Ideas on the Genesis of Culture.
When in his New
Science (1744 ed.,
§331; trans. Bergin and Fisch) Vico
claimed that “the
world of nations, or civil world,
which, since men had made it, men could come to
know,” he did not mean that man, as an individual,
everywhere,
and at all times, consciously made the
institutions, symbols, and norms
that characterize civil
cultures or civilizations. The first steps in the
building
of the “world of nations” were, on the
contrary, taken
by creatures, the consequences of whose acts were not
intended by them (ibid., §133). Thus religion, for ex-
ample, came about “when men's intentions were
quite
otherwise, it brought them in the first place to fear
of the
divinity, the cult of which is the first fundamental
basis of
commonwealths” (ibid., §629). Unintended
consequences,
then, are clearly conceived of as integral
to the emergence and development
of social cultures.
Vico concedes, indeed stresses, that men have
finite
minds, that they frequently do not know the outcome
of their
actions, yet he also insists that their intentions,
their
“wills” rest on consciousness, or
conscienza (ibid.,
§137). There is no suggestion that
men follow the
dictates of some transcendent being or, as in the Third
Proposition of Kant's “Idea of a Universal History”
(
Idee zu einer allegemeinen Geschichte in Weltburger-
licher Absicht,
1784), that they toil “for the sake of
those who come after
them,” even without intending
it. Men merely obey their own
spirit and, in so doing,
may or may not advance the cause of posterity (
New
Science, §§340, 376).
On the assumption, then, that men, being partici-
pants in and not only observers of their form of life
or
culture, can understand the working of human wills
or purposes in a way
they can never hope to understand
the working of nonhuman phenomena, Vico
proceeded
to trace the origin of human cultures. Emphasizing that
these cultures had “separate origins among the several
peoples,
each in ignorance of the others” (ibid., §146),
he also
sought to discover “in what institutions all men
have
perpetually agreed and still agree. For these
institutions will be able to
give us the universal and
eternal principles (such as every science must
have)
on which all nations were founded and still preserve
themselves” (ibid., §332). These primary institutions,
without which culture would be inconceivable, Vico
identified with religion
and rituals of birth, marriage,
and burial, events common to all cultures
(ibid.,
§§330-37).
In effect, therefore, Vico advanced two theories of
the genesis of culture.
On the one hand he rejected
cultural diffusion as an explanation for the
emergence
of a given culture in favor of a multiple-independent-
origin
theory. On the other hand he stipulated a
common-origin theory, by viewing
diverse manifesta-
tions of culture as
“modifications” of certain archetypes
“common to all nations,” a proof for which he saw
in
“proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which
substantially the same meanings find as many diverse
expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.”
To observe
the diversity of cultural manifestations and
to uncover the
“common mental language” underlying
them was the task
of philology which, for Vico, pro-
vided the
essential empirical foundation upon which
philosophy could erect its
theoretical edifice (ibid.,
§§161-62).
Closest to Vico's thought is that of Herder. Inquiring
into the genesis of
culture Herder asks what charac-
terizes
man as a creature of culture as distinct from
his biological existence as a
creature of nature. In his
first major philosophical work On the Origin of Lan-
guage (Über den Ursprung der Sprache, 1772),
Herder
had refuted the idea of man as essentially a
“rational
animal,” of reason as some sort of entity
or “faculty”
that was simply superimposed on man's
animal nature.
Man, he maintained, was fundamentally
different from
the animal. His capacity for speech, therefore, was a
function of the totality of his powers, the
manifestation
of the “entire economy of his perceptive,
cognitive,
and volitional nature” (Werke,
V, 28). By virtue of this
wholly different direction of his energies man is
no
longer “an infallible mechanism in the hands of Na-
ture.” Although not endowed at birth
with conscious
self-awareness, he has the propensity to attain it, and
thus, unlike the animal, he can attain a state of devel-
opment in which by “mirroring himself within
himself”
he becomes a reflective being (ibid., V, 28, 95).
Owing
to this capacity for self-awareness man is acutely con-
scious of his imperfections and hence
“always in mo-
tion, restless, and
dissatisfied.” Unlike the bee “which
is perfect when
building her first cell,” man's life is
characterized by
“continuous becoming” (ibid., V, 98).
In addition to the capacity for reflection, Herder,
like Vico before him,
stresses man's sense of freedom.
While the animal is wholly a creature of
nature, and
confined to that sphere of activity for which it is
equipped by its natural instincts, man, not thus deter-
mined, is also a creature of freedom. His
perfectibility
or corruptibility is closely bound up with this distin-
guishing feature. “Man
alone,” Herder writes in his
Ideas for a Philosophy of History (Ideen zur Philosophie
der Geschichte der Menschheit,
1784-91), “has made a
goddess of choice
in place of necessity..., he can ex-
plore possibilities and choose between
alternatives....
Even when he most despicably abuses his freedom,
man
is still king. For he can still choose, even though
he chooses the
worst” (ibid., XIII, 110, 146-47). Man's
sense of imperfection
and his sense of freedom, then,
are posited as the essential
(psychological) prerequisites
for the emergence and development of human
culture.
Herder's theme of self-consciousness was taken over
by Hegel who made it the
very condition of a people's
sense of history, while the notion of restlessness reap-
peared in a more socially oriented form
in Kant's essay
on universal history. Kant identified men's
“mutual
antagonism in society” as the origin of
“all the culture
and art that adorn humanity” (op.
cit., Fourth and Fifth
Propositions).
But were man's imaginative, cognitive, and social
propensities primary
determinants, inherently self-
generated
and autonomous, or were they rather reac-
tions, induced by and contingent upon the particular
physical
environment in which he found himself? This
was the question with which
Montesquieu essentially
sought to come to grips. In his De l'esprit des lois
(1748), he inquired into the nature and
source of a
“general spirit” within a given society.
Fully aware
of the interrelations between natural or physical and
social or institutional elements, he seems on occasion
quite undecided
which to regard as the ultimate deter-
minant, as in his hesitancy over the primacy of climate
versus
political constitutions, or in his vacillation con-
cerning religion, which he alternately described as a
determining and determined factor (Book XXIV, Ch.
3). However, the
prevailing tenor of his account of the
rise of civilizations was in terms
of geographical and
climatic determinants, echoes of which are still dis-
cernible in Arnold Toynbee's formula of
challenge-
and-response in
his A Study of History (1934-61). Thus,
when
enumerating such culture-determining agents as
religion, laws, maxims of
government, mores, and
manners, he mentioned these after climate (ibid., Book
XIX, Ch. 4).
This emphasis on geo-climatic determinants has
prompted commentators like R.
G. Collingwood, in
The Idea of History (1946, p. 79), to suggest that
Montesquieu “in fact conceived human life as a reflec-
tion of geographical and climatic conditions, not oth-
erwise than the life of plants.”
What lends support to
this criticism was Montesquieu's basic assumption
that
human nature itself was a constant.
Like many Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire did not
challenge this assumption,
but he did question Montes-
quieu's
emphasis on geo-climatic factors as the prime
determinants of cultural
differences. Not the physical
facts of a given environment, Voltaire argued
in his
Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations
(1769), but
man's ingenuity in mastering these, constituted the root
of civilization. If human life were a matter merely of
biology,
civilization would indeed be the same
wherever natural conditions were
alike. But “the realm
of custom is much vaster than that of
nature; it extends
over manners and morals, over all habits; it gives vari-
ety to the scene of the universe”
(Oeuvres, Paris
[1877-85], Vol. XIII, Ch. 197).
Therefore, it is not
nature, Voltaire concluded, but “culture
[which] pro
duces diverse fruits” (ibid.). The crowning
achievement
of these diverse cultural endeavors, and the means of
their perpetuation, Voltaire saw in the rise of great
cities. In this close
identification of culture with the
emergence of cities he was, however, at
odds not only
with Montesquieu but with many subsequent writers,
who
viewed urban growth as a threat to the continu-
ance of culture, if not as an unmistakable symptom
of its
decline.
