Chapter VII

Culture and Human Nature

            We have indicated the phenomenon of culture. We have delineated the reactions that it raises as soon as the human being becomes aware of it. We have determined through different studies some general characteristics. We make calculations confronted with the fact of culture: culture in some way already happens in the data of experience, verifiable in them, thus affirming its proper identity. Culture is human behavior shaped by membership in a determined social group and with human environment correlative to such behavior. Now that we have known culture externally, there is a need to deal with it wherein the human being is indispensably related. To do this is doing philosophy, because this involves a more radical questioning on what is man and on what really exists? - given that man is the place of truth.

            Culture is the most complex and a global phenomenon. It presupposes the existence of human individuals in reciprocal relation in terms of their intricate behaviors. The problem that we will tackle here is to obtain the sketch or schema, which implicates these individuals, the components of their behavior, and the nature of their existence.

            In fact, human behaviors are shaped by this or that culture. What must be the elements or aspects of which they composed themselves? What relations and interdependencies among such elements that allows the explicative comprehension of the complex configurations, flexible and extremely varied of the said behaviors? What is the result of the analysis and of the consequent synthesis regarding these? Is it enough to conceive them as the development of purely animal activity? Or do they involve at least some of their composite elements and consequently in the ensemble of their organization and originality hereafter of those?

            These are urgent questions because cultures are varied and in such variety - as we have seen above - they are not pure replicas of the genetic or racial differences among human groups or of diverse geographical environment.

            It is obvious that such behaviors imply much knowledge of the natural and cultural environment (that is of the cultural modifications of the first) as of the other and of its role in the environment. But what is the nature of such knowledge: purely sensible, empirical, or structural and external? It is obvious that such behaviors imply tendency, impulses, attitudes, aspirations towards the known, but of what nature?

            The problem affects the social aspect which culture obviously implies in man: such aspect is of the animal level.

            And since the mode of being and the radical ontological structure are known by the mode of doing or operation, what is implied in cultural phenomenon in terms of the same nature of the human being, his virtuality, perfection, becoming?

            With these questions, we would try to arrive at a complete philosophy of human person through culture. Here, we would try to explain inchoately the strict relation that occurs between the philosophy of culture and that of the human person or philosophical anthropology in the classical sense first.

            We would like, therefore, to demonstrate how culture implicates and presupposes the human being in his/her permanent structures of possibility, the human being in the structure of types and levels on the stages or facts that carry out such possibility. It would be this confirmation of that which developed usually in the philosophy of human person - a confirmation done because of the broadening and concretizing the horizon of human doing. In the following discussions later, we will see the contrary, as in the conception of human offered by a philosophy of Thomistic inspiration. Already it finds implicitly delineated as possibility and exigency the same culture of its multiplicity of forms, the role of the human individual to the internal and regarding the culture in which s/he develops himself/herself, by confronting finally the question of value.

            Briefly, and adopting through reason the clarity of a scheme somewhat rigid and artificial, we will speak then in this chapter first of cognitive activity and then the implicit tendency in all cultures, and finally the unity of the permanent structure of human being. The treatment of culture as a whole, of all cultures, avoids whatever reduction to empiricism. And we note this proposition that treats of philosophical explication.

I.          Cognitive Activity

            We have said that culture implies obviously certain knowledge of the natural and cultural environment of the other on the part of the human individuals who participate there. Such knowledge is immediately sensible, empirical, that is based on the senses with which the human being is endowed and with the perceptive and imaginative elaboration of the data, which they furnish. It is noted, for example, that the indigenous people, those who are directly dependent on the natural environment for their sustenance, are very knowledgeable, sensitive to any signs. This sensitivity of indigenous peoples is incredible. This is very true to the Pigmy in his/her jungle. We think, for example, of the Polynesians who are known to be great navigators across the islands of the pacific. Without the formal education on navigation and the aid of sophisticated instruments for navigation, their familiarity with the natural environment at sea is fantastic.

            In general, the degree that anthropology has come to know the culture of indigenous peoples, there always exists knowledge which imply that which we call knowledge in the full sense of the word: conceptual knowledge. For reasons of brevity and schematic clearness in our considerations, we will divide such knowledge artificially into the following: utilitarian, creative, and disinterested, showing - always contained in the indigenous - the dynamics of knowledge containing knowing, concept, verification, and responsible judgment. There is also the insistence of proper relationship of the intellective level with the sensible experience.

            First, the Utilitarian knowledge: we are not only aware of the nutritional and medicinal use of the varied plants and animals (as it is done by the Indians of the Amazon). We refer this knowledge also to the production of instruments for destruction and for war (for example the boomerang of the natives of Australia which from the technical point of view is considered primitive by the world). These instruments are made of various materials: wood, bones and stones (Aztecs and the Incas who has not known metals), fibers of plants and animal skins, feathers… For the great inventions of the Neolithic villages we quote Levis-Strauss: "It is in the Neolithic that confirms the mastery, on the part of man, of the great arts of civilization: poetry, weaving, agriculture, and the domestication of animals. No one, today, would think of this immense conquest by means of the fortuitous accumulation of a series of the findings made per case, or revealed from the spectacle passively registered of certain natural phenomena. Some of this technic supposes centuries of active observations and method, controlled hypothesis, through experiments." In all of these, there is obviously knowledge in the full sense of means-to-end and by its invention of instruments.

            Also the social institutions - so complex almost everywhere and the culture among the indigenous groups of people - they also have their utilitarian aspect. It is not only their origin - more difficult in establishing itself as fact – which has to be in great demand initially inventive, some understanding on the part of the members of the group, but also their application in the practical, their daily application to every single case, it does not go without discussions, treatment among the tribe, clan or family.

            And all these - works, the social relations - are achieved with the help and in great part by means of word, the use of language that all existing cultures possess - the linguistic test - a level of perfection. And this constitutes a system of relations.

            Therefore, if that which we have asserted in the first part of this essay regarding the knowledge of the other concerning the expressions and to the means-to-end, it has some validity, the utilitarian knowledge, implied in every culture, contains without doubt the intellective activity.

            But that is not everything. Other aspect strictly utilitarian in knowledge is present everywhere in all culture the creative aspect departing from that impression of restricted instrumentality.

            Second, the Creative knowledge: This refers to the psychical cognitive activity that leads to art. Creative knowledge is at the same time productive and disinterested.

            Art exists to a certain degree in all cultures, as we have indicated its presence in the cultural phenomenon. It seems that art is restricted only to the human specie. Given the extreme complexity of the activity, it is not the question here of developing an argument, but it seems to us difficult to exclude the knowledge that emerged from experience and reincarnated in the behavior and in the object that it produces. This is affirmed by Levis-Struass who conceived art as the installation in place of structure prevalent in the contingency of a model. Bernard Lonergan has similar explanation. He says that it is the intelligent discovery of new forms. These unify and connect the content and the experiential acts with the simultaneous liberation of the experience from its biological utility and of the intelligence from the construction of the verified and of the proofs because the work itself constitutes the convalidation. In metaphysics, here we see beauty as the synthesis of the one, true, and the good, but proportionate to the human being - the embodied spirit - which has the needd of vibrating harmonically with all the levels of its psychical activity. We also accept the definition given by Susanne Langer: "creation of forms symbolizing the human feeling". We also admit the answer of the linguist Roman Jakobson to the question: What makes the verbal message as work of art? "To see the message as such, the accent put on the message through its proper account." All these authors in authority confirm this creative dimension as actualized in the works of art.

            Finally, the Disinterested knowledge: Here the psychical activity tends immediately to know through the same process of knowing and ends up to its reason for being. This shows the proof of the presence of intellective activity more authentic with its charisms more typical in all cultures. In short, this is the kind of knowledge of something for its own sake.

            Here, we begin with the systematic knowledge of nature. A good reference to this is the first chapter of the La Pensee Sauvage of Claude Levi-Strauss. He, as a specialist on indigenous peoples, demonstrates his observation on their behavior. His work shows the refinement of the classifications of the names of minerals, plants and animals, and of their proper anatomical parts by the indigenous peoples - even classifications of environmental sectors. Such classifications based on the finest observations and linguistic expressions are attentively verified in case of doubt on the identification of an encountered example along the way.

The act of classifying is the work of the intellect that knows (distinctions, relations and unity of property). Conceptualizing, and verifying, and to doubt a proposition is the work of the intellect which seeks the truth of the affirmations.

            The same cognitive activities manifest themselves in previewing briefly and long decadence (for example the intensity of the future winter, basing itself on the finest observation of plants and animals), and regarding the identification and movement of the stars, things that require the confrontation of intermittent observations made in a lapse of prolonged time and they stand to the base of every sort of calendar. We remember that the temporal order of succession, simultaneity and regular rhythm, is not learned from experience but from the intellective activity.

            Also the human being makes object of an articulated knowledge in concepts and affirmations: the human being, according to the discourse and phases of its biological and social life, in its individual characteristics would be physical than moral, in its social roles… as the result of daily conversations than by proverbs, myths… Although, a certain society and certain culture are the theme of a reflective reconstitution in the structural models elaborated by the indigenous group (for example, the Australians) who at times confront them with that of the nearby tribe.

            The "primitives" explain all that to the observer, trying to answer also the questions that were not placed first, and at times they invent fables though going in circle.

            This knowledge of intellective level is certainly natural and a human reality. We find in all cultures, more or less, accentuated towards a coherent and unitary comprehension of all reality. The earth and the heavens, man and society, the rhythms discovered… they are all correlated if not in technical philosophical systems, at least in rites, myths, beliefs, symbolic transpositions…which emphasize the true connections or presumed among diverse orders or structures by way of analogy. We understand such present connections everywhere among sciences (to know directly based on experience), magic and religion (we recall that actually for example in France - Cartesian nation by excellence - there are more fortunetellers and witches who live of that occupation than physicians). The interdependence between the different aspects is absurd, one aspect is very far from the other. We take for example the celestial bodies and the organization of the state (the pharaoh is the son of the Sun-God Rha, the city-state conceived as the farm of a god…). Another example is between technics and rites (construction of the Polynesian imbarcation), between human sexuality and fertility of the land, between the human blood of the Aztec sacrifice and the continuity of the natural rhythm of day and night, between clan and matrimonial system and the animal specie in Totemism. According Levi-Strauss, the same exigency presses the scientist and the philosopher. It works in all cultures, also more in the 'primitive': that of introducing the beginning of the order in the universe, because this exigency of order is the bases of the thought which we call primitive, but only in as much as it is the base of every thought. Is it this not the manifestation of that pure desire to know which tends always beyond what is already known towards one truth, towards its objective being?

            No culture is wholly satisfied with the reality known and with the coherence glimpsed there, with that which men make and that which happens in nature. It puts itself the question of origin by justifying, valuing, founding the cultural behavior and the universal picture win which it inserts itself. According to Mircea Eliade, all myths would be myths of origin: the great myths of creation, the cosmogony, and also that which regard some aspect of the daily life and they seek the exemplar model in the behavior of the first human ancestors or divine. And also the death that would be resulting a pure fact inserted in the picture of the society or nature, it is everywhere felt as needing of explanation - as death enters in the world? - with myths of origin, and never conceived as term 'tout court' of the human existence, surrounded because of innumerable rites and beliefs. Religion wherever seems in part the result of such dissatisfaction. Finally, man is not totally absorbed by the vision of things elaborated by culture in which he is inserted. This is being testified by the further elaboration of myths themselves, and the capacity of inserting there what is brought by other cultures. According to Paul Radin says, all peoples, even primitive, encounter the type of man who are called "thinker", interested in the analysis of cultural patrimony to which he participates. It seems to us that all this implies clearly the knowledge of the limits of the reality, of the end as such, and because of its overcoming and transcending towards being and the infinite. That which we have seen to discover a grasp in every judgment that touches the existence but in as much as it is limited by the essence shown in the concept, and which develops in the theodicy as the exigency of the total intelligibility.     

            It manifests, then everywhere, although in the manner that is varied and in forms as never diverse, the absoluteness of the norms of conduct or ideals or moral values for whoever merits himself the qualification of being human, to the times as the exigency of the cosmic order, to the times as the relation with divinity, to the times as the ideal of personal dignity, to the times as the subordination to the common good. Also such aspect itself of culture refers itself to the conduct and to human destiny, also it possesses itself many connections with the affective motivations, with the desire and fear, to the point of becoming suspect of finding there its origin, also the fact that it is the object of many negotiations and compromises, it cannot be denied that its characteristic of absoluteness, universality, relation to the vision of the same reality, it involves clearly the intellective activity.

            To summarize, all cultures imply an unlimited intellective search of truth which would be partial rather than total, in some way a guide to actions - it is search which among thousand errors something is arrived at. However, our scope is limited itself to the explicating culture, all cultures. This implies the activity of men/women who participate there: the presence of properly intellective acts, which render human knowledge in the full and total sense of the term.

            Now, if it is true that cognitive intellective activity (with all its difficulty, defects and errors) takes part in every culture, it is also true that it is everywhere related to experience.

            It depends on its origin. Directly through which regards the natural environment, man, society, technic and also arts that finally always carry upon a 'matter': also the diversity in the cognitive baggage of the cultures explains itself in part with the diverse point of departure. Indirectly as the analogy, the reasoning, and with that the more audacious and universal systems, the same going hereafter towards the transcendence, they rest on the direct intellective knowledge and they move from it.

            It depends in the measure in which it is verified, it would be in the perceptive contents than in the imaginative contents, and in the lived consciousness of all the proper psychical activity.

            It depends purely in its expressions, in its depositing itself in symbols (symbolic images and their projections in the cultural objects of utility or of art) and the signs (linguistic, mathematical, scientific…) in which the signifying is sensible, they surround knowledge of an affective halo, they serve as springboard to further knowledge but also they easily mislead thought. We remember their enormous importance in religion.

            Finally, these same knowing, thinking, believing, and presuming - in sum the fruit of intellective activity proper to a culture - are transmissible, as the ensemble of culture, through tradition. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as commonality of knowledge or errors on the surrounding nature and that of the human - i.e. of the social and religious conventions, of technology and styles, which characterize the members of a human group in difference to other groups. Now this supposes the proper disposition, the incarnation of the intellective knowledge in the behaviors and in the objects that rather result, as the origin of knowledge departing from the perceived data in these same behaviors and objects: In other words, it supposes that the certain grouping of data facilitated the knowing, in other words, the role of the happy presentation, (by means of the 'phantasma rite dispositum'), the privilege of certain sensible constellations in birthing the act of comprehension and in facilitating or verifying it of the concepts which brings to judgment.

            This happens before the behaviors: means-to-end and to the concatenation of their results. The man who develops himself by means of other men who behave themselves such, takes the meaning - the intention and the knowledge - which animates and informs such behaviors. The man who develops surrounded by such objects - useful objects and objects of art or both things fused into one - rather takes the function in concert with the objects and of the meanings of the cultural environment which surrounds him.

            This happens purely before behaviors and objects or modifications of the natural environment which are symbols or signs: the man who sees them and listens to them, rather takes the meaning and arrives at participating in his culture in that which is in fact of knowledge.

            And this happens also to a certain measure to adults who understand living in a group whose culture is different from theirs (for example, Gonzalo Guerrero, who was taken a prisoner by the Maya. He refused to go back to Spain. He was chosen by the Indios as the head of their war and died during the war against the ‘conquestadores’ in 1536), for the anthropologists who go deliberately for reasons of study, and the historians who reconstruct the culture of the past by means of the remaining cultural objects (edifice, instruments, writings…).

            Proper to such connection of the intellective activity with experience and such transmissibility of knowledge transmits tradition, they explain in great part (human freedom, individual talents, casual circumstances…) the diversity of extension, of profoundness, of approach and emphasis, of error in the knowledge of a culture to another, while the aspiration to truth and the opening to the infinite of this activity rather explain audacity, the tentatives of synthesis also hastened, the transcendence rather immediately knowable.

            Because there is the fact of enormous diversity of accents and pure development of various forms and types of knowledge from one culture to another, also in dependence of the numerical greatness of the population (number of intelligent contributions, need and possibility of specialization…), of the existence of some writings which renders possible the increasing accumulation of knowledge expressed in precise technical terms (mathematical, systematic philosophy, experimental sciences which render further experimental knowledge…). We will return to the proposition of the value of cultures and also the historical actual situation. But such diversity does not result to the presence of new types or levels of cognitive acts, but by their direction, by their combination, by their self-accumulating and self-specializing on determined methods and contents, by their eventual overcoming always the descriptive knowledge, 'quoad nos', with that explicative, 'quoad se'. We appeal to this proposition, through the fundamental diversity among the primitive knowledge which is also in great part ours, and that scientific, to the limpid pages of Levi-Strauss and we cite to conclude - from the last of those indicated here: << The savage thought is logical, in the same sense and of the same manner to that of ours, but as it is ours when it applies itself to the knowledge of the universe to which it recognizes simultaneously physical property and semantic property. (…) this thought precedes by means of understanding, not of the affectivity; with the help of distinctions and of oppositions, not through confusion and participation>>.

II.         Tendential Activity.

            Evidently, a culture is not only considered in terms of cognitive knowledge, but the combination of intellective and the experiential. Here, we insist, because it is in such context that we can understand the existence and the nature of the tendential activity which animates the behaviour, reflects itself in the world of cultures.

            It is a fact that the intellective knowledge informs the behavior and directs it towards the environment known by it. It indicates the presence of the tendential acts towards the reality as it is presented by the intellective activity. Such is volition, the acts of the will. Because, if it does not have the tendency towards the reality according to the intellective knowledge which men of diverse cultures have, behaviors do not exist: the means-to-end types of a given culture, the action that tries to reach or realize the known ends through ways proportionate as means: technic, social behavior, rites … If there are no such tendencies, also the disinterested knowledge would not be possible because of the lack of the direct experience, and of the impulse to reflection which constitute the investigation. If it does not have, there would not be artistic and literary expression and also that which is most important, but modest to the scope of communication, talking.

            Such tendential acts, the field opened by knowledge, are directional and limited: a tending to that which it knows, as modality offered in some way together with the ends. It is this, which explains such commonality of ends, of means, of aspirations, which animates the participants to a common culture. And it is not the other, which is the origin and the intellective specification of the acts of the will.

            That such acts are, at times, in all cultures: acts of love, of gratitude, disinterested, and that they are free of arbitrary freedom, it is not possible to show in a convincing way its behaviors pressed abstractly, outside the context of the single individual and single concrete situation. However, how much disinterested love, all cultures seem to have it a place, implying it, in the social, cosmic, and religious ideals, which they present in the research of religious services, and in the mystical experience regarding some personal divinity, in fidelity and sacrifice for companions or members of the family … described in the myths and fables … There exist also some form of respect of self, which constitutes the specie of the ideal imagination of itself or the ideal not only towards I tend, but also enjoy and be pleased: love of benevolence or disinterested towards itself.

            There are enormous differences of emphasis, of themes, of forms … offered by every single culture. In the religious field, in some primitive the thanksgiving cult hides the love of esteem towards divinity, it goes by itself, and also the oblative love or of true fascination in some tendencies in Great Religions as for example (bhakti) or the love towards a personal God in Hinduism … And also a similar diversity of emphasis, often prevailing in the relation between persons or groups, finds itself under. The so diverse forms in family relations or social living conceived and proposed by every single culture.

            The cognitive arrangement and direction of volitive acts to a given cultural model also includes the affectivity of important thoughts and crystallizing in language and the scale of values, they explain the affective diversity from one culture to another culture, the exasperation of pride and of the aggressivity, the prevalence of meekness and tenderness, of the serenity or self control … things which result so conspicuous in the extreme examples of three cultures: Pueblos, Dabu and Kwakiutl presented by Ruth Benedict. And Henri Bergson has asserted that romantic love is stated a creation of the discoveries inspired by the medieval mystics. The systems and ways of alleviating the new generation obtain proper to this result of modeling unconsciously and consciously the affectivity, according to the known saying that the battle of Waterloo conquered the sportsmanship field of Eaton.

            In this field, symbols possess an enormous importance, as they involve intelligence at the same time, but more on the imaginative and perceptive level, they move the affections: symbols-objects (mode of seeing and imagining the natural objects and all cultural objects and symbols-behaviours (rites, gesture of courtesy, ceremonies…). Through these art, myth, style of gesture … they render the atmosphere, directly dominating, the typical savor of culture, and Eliade has insisted many of its myths move the actual fact of Western society and that of the Soviets, which pretend themselves to be scientific and rational.

            Arbitrary freedom results itself from the very nature of intellective-volitive activity. But, more empirically, it seems implicit in the fact that cultures present also alternative norms of behavior, on the individual the variety of realization of the cultural schemes, on cases of deviation and revolt, and on the same cultural change which has occurred (finally cultures are only through external influences, but also through autonomous initiative (we think for example of the evolution of the single Polynesian culture in many islands of the Pacific). And, especially, the anthropologists who lived with diverse populations participating in their daily activity, as Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski to the Triobriandes (Melanesians of a near island to New Guinea), they have seen them doing individually in their cultures and in their society as we in ours.

            Further, the fact that individuals who find themselves in the context of encounter or of friction between two cultures or two cultural variants, or in equilibrium among them, they do not adhere scattered in a divergent way one to one, other to another possibility (for example, national citizenship which is in such cases has become a question of personal choice among members of the same family), it shows that man transcends virtually his culture, that he is in some measure more less great and more or less directed, free in his concern.

            The limits of volitive activity: in the objects or ideal contents to which it adheres, in the human ideals which it tries to realize, in the love and in freedom with which it involves itself - limits are so evident in every human activity and so varied from one culture to another - they explain also its proper cognitive context and with affectivity that it must direct.

            The cognitive context in fact ignores or develops some possibility: Marx himself said that man does not desire that which in an epochal data they present themselves as possible.

            The affectivity or resistance to the ideals and mode of doing proposed by a culture, it would be for reasons of individual temperaments at times improper in particular to such or to other culture (Margaret Mead presents very clearly in the single tribe of New Guinea). It would because this which the culture calls is very unilateral from the affective point of view or very difficult: as was said by an American sociologist (Park), "customs can render acceptable something, but they have more difficulty in making it regarding to some behaviors that regards others." It is enough to think of the self-discipline required at one time by the Japanese samurai or by the youth of some North American tribe in overcoming obstacles in the rites of puberty.

            Having admitted this which precedes, how much to the implicated acts in all cultures, as it explains itself that often of the accepted behavior, are there seemed to be repugnant and morally condemnable, while others seems to be desirable or morally obligatory? An old authority Malinowski on his primitives, to the question on their manners and costumes, responded: Customs none, manners beastly. While - as referred by Godfrey Lienhardt - confronted with the African diversity consider it as a barbaric order.

            Often, there is a question of sensibility, less plasmable and more broad than understanding: that is, being supposed also that we have understood a given behavior in the context of its culture, it can be as continuous producing irritation to us. Other times it treats itself of diverse cultural ordinance of togetherness, because an immoral thing or instead obligatory in a context, it cannot be it in another or vice-versa the natural moral laws concretizing themselves also according to the cultural situations to which it applies itself; but we do not become aware for lack of reflection and for cultural egocentrism. But also in the cases of objective bad moral included in cultures, they do not astonish us. To know can be brilliant without that its content correspond to the reality, the gathered evidence can be presumed instead than sufficient; the judgement can be arrived at: because the cognitive systems regarding the reality (nature, man, society, divinity, their reciprocal relations) include errors and lacuna, more or less, grave of logic and of content, and this reflect itself in judgements and scale of values and thus, in choices. Thus, it will treat the objective bad moral but not formal, not imputable: even, in the concrete behaviours, it can be treated with merit.

            Moreover, the single individuals do not recognize or do not know the totality of its extension and the profundity of cognitive contents pertinent to their culture. Or they can commit mistake in knowing the concrete or situational application.

            Finally, as understood everywhere that the singular individuals or they leave themselves overcome by their subjective impulses, or also they choose consciously evil.

            Cultures reflect and presuppose the weakness, fallible and sinful man, accumulating the results of his activity, thus those deficiencies than those positives.

   III.            Unity and the Permanent Structure of the Human Being.

We have discovered the presence of the same types and strata or levels of acts of the human being in all cultures. We have gathered that same principle of the diversity of these cultures.

This diversity consists in the different combinations of acts, in a dosage proper to its culture, as the result of the original cultural behaviors and in a correspondent cultural world, which consist of the meanings or content of those same acts and modifications of natural and human environment proper to such behaviors. Each culture possesses then its own world: that which knows itself of the reality and that which presumes, believes or hypothesizes oneself, that which perceives and imagines oneself symbolically, and also the scale of values gathered there. Each culture possesses modes or schemes of behavior with regard to such world.

And the individual is incited towards the acquisition of culture, which happens after all from the first infancy - through the tradition, which to him becomes fact - inserting himself there in a mode more or less result according to his talents and temperament, according to the course of his individual life and according to his personal choices. Tradition comes the apprehension in the sense broader of the word: perceptive, imaginative, affective and motor (bodily movements), cognitive apprehension with acts of understanding favored by a part, apprehension of the will which comes praised or blamed in the behavioral results, and so life.

Any culture realizes some human possibility inherent in the acts and dispositions of the man of preference. And given that it treats itself of an order and of a direction of activity, cultures as structured or integrated totality and also many of their elements or other components more conspicuous - these are not composed in the same individual and in the same group.

The unity of any single culture is proper to exclusion of that which is incompatible with its elements that especially to the exigency of coherence inherent in the human cognitive activity which is reflected purely in the volitive activity. Very little integration, very little unity of a culture renders the human being who participates there, disoriented, insecure, in anguish and unhappy.

The imperfection of the unity or integration of any culture is proper instead to the complexity and to the difficulty of the human knowledge, to the limits of experience conditioned by the environment and of the biology, to the fact that the imagination and more of the affectivity they do not allow themselves to be shape by the spirit which broadly to certain grade, not to the virtual presence of other possibility not included by that given culture, and to the liberty which is never of the whole related in the particular choices by the choices of ground already made and it can put again in question this ultimacy.

If it is so of cultures, if it treats itself of the same types and levels of acts, all this that comes said of permanent structure of the human being in philosophy of man, valid for all the human beings, the same is also valid when it pertains to culture. We think of the capacity or faculty of various levels and types of acts, and also the substantial and central human structure: prime matter and intellective substantial form which compose the essence and the existence or being correspondent to the essence which the actual is limited by it. Evidently such determination of permanent structure requires an metaphysical analysis, but its premises in the structuration of the human activities come strongly confirmed by the study of the human being in his/her cultural diversity.

But in our study of culture, we see very clearly and radically that the permanent structure of the human being is essentially a possibility or virtuality of actuation, and that such actuation transmitted and in the human activity it can assume suspicious variety also for who considers the enormous individual differences among the members of the proper culture. The human being results a being extremely flexible, essentially not given but by making himself: the permanent structure is no other than a sketch of possibility actuating in diverse modes, and such actuation is its destiny by accomplishing. The permanent structure - in a measure that it considers itself in correspondence to the presupposed levels of activity - becomes always less determined 'ad unum', always more opened. The human being is so already in some measure under the biological aspect which supports the large fan of conditions and activities; it is so much more in the experiential level in the forms which can assume the perception and more the imagination and affectivity; it is especially in the intellective-volitive activity, proper in the variety of cultures we gather under an original aspect that which means the opening of this ultimate to the whole being, his/her infinite aspiration of knowledge and of love, and his freedom.

The human being is properly this most opened structured possibility of activity and perfection which is constituted by that which we call permanent structure, the a priori of the activity.

And such similarity among all cultures, their comparison, properly finds here its root: in human nature, in that permanent structure of possibility through the most varied activity but composed always by the same levels and types of acts that are interdependent. Everywhere such activity or cultural behavior must be sustained at least of biological activity indispensable in a given natural environment for the survival of the group; wherever the experiential activity cognitive and tendential - also if modeled by the intellective-volitive - submits in some measure to the necessity and biological rhythm: urgent needs, growth and decadence, birth, puberty and death; and ought to be so under the level of psychological disturbances. Wherever the intelligence aspires for the truth and the will for the good, but submits to the limits conditions and exigencies of the experiential level and that of the biological level. Cultures are thus solutions to similar problems, diverse actualizations of the same "actua-able", who is the human being in his/her existent nature.

The culture in its diversity supposes finally the social aspect of man. It supposes the reciprocal dependency among human beings from the point of view of the biological would be in the generation than in the breeding; it supposes perception, imagination and affectivity of the human being going back in the great part towards its similar through living and communicating with them; it supposes the importance of living together for facilitating the development of intellective knowledge across the procurement of perceptive-imaginative configurations provoking the knowledge and gathering the evidence, and the immediate presence of being proportionate to the love: both the things coming across the gathering the other behavior 'means-to-end' and 'expressive' and the objects and modifications that result (instruments, objects of use, symbols, signs).

But the consideration of the human being departing from culture does not only discover the social aspect of the human being: it underlines many things, especially for that which concerns the intellective-volitive activity from the western philosophical tradition which always conceive in mode that is very individualistic. We have uncover in fact with it how everyone depend their development on others, in the direction and in the objects of its knowledge in the full sense of the word, in its values, in its voluntary adhesion and possibility of choice. Others understand also the past generations and that of the future. The sociability of the human being, in which the accent came placed for it more on the human being: the biological organism and psychical animal, and his needs by satisfying to their regard, it moves so towards the human being: spirit, also if incarnate spirit, understands itself. The human being has need for other human beings in a way that embraces all of his being, thus resulting the relationship of each other in reciprocity in his humanity itself, his existence and his destiny.

We have determined in someway the relations between culture and human nature departing from the first, confirming but also growing hoarse our conception of the human being. But it can only take the inverse way and deducing culture and its diversity departing from the human being: it is this that we do understand in the following chapters.