Semiotic (symbolic) an approach considers signs and symbols as means of expressing the content of culture, its meanings and values. Thus, it is noted that culture has a symbolic content. The main representative of the symbolic concept of culture, the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, notes the human ability to systematically symbolize the world. According to him, the surrounding world appears to a person as a world of symbols associated with the logic of signs, since a symbol is not just a shell of thought, but also a necessary means of expressing its content. Therefore, he sees the source of culture in the ability of a person to create an artificial world, denoting reality with certain symbols as sign systems (a typical example of a sign system expressing semantic meanings is language as a universal form of culture). Language, myth, religion, art, philosophy, science are the constituent parts of the symbolic circle in which man exists.
All of the above philosophical models of culture and approaches to its comprehension indicate that culture is the most important philosophical category underlying the understanding of man and society.
One of the aspects that reflects the problem of the relationship between culture and civilization is the elucidation of the role and place of scientific and technological progress in human existence and in the development of culture. Science acts, if not as a mouthpiece for the idea of progress, then as an expression of the level of its achievements. The connection between science and civilization, especially modern, technogenic, is beyond doubt. However, its role in the civilizational process began to unfold as hostile to culture.
The result of scientific and technological progress was not only achievements, but also the substitution of culture, or rather the replacement of culture by a technocratic civilization, with the primacy of means over the goal, goals over meaning, meaning over being, technology over man.
Civilization, which is aimed at the possession of material values, reduces the people themselves to the level of things, and consciousness itself - to the level of material consciousness. Here in the first place is not concern for the development of the spirit, creativity, harmony, but the entertainment industry. On its basis, the so-called " Mass culture ”, which not only elevates the human spirit, but corrupts it through the spread and multiplication of lower emotions, feelings and animal passions.
The reason for the crisis of the world of technogenic civilization is not material, but spiritual. It consists in the divergence of culture and civilization, in the humiliation of culture, in the domination of material civilization. This crisis can be overcome only by spiritual renewal, by the growth of culture. The question of the relationship between culture and civilization is due to the specifics of the historical development of mankind, since we are talking about the preservation of the cultural experience of mankind in the conditions of the rapid pace of industrial-technogenic civilization of the era of scientific and technical progress and the global problems of our time. Mankind is capable of destroying itself by means of technical means created, therefore the preservation of culture is the preservation of mankind. And, consequently, a person has no alternative: the future of mankind is the development of culture. Culture manifests itself through the development of man as a conscious, creative and self-active being. The progress of culture acts as one of the laws of the history of society. Each culture, first of all, civilizes society and man.
The point of creative upsurge in solving this problem can be not a new political thinking, not a new religion, not mythology, and that area of science, which marks the beginning of the process of formation of a new scientific consciousness and scientific thinking.
Engaging in science and scientific and technical creativity in itself does not ensure the growth of spirituality. For science (especially for technology) there is enough talent. At a certain stage, it can forget about universal human values, “dissociate itself” from culture.
However, we must not forget that culture is a much older and broader phenomenon than science. There can be no science outside of culture. If cultural values lose their significance, the lack of spirituality begins to dominate in society.
In the reference literature on this topic, see the articles:
Modern philosophical dictionary. - M., 2004. Art.: "Culture", "Marginality", "Post-industrial society", "Civilization".
New philosophical encyclopedia. In 4 volumes - M., 2001. St.:
"Culture", "Mass culture", "Philosophy of culture", "Civilization".
philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. - K., 2002. Art.:
"Culture", "Mass culture", "Marginal culture", "Philosophy of culture", "Civilization".
The word culture is one of the most popular in discussions about eternal philosophical problems. There are hundreds of different definitions of culture and dozens of approaches to its study. In the most general sense, culture is most often understood as the achievements of science and art, as well as the way of behavior learned in the process of education. Word "culture" appeared in Latin (cultura - cultivation, care) and originally referred to the cultivation of the land. The Roman orator Cicero first used the word culture in a figurative sense to characterize human thinking: "Philosophy is the culture of the mind." The concept of culture correlates with another concept of "nature" (natura - nature) and is opposed to it. Man, transforming nature, creates culture, and at the same time he forms himself.
In our time, culture is studied by a number of sciences: history, archeology, ethnography, anthropology, religious studies, sociology, art history, etc. Each of these sciences chooses its own perspective in the study of culture, explores one of the components of culture as a whole (for example, political science studies political culture, and sociology studies the culture of social relations). At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. even a special science of culture arose - cultural studies, which set itself the task of studying not individual elements of culture, but culture as a system. The situation of the dialogue of cultures required new approaches in the study of culture, such as, for example, sociological and anthropological. Despite the fact that culture is studied both by cultural studies and a number of social and human sciences, the philosophical analysis of culture retains its importance. The philosophy of culture has long become a necessary organic component of the philosophical understanding of being, the world and man in the world.
Social philosophy highlights the following cultural functions:
- socializing function. Socialization is the process of assimilation by a person of social roles, skills and abilities. Socialization takes place exclusively in the cultural environment. It is culture that offers a variety of roles and norms of behavior. In sociology and social psychology there is also the concept of "deviation" - the rejection of socially approved norms of behavior;
- communicative function, i.e. interaction between people, social groups and societies.
Function differentiation and integration society, since culture is a product of the coexistence of people, which requires the acquisition of common interests and goals, i.e., integration. At the same time, the set of forms of social interaction is constantly changing, i.e., there is a differentiation of culture;
- sign-communicative function of culture. All cultural phenomena, "artifacts", are signs that carry a symbolic meaning. A feature of human activity is precisely its symbolic nature, thanks to which communication between people is carried out. Signs and symbols are ordered and form systems. Culture can thus be seen as a system of symbols;
- game function culture lies in the fact that within its framework there is also a free, creative activity of people, which is based on competitive and entertaining moments (for example, festivities, competitions, carnivals). The concept of "game" is actively used in modern research, as it allows a deeper understanding of the features of human activity.
What is the place of the individual in culture? In philosophy, there is the following statement: Man is the subject and object of culture. Indeed, culture is the result of people's activities, but at the same time, it is culture that influences the formation of a person, socializes him. Culture is also a way of internal regulation that requires reflection, and not just reproduction. To understand the world means to expand one's attitude towards it. If a person shows a consumerist attitude towards culture, refuses creativity, then he culturally "runs wild". On the contrary, the ability to diversify one's life, to find opportunities for creativity means the ability to enter the world of culture.
What is the relationship between culture and civilization? With the ambiguity of the definitions of both concepts, this question does not have an unambiguous answer. Let's get acquainted with the existing definitions of the concept of "civilization".
Civilization(from lat. civilis - civil, state):
1) a synonym for culture;
2) a certain stage of social development, characterized by the presence of urban settlements, the state and writing;
3) a socio-cultural type with its own religious system.
The concepts of culture and civilization are sometimes used as synonyms (which is typical, for example, for the anthropological approach). Civilization can also be considered as a level of cultural development. From such an understanding come, for example, historians and archaeologists. They consider civilization only the culture in which there are urban settlements, the state and writing. The concepts of "culture" and "civilization", while not being identical, are at the same time closely related. Generally, researchers agree that civilization: - this is, firstly, a certain level of development of culture, and secondly, a certain type of culture with its characteristic features. We can talk about Middle Eastern civilizations, ancient civilizations, etc. In this case, civilization acts as a certain characteristic of the peoples of the world, necessary for their study. N.Ya. Danilevsky called them "cultural-historical types", O. Spengler- "high cultures" A. Toynbee- "civilizations" P. Sorokin- "sociocultural supersystems",: N. Berdyaev- great cultures.
The understanding of civilization as the final stage in the development of culture was proposed by the German philosopher O. Spengler (“The Decline of Europe”). In his opinion, culture is creativity, and civilization is repetition, reproduction and replication. Focusing on the transition of culture into civilization, Spengler believed that this transition was marked not by the development of culture, but by its decline and death,
O. Spengler identified eight main cultures (civilizations) with their own style:
Egyptian;
Indian;
Babylonian;
Chinese;
Greco-Roman;
Magical (Byzantine-Arabic);
Faustian (Western European).
As the ninth culture, he called the emerging Russian-Siberian.
Spengler proceeded from the idea of the existence of a certain leading characteristic that gives each culture a corresponding specificity. Each of the great cultures during its active phase has a complete relationship between all the elements that make up the culture. Over a certain period, one (leading) quality of culture permeates them all. The primary form of every culture is embodied in symbols.
A civilization is also understood as a cultural-historical type with a single religious system characteristic of it (for example, with this approach, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim civilizations are singled out). Such an interpretation of the concept of "civilization" was proposed by the English historian A. Toynbee, who devoted the multi-volume work "Comprehension of History" to the study of the causes of the development and decline of civilizations. Toynbee civilizations are more of a variant of a cultural community. The concept of "civilization" helps to more fully reveal the uniqueness of the cultures of various continents: Europe, America, Asia, Africa, "North" and "South", "West" and "East". Even broader than the concept of "civilization" is the concept of "civilizational type". As such, the West and the East are singled out (sometimes, for brevity, they simply speak of Western and Eastern civilizations). The terms East and West are not geographical, but cultural and philosophical. The East can be defined as a pre-industrial or traditional society. The West is an innovative society, a technical civilization. There are a number of fundamental differences in the relations between society and man in the West and in the East.
1. If the East is characterized by a slow pace of historical development, the dominance of traditions, then in the West innovation prevailed and there were high rates of historical development.
2. The East is a traditional society with a closed and immobile social structure. A person cannot change his social position, he belongs to the social group in which he was included by the very fact of birth. The East is characterized by despotism as a form of government. Western society is a non-traditional type of society: open and mobile. A person has opportunities to change his status, such as education, career, business. It is in the West that such forms of government as democracy and republic arise.
3. Figurative thinking prevails in the East, and the picture of the world is formed by religious and mythological systems. Rational thinking is developing in the West, the highest expression of which is science, which claims to form its own picture of the world.
4. In the East, the public and the natural were perceived as one. Man very harmoniously coexisted both with the surrounding nature and with his own bodily nature. In the West, nature was seen as an object of social influence, which resulted in the environmental problems of the 20th century.
West and East as civilizational types are a theoretical abstraction that largely helps to understand the difference in the ways of development of society. Of course, at the beginning of the 21st century. The East is undergoing tremendous changes that are comprehended within the framework of the theories of modernization and globalization.
Today the West is synonymous with the concept of "developed countries". The East is modernizing, but with varying degrees of success. Researchers note that those eastern countries where the Confucian religious tradition existed (Japan, China) are the most successful along the path of technical civilization. More difficult is the path of India with its religious system of Hinduism. The biggest difficulties are expected on the way of modernization of the country of Muslim culture.
Civilization and culture are concepts closely related to each other. At present, at a certain level of development of a society or a society that has reached cultural studies and other humanities, civilization is most often understood as a certain stage in its development. It is understood that in the primitive era of the history of mankind, all peoples, all tribes have not yet developed those norms of communication, which later became known as civilizational norms. Approximately 5 thousand years ago, in some regions of the Earth, civilizations arose, that is, associations of people, a society based on qualitatively new principles of organization and communication.
In the conditions of civilization, a high level of cultural development is achieved, the greatest values of both spiritual and material culture are created. The problem of the relationship between culture and civilization is the subject of many of the most serious works of well-known theoreticians of culture. Many of them associate it with questions about the fate of culture, civilization, and even all of humanity.
The concept of "civilization" is ambiguous. The term "civilization" comes from the Latin word meaning "civilian". There are at least three main meanings of this word. In the first case, a traditional cultural-philosophical problem is born, which goes back to the German romantics. In this sense, "culture" and "civilization" are no longer perceived as synonymous. The organics of culture is opposed to the deadly technism of civilization. The second meaning of the word presupposes the movement of the world from a split to a single one. A third paradigm-pluralism of individual disparate civilizations is also possible. In this case, the vision of a universal human perspective that goes back to Christianity is being revised.
To develop a more or less precise definition of civilization, it is necessary, in turn, to study major social and cultural phenomena that exist in the form of wholes, i.e. macrohistorical research. N. Danilevsky calls such phenomena cultural-historical types, O. Spengler - developed cultures, A. Toynbee - civilizations, P. Sorokin - metacultures.
All these social and cultural supersystems do not coincide with the nation, or with the state, or with any social group. They transcend geographic or racial boundaries. However, like deep currents, they define a wider civilizational scheme. And everyone is right in their own way. For there is no modern science without taking into account and substantiating the status of an observer.
O. Spengler in his book "The Decline of Europe" formed his understanding of civilization. For Spengler, civilization is such a type of development of society, when the era of creativity, inspiration is replaced by the stage of ossification of society, the stage of impoverishment of creativity, the stage of spiritual devastation. The creative stage is culture, which is being replaced by civilization.
Within the framework of this concept, it turns out, firstly, that civilization means the deadening of culture, and secondly, that civilization is a transition not to a better, but to a worse state of society.
Spengler's concept became widely known, although it was more polemicized than agreed. For example, the great humanist A. Schweitzer assessed Spengler's theory as an attempt to legitimize the right to existence of a civilization free from moral norms, a civilization free from humanistic spiritual principles. According to Schweitzer, the dissemination in society of the idea of the inevitability of a soulless mechanical civilization can only bring pessimism into society and weaken the role of the moral factors of culture. N. Berdyaev called Spengler's mistake that he gave "a purely chronological meaning to the words civilization and culture and saw in them a change of eras." From Berdyaev's point of view, culture exists in the era of civilization, just as civilization exists in the era of culture.
It should be noted that Berdyaev and Schweitzer considered the distinction between culture and civilization to be rather arbitrary. Both great thinkers pointed out that French researchers prefer the word "civilization" ("civilisation"), and the German word "culture" ("Hochkultur", i.e. "high culture"), to refer to approximately the same processes .
But most researchers still do not reduce the difference between culture and civilization to the peculiarities of national languages. In most scientific and reference publications, civilization is understood as a certain stage in the development of society, associated with a certain culture and having a number of features that distinguish civilizations from the pre-civilized stage of development of society. Most often, the following signs of civilization are distinguished.
The presence of the state as a specific organization, management structure, coordinating the economic, military and some other spheres of life of the whole society.
The presence of writing, without which many types of managerial and economic activities are difficult.
The presence of a set of laws, legal norms that have replaced tribal customs. The system of laws proceeds from the equal responsibility of each inhabitant of a civilizational society, regardless of his tribal affiliation. Over time, civilizations come to a written fixation of a set of laws. Written law is the hallmark of a civilized society. Customs are a sign of a non-civilized society. Consequently, the absence of clear laws and norms is a vestige of clan, tribal relations
A certain level of humanism. Even in early civilizations, even if ideas about the right of every person to life and dignity do not prevail there, then, as a rule, they do not accept cannibalism and human sacrifice. Of course, in modern civilizational society, some people with a sick psyche or with criminal inclinations have urges to cannibalism or ritual bloody actions. But society as a whole and laws do not allow barbaric inhuman actions.
Not without reason, the transition to the civilizational stage among many peoples was associated with the spread of religions bearing humanistic moral values - Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism.
These signs of civilization do not necessarily appear all at once. Some may be formed in specific conditions later or earlier. But the absence of these signs leads to the decline of a particular society. These signs provide a minimum of human security, ensure the effective use of human abilities, and therefore ensure the efficiency of the economic and political system, ensure the flourishing of spiritual culture.
Usually, researchers of civilizations point out the difficulties of their interpretation: the complexity of the internal composition of each of the civilizations; intense internal struggle within civilizations for dominance over natural and human resources; intense struggle for hegemony in the symbolic sphere in the form of ideology and religion. Moreover, in such a struggle, warring factions, coalitions and cliques often look for external support against their brothers in civilization, looking for ways to assert themselves in sub-civilizational strife. Material for this kind of thinking is provided by the history of the Arab-Islamic civilization: Hindustan, Indonesian of the 20th century.
Difficulty for the study of civilizations is their internal dynamism. Their appearance is formed not only by centuries of historical background. A dramatic process of interaction between Western and soil-based impulses, rationalism and traditionalism unfolds itself. This interaction can be traced as one of the defining characteristics of cultural dynamics in non-Western societies. For two or three centuries it has been the leitmotif of the history of Russia. The same can be said about Turkey, Japan, Latin America, India and the Middle East. This interaction of oppositely directed impulses remains universal. Moreover, since the 19th century it even managed to establish itself in Western culture - a collision of mondialism and western-centrism.
Political culture obviously plays a significant role in the interpretation of this problem. One can understand the socio-economic and psychological prerequisites of fundamentalism - in the Islamic world, in Orthodoxy, Hinduism and Judaism. Fundamentalism really takes on the appearance of an eschatologically formidable, all-embracing phenomenon. But today's trends are not eternal. In addition, if we take a closer look at fundamentalism in the bosom of various cultural civilizations, in fact civilizational structures, approaching it culturally, then this is most likely an attempt at an activist restructuring of traditional religious consciousness in the current conditions of a deeply unbalanced in many respects Western-centric world.
Fundamentalism is alien not only to rationalism, but also to traditionalism, since it does not accept tradition in its historical changeability and givenness, tries to establish tradition as something charismatically invented, tries to keep it on the path of rational design, to consolidate tradition by rational means. In this sense, one has to speak not about conservatism, but about the radicalism of the main fundamentalist attitudes.
All this indicates that it is difficult to give a strict definition of the concept of civilization. In fact, civilization is understood as a cultural community of people who have a certain social genotype, a social stereotype, which has mastered a large, fairly autonomous, closed world space and, because of this, has received a firm place in the world layout.
In essence, two directions can be distinguished in the morphological doctrine of cultures: the theory of the staged development of civilization and the theory of local civilizations. One of them is the American anthropologist F. Northrop, A. Kroeber and P.A. Sorokin. To another - N.Ya. Danilevsky, O. Spengler and A. Toynbee.
Stage theories study civilization as a single process of the progressive development of mankind, in which certain stages (stages) are distinguished. This process began in ancient times, when primitive society began to disintegrate and part of humanity passed into a state of civilization. It continues to this day. During this time, great changes have taken place in the life of mankind, which have affected socio-economic relations, spiritual and material culture.
Theories of local civilizations study large historically established communities that occupy a certain territory and have their own characteristics of socio-economic and cultural development. More about this theory in paragraph 3 of my abstract.
As P.A. Sorokin, there are a number of points of contact between both directions, and the conclusions reached by representatives of both directions are very close. Both recognize the existence of a relatively small number of cultures that do not coincide with either nations or states and are different in character. Each such culture is an integrity, a holistic unity in which the parts and the whole are interconnected and interdependent, although the reality of the whole does not correspond to the sum of the realities of the individual parts. Both theories - stadial and local - make it possible to see history in different ways. In the stadial theory, the general comes to the fore - the laws of development common to all mankind. In the theory of local civilizations - the individual, the diversity of the historical process. Thus, both theories have advantages and complement each other.
The word "culture" comes from a Latin term meaning cultivation of the land, as well as education and development. Initially, it was associated with the rural way of life and interaction with nature. Based on this meaning, in philosophy it means both a specific way of organizing and developing human life, represented by the products of material and spiritual labor, and a system of certain socially conditioned norms and spiritual values. Culture is also often referred to as the totality of people's attitudes towards nature, society and themselves. For convenience, they are divided depending on the historical stages of development - for example, ancient, Renaissance, and so on, from groups or communities of people - national, ethnic or multi-ethnic, world, culture of the individual ...
The term "civilization" also has a Latin origin, however, its meaning is not agrarian, but urban, and is associated with such concepts as citizenship and the state. Culture and civilization in philosophy can be close in meaning - for example, the word "civilization" is often used as a synonym for culture. But, as a rule, in a stricter sense of the word, civilization is called the degree of development of society, which follows “barbarism”, and is also divided into historical stages of development (ancient, medieval ...). We can say that both of these concepts are two facets of one whole.
However, until the 18th century, the scientific community actually lived without the terms "culture" and "civilization". Philosophy introduced them into the lexicon rather late, and at first they were considered synonymous. However, representations close to these concepts in meaning have existed for a long time. For example, in China they were traditionally denoted by the word "ren" (Confucius), in ancient Greece - "paideia" (well-bredness), and in ancient Rome they were even divided into two words: "civitas" (the opposite of barbarism, civilization) and "humanitas" ( education). Interestingly, in the Middle Ages, the concept of civitas was more valued, and in the Renaissance, humanitas. Since the 18th century, culture has become more and more identified with the ideals of the Enlightenment in the spiritual and political field - reasonable and harmonious forms of government, science, art and religion. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot and Condorcet agreed that the development of culture corresponds to the development of reason and rationality.
Has culture and civilization always been positively perceived by thinkers? The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a contemporary of the Enlightenment, gives a negative answer to this question. He believed that the further a person moves away from nature, the less true happiness and natural harmony in him. This criticism also had an effect on German philosophy, whose classics tried to comprehend these contradictions. Kant put forward the idea that the problem of whether culture and civilization is good or bad can be resolved with the help of the "moral world", the German romantics Schelling and Henderlin tried to do this with the help of aesthetic intuition, and Hegel believed that everything can be resolved within the framework of the philosophy of self-consciousness of the Absolute Spirit. Herder believed that contradictions are generally characteristic of the history of culture, since it develops according to types (Eastern, ancient, European), each of which reaches its maximum, passing on achievements to the next. Humboldt suggested that one of the most significant features of national culture is the language that forms the national spirit.
However, most often she considered the development of culture as a one-line process, and therefore her position did not cover all the diversity that world culture and civilization gives. Philosophy of the 19th century (especially in the person of the neo-Kantians Rickert and Weber, as well as representatives of the "philosophy of life") criticized this position. Neo-Kantians recognized as the main world of values that call a person to do his due and influence his behavior. Nietzsche contrasted Apollonian and Dionysian and Dilthey - discursive and intuitive, calling the first "liquefied fluid of the mind." Marxism sought in culture and civilization a material basis and a social group (class) character.
From the end of the 19th century, the study of culture from the standpoint of anthropology and ethnography (Taylor) also began, a structural analysis of culture as a system of values, semiotics and structural linguistics (Levi-Strauss) was created. The twentieth century is characterized by such a direction as the philosophy of culture, the essence of which was represented by symbols (Cassirer), intuition (Bergson) or Philosophers of Culture, just as existentialists and representatives of philosophical hermeneutics saw in each universal meaning, which is revealed when deciphering its symbols. Although there is such a position that rejects such a concept as world culture and civilization. The philosophy of Spengler and Toynbee considers the polycentrism of cultures as evidence of the absence of generally accepted and universal patterns in different civilizations.
Considering the correlation of culture and civilization, it is necessary to imagine what meaning is invested in these concepts. This meaning has varied from era to era, and even today these terms can be used in different meanings.
The concept of culture and civilization
The word "civilization" comes from the Latin "civilis" - "state", "city". Thus, the concept of civilization is initially associated with cities and the statehood concentrated in them - an external factor that dictates the rules of life to a person.
In philosophy 18-19 centuries. civilization is understood as the state of society following the stages of savagery and barbarism. Another understanding of civilization is a certain stage in the development of society, in this sense they speak of an ancient, industrial or post-industrial civilization. Often, civilization is understood as a large interethnic community that has arisen on the basis of a single system of values and has unique features.
The word "culture" comes from the Latin "colero" - to cultivate. It implies the cultivation of the land, the development of it by man, in a broad sense - by human society. Later, this was rethought as the "cultivation" of the soul, giving it truly human qualities.
For the first time, the term "culture" was used by the German historian S. Pufendorf, characterizing with this word the "artificial man" brought up in society, as opposed to the uneducated "natural man". In this sense, the concept of culture approaches the concept of civilization: something opposite to barbarism and savagery.
Relationship between culture and civilization
For the first time the concepts of culture and civilization were opposed by I. Kant. He calls civilization the external, technical side of the life of society, and culture - its spiritual life. This understanding of culture and civilization persists to this day. An interesting rethinking of it is offered by O. Spengler in his book “The Decline of Europe”: civilization is the decline of culture, the dying stage of its development, when politics, technology and sports dominate, and the spiritual principle fades into the background.
Civilization as the external, material side of the life of society and culture as its internal, spiritual essence are inextricably linked and interacted.
Culture is the spiritual possibilities of society at a certain historical stage, and civilization is the conditions for their realization. Culture determines the goals of being - both social and personal, and civilization ensures the real embodiment of these ideal plans by involving huge masses of people in their implementation. The essence of culture is the humanistic principle, the essence of civilization is pragmatism.
Thus, the concept of civilization is associated primarily with the material side of human existence, and the concept of culture - with the spiritual.
