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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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,


615

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


616

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.