CHAPTER 10
The aim of the chapter is to arrive at a judgment on the value of culture. Such judgment pertains to the philosophical consideration of every reality, as it is ontologically good. But the judgment of value is more founded, in as much as it rests more on truth, on the knowledge of the reality in question. This chapter situates itself ultimately in our consideration of culture. In the preceding chapters we have discovered the relationships between man and culture, and implicitly connected ultimately to the human being in its totality. Now this becomes useful for the judgment of value on account of the good as also the truth of a being or group of beings not in isolation, but necessarily in conjunction with other beings, being the whole reality as ontologically one.
Lastly among chapters on culture, it will lead us further to the Part III - the philosophical consideration of History. Because a judgment of value tends towards willing and towards action, and the human action situated in time.
Going back to theme of the chapter, we presuppose the essential of the philosophy of human being - which implies culture and as it is derived from human nature. It also includes metaphysics in general, theodicy, and ethics. The human being is ontologically good. And so also the continuity of its existence, its knowledge of reality, its adherence to it, they constitute its ultimate perfection and they are good.
It is only by resolving the problem of value of culture that we will arrive at the attitude equivalent to the cultural phenomenon. We will be able to give a sufficient answer to the marvels that it inspires: the attitude and response - we hope - overcome the typical attitudes-responses but contrasting among themselves (Chapter V).
But the explication is not going to happen without the serious practical problems, which touch the actual historical moment. Thus they remain to us the study of history. They cannot obtain an adequate solution if not in the concrete, in the efforts of many persons of good will of many generations.
In the three sections which follow and progressing from the abstract to the concrete, we will consider the value of culture in general, the value of the single culture confronted among themselves and the choices that they further derive.
The Value of Culture in General.
The answer to this very abstract level is easy given the stage of our reflections.
Culture - any culture - brings, as we have seen, aa complex knowledge. Now the knowledge in the full sense of the term represents perfection for the human being. Knowledge assumes the aspect, which we have called the disinterested knowledge, responding to the question: << quid sit>> (what is it) and <<an sit>> (is it so?) of the reality. It satisfies the pure desire to know which is proper to every intelligent being. In every culture the human being finds some answer regarding nature, which surrounds him/her, regarding himself/herself, and regarding the human group in which s/he lives. In every culture, the human being finds a certain coherence of ensemble among the various aspects of the real. In every culture, his/her existence, origin, destiny -- hints at making a sense. And there is a minimal answer to the radical quest on the foundation of being, a minimum of transcendence, more or less, veiled.
Knowledge under the aspect of utility offers therefore solutions to the human being in terms of his/her social needs and affective life, and also to his/her vital needs and pleasure. Under the creative aspect, it gives some possibility of expressing himself/herself and of satisfying harmonically in the esthetic pleasure.
As a whole, culture in which s/he participates allows him/her to rise to a level of knowledge, rendering relatively easy that which the preceding generations have discovered, invented, created ... with great effort.
Knowledge to his/her turn opens a wide and shallow field ensemble to willing, to tending towards the reality, as it is intellectually known. To will to know further, the knowledge has already given them the savor and the gusto. The willing of useful things for himself/herself and for others, the procuring the means for them, this is already the proof of their realize-ability. To will, love himself/herself and the other, the social ideals, the cosmic order and divinity itself, because s/he sees the reality in itself and the value. To will freely, because s/he knows himself/herself more and also more the field to exercise freedom and choice, here s/he broadens himself/herself and disposes himself/herself in prospective.
Knowing and willing inform, address, and enrich the behavior of vanishing and more varied modes. It would be in as much as to the attainment of ends and communicative expression, which renders meanings in the world in terms of symbols and signs. Thus, his/her imagination and his/her affectivity diversify themselves and sharpen the modeling of themselves in the cultural world, which is its enormous difference with those of the animal world.
Finally, the whole of this, through the fact of culture, is some common mode to the group, basing on a human communication, social consciousness, a community life not so much purely on the animal level, but to that of participation to same world and even to the transcendence, to that of willing, collaboration and reciprocal love, to that of communication between persons.
To acquire some culture - more to the contents of knowledge and of willing and to the results of the behavior - from infancy to the end an exercise of the capacity which otherwise would become very limited as irreparable loses.
Therefore culture offers to man a way of perfection unique and irreplaceable. The human being is a being opened to the infinite reality, to truth and good. S/he is a person, who, in some way, is an end in itself. S/he has a perfection, which participates in its value in some absolute mode.
Nevertheless, every culture is limited in its development. It offers to the human individual a perfection, which does not exhaust the possibility of perfection, and this under all its aspects. Even, as we would see in the following sections, some culture excludes some perfection, which is found in other cultures, because of incompatibility. Worst, every culture includes errors (false judgment), which affect behaviors and the cultural world (errors on man, on nature, on society, on the total view of the reality and its foundation: the divinity). It also includes objective moral evil, it would be the fruit of involuntary errors which as fruit of formal personal sins of the members, which are deposited under the form of valuations, of social institutions, and so forth.
Now, the limits, the errors and the objective evil are inevitable.
The limitations are the results of the fact that man is infinite but only potentially. Infinite, in as much as, s/he is opened to truth and the good, which coincides with the whole reality. The human being is always limited in his/her knowledge and in his/her volition. Then, these, ultimately, as they belong to an incarnate spirit, depart from a situation: from the experience of a determined conditioned environment from a biological organism, and little by little emerge and little by little shape behaviors and environment. But if the limits of any culture are inevitable, they are inevitable as these determined limits. The contribution of every individual can make them shift more to others, and proper in this constitutes history, the evolution itself of culture.
The errors and the objective moral evil derive themselves from human being as fallible. Human beings can make mistakes in judgment and decisions. Thus, these errors and evils are inevitable.
To sum up, every culture - proper in as much as it offers to man a certain level of perfection - functioning and receiving the contribution of its participants - contains the capacity to overcome these limits. It bears in itself the capacity to correct its errors and the objective moral evils. We will elaborate more on this theme in our treatment of history. As Pope John Paul II clearly puts it:
“It must certainly be admitted that man always exists in a particular culture, but it must also be admitted that man is not exhaustively defined by that same culture. Moreover, the very progress of cultures demonstrates that there is something in man, which transcends those cultures. This ‘something’ is precisely human nature: this nature is itself the measure of culture and the condition of ensuring that man does not become prisoner of any of his cultures, but asserts his personal dignity by living in accordance with the profound truth of his being” (Veritatis splendor, n. 53).
As a conclusion, we affirm that culture - any culture- is good because it develops the human being. But a good is always limited, and limited because the human being is only potentially infinite. It is a limited good, which does not preclude the power to overcome the limit. A good is always partial in as much as it excludes other culture and thus other perfections. But this is because there are many ways of being human and of realizing such in himself/herself, which partly are not incompatible among themselves. In the final analysis it is always the cause of the human potentiality in relation to the infinite and of the conditioned limits.
A good which includes evil also regarding to the person in his absolute aspect because opened to the infinite reality- errors and objective moral evils- but inevitable evil to whose elimination the individual can contribute in the measure of his cultural maturity.
Finally, culture is inevitably good for the human being, in as much as it derives from its nature and existence, but also inevitable because it renders in the ensemble more perfect. Thus, it renders the perfection that is personal.
However, these considerations on the value of culture are very abstract. They exist in fact more cultures, and they are in contact reciprocally among each other. Therefore, it allows an influence, transforming or destroying one to the other. It put itself the problem of the relative value of cultures comparing one to another. Further the problem of value of perspectives and choices.
The Value of Individual or Singular Cultures.
We have concluded that every culture is good. Each has value in as much as it renders perfection to the human being. Therefore, if diverse human groups through culture will live perfectly isolated and without the possibility of contacts and reciprocal influences, we will be contented of affirming that some culture is better than nothing, and that the opened unique way is that of operating to the internal of the proper culture to its eventual self-correcting and self-overcoming.
We know that the condition is not verified itself, on the contrary, never verified less that the actual now - the conclusions already obtained two problems: one of the theoretical and objective order on the respective value of cultures, the other of the subjective order in the sense of regarding the human subjects themselves who participate in the knowledge already reached.
This ultimate question is well delineated by Paulo Filiasi Carcano. He notes that cultural anthropology is meta-cultural, putting itself beyond cultures because it takes all for the object of study and of knowing. And we can gather that it is pure history, and philosophy of culture, which regards it purely the cultures and sciences themselves.
Now, the one who participates such knowing, as Filiasi Carcano notes, risks anguish and existential uprootedness. Uprootedness because its cognitive horizon of the human being and human life widen much beyond the culture in which s/he assumes to live. Anxiety because the field of the possibility broadens as, with new values often incompatible among themselves and in any case integrably difficult in his/her concrete life, which render the burden of freedom more onerous. Uprootedness and anxiety, because among his/her intellective knowledge, his/her will and his/her freedom partly and his/her concrete life in proper culture by the other, the distance - always present in a minimal measure in every human being (even, the indispensable condition of being human, of transcendence and of freedom - Ponty - increases immeasurably, meanwhile it is impossible to make an equation of this to that.
Many cultures have contributed to our present culture. The works of Levi Strauss shows this. For example, the "primitive" cultures which have invented things of the said Neolithic revolutiion - a unique parallel to the industrial revolution of 17th cent - which constitute the economic-technological base for human subsistence: the agriculture, the development, the city…. Many cultures have excelled in the specific fields neglected by the western culture: for example the indigenous peoples' adaptation with the natural environment, India in the elaboration of a religious philosophical system, etc.
But it is not the contribution in which we possess and not even attaining the summits in some specific aspect of life that give the measure of value of single cultures. Any of these, in fact, constitute a unity, a grouping, and as a global mode of life, which many human beings live, and in which there are good or bad realized as men.
As such, it seems that cultures are not equal and the same, and however, unique in their own kind.
Cultures are not equal or the same as to their value. This does not mean to say that it would be easy to evaluate it, because of the insufficiency of information, on one part, and on the other for the complexity of the criteria of judgment.
Culture only exists through human being, by human being and for human being. It is the whole of human activity, human intelligence and emotions, the human quest for meaning, human customs and ethics. Culture is so natural to the human being that human nature can only be revealed through culture.
In its essential relation to truth and good, culture cannot only spring from the experience of needs, centres of interest or basic requirements. “The first and fundamental dimension of culture is healthy morality, moral culture. "When they are deeply rooted in experience, cultures show forth the human being’s characteristic openness to the universal and the transcendent” (Fides et ratio, n. 70). Marked as they are by the very tensions aimed at achieving their fulfillment and the human dynamics of their history.