The adaptive function is the most important function of culture, ensuring the adaptation of a person to the environment. It is known that the adaptation of living organisms to their environment is a necessary condition for their survival in the process of evolution. Their adaptation occurs due to the work of the mechanisms of natural selection, heredity and variability, which ensure the survival of individuals that are most adapted to the environment, the preservation and transmission of useful traits to the next generations. But it happens in a completely different way: a person does not adapt to the environment, to changes environment, like other living organisms, but changes the environment in accordance with its needs, redoing it for itself. ( The function of socialization and inculturation, or the human-creative function, is the most important function of culture. Socialization is the process of assimilation by a human individual of certain knowledge, norms and values necessary for life as a full member of society, and inculturation is the process of assimilation of skills and knowledge necessary for life in a particular culture. These close processes are possible only with the help of systems of upbringing and education specially created by culture. Outside of society, these processes are impossible, so a real person would never have come out of Mowgli or Tarzan. Children who, for some reason, grow up among animals, remain animals forever.)
The communicative function of culture ensures that people communicate with each other. A person cannot solve any problem of any complexity without the help of other people. People enter into communication in the process of any kind of labor activity. Without communication with his own kind, a person cannot become a full-fledged member of society, develop his abilities. A long separation from society leads the individual to mental and spiritual degradation, turning him into an animal. Culture is the condition and result of human communication. Only through the assimilation of culture do people become members of society. Culture gives people the means to communicate. In turn, communicating, people create, preserve and develop culture.
Educational and educational function. We can say that it is culture that makes a person a person. An individual becomes a member of society, a person as he socializes, i.e. masters knowledge, language, symbols, values, norms, customs, traditions of his people, his social group and all of humanity. The level of culture of an individual is determined by its socialization - familiarization with the cultural heritage, as well as the degree of development of individual abilities. The culture of personality is usually associated with developed creative abilities, erudition, understanding of works of art, fluency in native and foreign languages, accuracy, politeness, self-control, high morality, etc. All this is achieved in the process of upbringing and education.
Integrative and disintegrative functions of culture. E. Durkheim paid special attention to these functions in his studies. According to E. Durkheim, the development of culture creates in people - members of a particular community a sense of community, belonging to one nation, people, religion, group, etc. Thus, culture unites people, integrates them, ensures the integrity of the community. But uniting some on the basis of some subculture, it opposes them to others, and separates wider communities and communities. Within these broader communities and communities, cultural conflicts can arise. Thus, culture can and often performs a disintegrating function.
Regulatory function of culture. As noted earlier, in the course of socialization, values, ideals, norms and patterns of behavior become part of the self-consciousness of the individual. They shape and regulate her behavior. We can say that culture as a whole determines the framework within which a person can and should act. Culture regulates human behavior in the family, at school, at work, at home, etc., putting forward a system of prescriptions and prohibitions. Violation of these prescriptions and prohibitions triggers certain sanctions that are established by the community and supported by the power of public opinion and various forms of institutional coercion.
The function of translation (transfer) of social experience is often called the function of historical continuity, or information. Culture, which is a complex sign system, transmits social experience from generation to generation, from era to era. In addition to culture, society has no other mechanisms for concentrating the entire wealth of experience that has been accumulated by people. Therefore, it is no coincidence that culture is considered the social memory of mankind.
The cognitive (epistemological) function is closely connected with the function of transferring social experience and, in a certain sense, follows from it. Culture, concentrating the best social experience of many generations of people, acquires the ability to accumulate the richest knowledge about the world and thereby create favorable opportunities for its knowledge and development. It can be argued that a society is as intellectual as it fully uses the richest knowledge contained in the cultural gene pool of mankind. All types of society that live today on Earth differ significantly primarily on this basis.
Regulatory (normative) function is associated primarily with the definition (regulation) of various aspects, types of social and personal activities of people. In the sphere of work, life, interpersonal relationships culture in one way or another influences the behavior of people and regulates their actions and even the choice of certain material and spiritual values. The regulatory function of culture is supported by such normative systems as morality and law.
The recreational function of culture (mental release) is the opposite of the normative function. Regulation and regulation of behavior are necessary, but their consequence is the restriction of freedom of individuals and groups, the suppression of some of their desires and inclinations, which leads to the development of hidden conflicts and tensions. A person comes to the same result due to excessive specialization of activity, forced loneliness or excess of communication, unsatisfied needs for love, faith, immortality, intimate contact with another person. Not all of these tensions are rationally resolvable. Therefore, culture is faced with the task of creating organized and relatively safe ways of detente that do not violate social stability.
The sign function is the most important in the system of culture. Representing a certain sign system, culture implies knowledge, possession of it. It is impossible to master the achievements of culture without studying the corresponding sign systems. Thus, language (oral or written) is a means of communication between people. Literary language acts as the most important means of mastering the national culture. Specific languages are needed for understanding the world of music, painting, theater. The natural sciences also have their own sign systems.
The value, or axiological, function reflects the most important qualitative state of culture. Culture as a certain system of values forms a person's well-defined value needs and orientations. By their level and quality, people most often judge the degree of culture of a person. Moral and intellectual content, as a rule, acts as a criterion for an appropriate assessment.
Traditionally, culture has been the subject of study in philosophy, sociology, art history, history, literary criticism, and other disciplines, while the economic sphere of culture has practically not been studied.
At the initial stages of the development of human society, the term "culture" was identified with the main type economic activity that time - agriculture.
At the initial stages of the study of economic culture, it can be defined through the most general economic category "mode of production",
Economic culture should include not only relations of production, but also the totality of social relations that have an impact on the technological mode of production, material production, and on a person as its main agent. Thus, in a broad sense, economic culture is a set of material and spiritual socially developed means of activity, with the help of which the material and production life of people is carried out.
In the structure of economic culture, it is necessary to single out the main structure-forming factor. One such factor is human activity.
any work activity is associated with the disclosure creativity producer, but the degree of development of creative moments in the labor process is different. The more creative labor is, the richer the cultural activity of a person, the higher the level of labor culture.
The culture of work includes the skills of owning tools of labor, conscious management of the process of creating material and spiritual wealth, the free use of one's abilities, the use of the achievements of science and technology in labor activity.
There is a general tendency to increase the economic cultural level. This finds expression in the use of the latest technology and technological processes, advanced methods and forms of labor organization, the introduction of progressive forms of management and planning, development, science, and knowledge in improving the education of the working people.
relations between different cultures, there are three trends: a) cultural ethnocentrism, b) cultural relativism,
c) cultural integration. In the first approach, a "foreign" culture is evaluated according to stereotypes, standards of their community and they take their own as a kind of universal model, as a basis for evaluating and making judgments about other cultures. Ethnocentrism has a dual character. On the one hand, it contributes to the rallying of people of a certain ethnic community around their own norms and values of culture, the formation of ethnic self-awareness; on the other hand, it leads to a negative attitude towards the values of a different culture, which is fraught with interethnic conflicts or cultural self-isolation. This approach, under certain conditions, can serve as a basis for nationalism and chauvinism.
The second approach (cultural relativism) denies the assessment of the phenomena of another culture according to its own standards and criteria. Relativists believe that value judgments are subjective, conditional, relative. They cannot be completely trusted. Each culture is original, specific and can be correctly perceived only through the prism of its own values and norms. This approach is softer. It allows you to find ways of mutual enrichment of cultures.
The third approach is cultural integration. This position contains a desire for coherence and interdependence while maintaining its own identity. The cultures of different peoples and countries are getting closer and closer. By absorbing all the best from other cultures, each national (ethnic) culture enriches itself. In addition, almost every modern society is multi-ethnic. This makes the process of rapprochement and mutual enrichment of cultures even more natural. This is where internationalization comes into play.
Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation
Federal Agency for Education
SEI HPE "Ural State Technical University - UPI named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin"
CONTROL WORK on the topic:
The culture of communication as a component of the general culture of the individual: essence, structure, forms of manifestation.
Teacher: Balandina T.Yu.
Ekaterinburg
Introduction
Culture begins to occupy an increasing place in the life of mankind. Not only culture in the broad sense of the word as a result of the creation of the mind and soul of man.
Culture, as an integral system, is usually divided into two forms: material culture and spiritual culture, which corresponds to two main types of production - material and spiritual. Material culture covers the entire sphere of material and production activity of a person, and its results: tools, housing, everyday items, clothing, means of transport, etc. Spiritual culture includes the sphere of spiritual production and its results, i.e. the sphere of consciousness - science, morality, education and enlightenment, law, philosophy, art, literature, folklore, religion, etc. This should also include the relationship of people among themselves to themselves and to nature, which are formed in the process of producing products of material and spiritual activity.
1 Essence of culture
Culture from the Latin cultura - cultivation, upbringing, education, development, veneration. The concept of culture exists in almost all languages and is used in a variety of situations, often in different contexts. The concept of culture is extremely broad, since it reflects a complex, multifaceted phenomenon of human history. It is no coincidence that specialists in cultural studies have been struggling with its definition for a long time, but still cannot formulate a definition of culture that would satisfy, if not all, then at least the majority of scientists. Well-known American culturologists, scientists of Harvard University, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn counted almost 170 definitions of culture extracted from the works of Western European and American researchers published from 1871 to 1950. They consider Edward Burnet Taylor, an outstanding English historian of culture, to be the first. His book Primitive Culture is widely known in Russia. At present, according to experts, there are already over 500 definitions of culture. And according to some, this number is allegedly approaching a thousand. Some authors consider culture as "a specific mode of activity, as a specific function of the collective life of people" (Markaryan), others focus on "the development of a person himself as a social person." (Mezhuev) Very common spiritual values or as a certain ideology. Finally, sometimes culture is treated only as art and literature. Within the framework of historical, philosophical, ethnographic, philological and other studies, one can discover a wide variety of ideas about culture. This is due to the versatility of this phenomenon and the breadth of the use of the term "culture" in specific disciplines, each of which approaches this concept in accordance with its tasks. However, the theoretical complexity of this problem is not reduced to the ambiguity of the concept of "culture" itself. Culture is a multifaceted issue historical development . And although a single definition of the phenomenon of culture has not yet been developed in both domestic and foreign science, there has nevertheless been some convergence of position - many researchers have come to understand culture as a complex multicomponent phenomenon associated with all the diversity of human life and activity. The word "cultura" itself has been known since the time of Cicero and translated from Latin means cultivation, processing, care, improvement. "It, unlike another concept - that is," nature ", means in this context everything created, extranatural. The world of culture, any its object or phenomenon is perceived not as a result of the action of natural forces, but as a result of the efforts of the people themselves, aimed at improving, processing, transforming what is given directly by nature.The concept of culture means, in its essence, everything that is created by human labor, then there are tools and machines, technical means and scientific discoveries, monuments of literature and writing, religious systems, political theories, legal and ethical norms, works of art, etc. One can understand the essence of culture only through the prism of the activities of man, the peoples inhabiting the planet. It does not exist outside of a person.It is initially associated with a person and is generated by the fact that he constantly strives to seek the meaning of his life and activity, and, conversely, there is neither a society nor a social group, nor a person without culture and outside culture. According to Sorokin, one of the founders of the Russian and American sociological schools: "... Any organized group inevitably has a culture. Moreover, neither a social group nor an individual (with the exception of a simply biological organism) cannot exist ... without culture." Modern culturologists believe that all peoples have a culture, there are no and cannot be "uncivilized" peoples, however, each people has its own, unique and unrepeatable culture, which is not identical to the cultures of other peoples, but coincides with them in many significant parameters. Cultural processes are complex and multifaceted phenomena. Since they can be studied by various methods, and therefore interpreted and understood in different ways, there is not one, but many concepts of culture, each of which explains and systematizes cultural processes in its own way. In modern cultural studies, among the many definitions of culture, the most common are technological, activity and value. From the point of view of the technological approach, culture is a certain level of production and reproduction of social life. In the activity concept of culture, it is considered as a way of human life, which determines the whole society. The value (axiological) concept of culture emphasizes the role and significance of the ideal model, the proper in the life of society, and in it culture is seen as the transformation of the proper into the real. All culturologists rightly believe that cultural processes are studied in the main spheres of human life. Material culture is production, its technology, tools, housing, clothing, weapons, and much more. The second sphere of people's life is social, and culture is revealed in social relations, it shows the processes taking place in society, reveals its social structure, organization of political power, existing legal and moral norms, types of management and leadership styles. And, finally, an important area of human life is his spiritual life, which is revealed in the concept of spiritual culture, which includes all areas of spiritual production - science and art, literature and religion, myth and philosophy and based on a single language understandable to all members of this community. .
2 Structure of culture
Culture is a very complex, multi-level system. It is believed that the structure of culture is one of the most complex in the world. On the one hand, these are the material and spiritual values already accumulated by society, the layering of eras, times and peoples, fused together. On the other hand, it is a "live" (ie momentary, today's) human activity, based on the legacy left by 1200 generations of our kind, fertilizing and passing on this legacy to those who will replace the living ones. It is in such a continuous exchange of knowledge, skills, abilities, and abilities that the meaning of the cultural process lies. So, despite the difficulties, the structuring of culture is possible. Today it is customary to subdivide culture according to its carrier. Depending on this, it is quite legitimate, first of all, to single out world and national culture.
1. World culture is a synthesis of the best achievements of all national cultures various peoples inhabiting our planet.
2. The national culture, in turn, acts as a synthesis of the cultures of various social strata and groups of the corresponding society (i.e., sub-ethnic groups, for example, Cossacks, youth, etc.). The originality of the national culture, its well-known originality and originality are manifested both in the spiritual (language, literature, music, painting, religion) and material (features of the economic structure, housekeeping, traditions of labor and production) spheres of life and activity. Further, in accordance with specific carriers, there are also
3 cultures of social communities (class - noble, urban, rural, professional, youth), families, individuals. All this is the structure of culture according to its bearer. In addition, culture is divided into certain types and genera. The basis for such a division is the consideration of the diversity of human activity. This is where material culture and spiritual culture stand out. However, it must be borne in mind that their subdivision is often conditional, since in real life they are closely interrelated and interpenetrate each other. Material culture includes:
1. culture of work and material production;
2. culture of life;
3. the culture of the topos, that is, the place of residence (dwelling, houses, villages, cities);
4. culture of attitude to one's own body;
5. physical culture. Spiritual culture acts as a multi-layered formation and excludes:
1. cognitive (intellectual) culture;
2. moral;
3. artistic;
4. legal;
5. pedagogical;
6. religious;
Artistic culture is a special area of culture, formed due to the concentration around art of a number of forms of activity associated with it: artistic perception, thinking, creativity, experience, etc. Artistic culture has special forms of material embodiment, is spiritual in its basis, and, as a rule, has a pictorial character. This is a special integral structure in which the material and the spiritual are organically combined. This organicity is unknown to other forms of spiritual activity and allows us to single out artistic culture as a special independent and central layer of culture. On the one hand, it comes close to the layer of material culture (proximity, for example, of literature to science). The internal structure of artistic culture has not yet been sufficiently studied. Most often, artistic culture is reduced to the communicative scheme "artist-art-public". The elements of this self-governing system are "artistic production - artistic values - artistic consumption". In artistic culture, human activity is represented by all its types, which merge and identify in art itself, and also, being specifically refracted, enter the artistic culture that surrounds art with its institutions.
So. cognitive activity is introduced into artistic culture in the form of artistic production. Communicative activity is included in it in the form of consumption of works of art, since the perception of works of art is a kind of communication between the public and the author or his work. Value-oriented activity as part of artistic culture specializes in the evaluation of works of art. Cognitive activity, for its part, manifests itself in the form of a specific interest in art, studied within the framework of art history sciences. The central link of artistic culture is art as a set of activities within the framework of the artistic creativity of the subject and its results. Artistic culture is a relatively autonomous and self-governing system of circulation of specific, non-recoded aesthetic information, all links of which are held together by a network of direct and feedback . There are a number of types of culture that cannot be attributed only to material or spiritual culture. They represent a "vertical" section of culture, "penetrating" its entire system. It is economic, political, ecological, aesthetic. In terms of content and influence, culture is divided into progressive and reactionary. Such a division is quite legitimate, because it follows from its corresponding impact on a person and society. Culture as a human-informing phenomenon can educate a person not only moral, but also immoral. Throughout the history of mankind, the opposition of "culture" and "non-culture" (what the ancient Greeks called "barbarism", referring to the high organization of their society) runs. Today we understand that the "barbarism" of that time was only a different type of culture, that modern "barbarism" paid such keen attention to culture for a reason, tried to introduce it as the only possible "its own type" of culture. True, the famous words were born in Hitler's entourage: "When I hear the word" culture ", I immediately want to grab a gun." There is no contradiction here: the type of culture is not only a scientific concept, not only a phenomenon that is formed organically in the process of historical development. The type of culture can become a positive or negative ideal, but culture itself is in any society in a very false relationship with ideology, politics, economics, and the entire system of social relations. And any social force cannot be indifferent to the existing or emerging, especially the forcibly formed type of culture. And even more so forcibly formed type of culture. So fascism, and any other form of authoritarianism, totalitarianism, any absolute power, certainly strives to introduce strict regulation into the system of culture, to subordinate culture to its influence, control, to “remove” from culture as memory and from culture as a process that which is “not desirable” , "bad". And the sharper the social, political and other confrontations in society, the sharper the conflicts within the culture, the sharper the conflict of the culture that upholds humanistic ideals, with society, with the authorities. In connection with the social revolutionary explosions of the late 19th century - the first decades of the 20th century, ideas and practical attempts were born to grow, as it were, in a flask, a "pure" culture, not spoiled by tradition and corresponding to the "tasks of the proletariat" (proletcult in the USSR, "cultural revolution" in China ) or "national tasks" ("soil" culture of the Nazis in Germany). Culture began to be cut to the quick, which ended with Hitler's and Stalin's bonfires from books, Stalin's "purges". Characteristically, such a "witch hunt" inevitably engulfed the entire culture in the USSR: the class-alien Mandelstam was destroyed along with cybernetics, the socially hostile Yesenin, along with genetics. Hitler anathematized both Karl Marx and Albert Einstein and Bertolt Brecht. The more clearly the collapse of totalitarian attempts to create universal happiness, the "final solution" of social problems was indicated, the more tragic the anti-cultural nature of such attempts was revealed, their destructive, burdened by dangerous, long-term consequences of influencing culture.
As regards scientific and technological progress, technology, material culture in general, there is no need for explanations: isolationism, the rejection of interactions, of world ties lead to a lag, to degradation. And the same thing happens in the spiritual culture. Ecology in general, "ecology of culture" in particular, imply interactions in the name of the common survival. Culture is becoming more and more a real force in modern society, in the voice of culture, receiving worldwide resonance, it turns into a word of freedom and democracy, uniting people and warning them about the true and false ways of development of each people and humanity. The substantive block makes up the "body" of culture, its substantive basis. It includes the values of culture - its works that objectify the cultures of a given era, as well as the norms of culture, its requirements for each member of society. This includes the norms of law, religion and morality. norms of everyday behavior and communication of people (etiquette norms). Only the strict fulfillment of these norms and regulations entitles a person to claim the title of cultural. functional block. Reveals the process of movement of culture. In this regard, the substantial result of this process. The functional block includes: o traditions, rituals, customs, rituals, taboos (prohibitions) that ensure the functioning of culture. In popular culture, these means were the main ones; o with the advent of professional culture, there are also special institutions designed for its production, preservation and consumption (for example, libraries, theaters, museums, etc.). Thus, the structure of culture is a false, multifaceted formation. At the same time, all its elements interact with each other, forming a single system of such a unique phenomenon as culture appears before us.
3 Forms of manifestation of culture
Culture plays a very controversial role in human life. On the one hand, it contributes to the consolidation of the most valuable and useful patterns of behavior and their transmission to subsequent generations, as well as to other groups. Culture elevates a person above the animal world, creating a spiritual world, it promotes human communication. On the other hand, culture is able, with the help of moral norms, to consolidate injustice and superstition, inhuman behavior. In addition, everything created within the framework of culture to conquer nature can be used to destroy people. Therefore, it is important to study individual manifestations of culture in order to be able to reduce the tension in the interaction of a person with the culture generated by him.
Ethnocentrism. There is a well-known truth that for each person the earth's axis passes through the center of his native city or village. The American sociologist William Summer (211, p. 13) called ethnocentrism such a view of society in which a certain group is considered central, and all other groups are measured and correlated with it.
Without a doubt, we admit that monogamous marriages are better than polygamous ones; that young people should choose partners themselves and that this is the best way to form married couples; that our art is the most humane and noble, while the art of another culture is defiant and tasteless.
To some extent, ethnocentrism is inherent in all societies, and even backward peoples in some way feel superior to everyone else. They, for example, may consider the culture of highly developed countries stupid and absurd. Not only societies, but most social groups (if not all) in a society are ethnocentric. Numerous studies of organizations conducted by sociologists from different countries show that people tend to overestimate their own organizations and underestimate all others. Ethnocentrism is a universal human reaction affecting all groups in society and almost all individuals. True, there may be exceptions to this issue, for example: anti-Semitic Jews, revolutionary aristocrats, Negroes who oppose Negroes on the elimination of racism. It is obvious, however, that such phenomena can already be considered forms of deviant behavior.
A natural question arises: is ethnocentrism a negative or a positive phenomenon in the life of society? It is difficult to answer this question clearly and unambiguously. Let's try to determine the positive and negative aspects in such a complex cultural phenomenon as ethnocentrism. First of all, it should be noted that groups in which there are clearly expressed manifestations of ethnocentrism, as a rule, are more viable than groups that are completely tolerant of other cultures or subcultures. Ethnocentrism unites the group, justifies sacrifice and martyrdom in the name of its well-being; without it, the manifestation of patriotism is impossible. Ethnocentrism is a necessary condition for the emergence of national identity and even ordinary group loyalty. Of course, extreme manifestations of ethnocentrism are also possible, such as nationalism, contempt for the cultures of other societies. In most cases, however, ethnocentrism appears in more tolerant forms, and its main message is that I prefer my customs, although I admit that some customs and mores of other cultures may be better in some ways. So, we encounter the phenomenon of ethnocentrism almost daily when we compare ourselves with people of a different gender, age, representatives of other organizations or other regions, in all cases where there are differences in the cultural patterns of representatives of social groups. Every time we put ourselves at the center of culture and consider its other manifestations, as if trying them on ourselves.
Speaking about the significant role that ethnocentrism plays in the processes of group integration, in rallying group members around certain cultural patterns, its conservative role and negative impact on the development of culture should also be noted. Indeed, if our culture is the best in the world, then why do we need to improve, change, and even more so borrow from other cultures? Experience shows that such a point of view can significantly slow down the development processes that take place in a society with a very high level of ethnocentrism. An example is the experience of our country, when the high level of ethnocentrism in the pre-war period became a serious brake on the development of culture. Ethnocentrism can also be a tool against changes in the internal structure of society. Also in Ancient Rome among the representatives of the poor, the opinion was cultivated that, despite poverty, they were still citizens of a great empire and therefore higher than other peoples. This opinion was specially created by the privileged strata of Roman society.
In order to achieve understanding, to understand another culture, it is necessary to connect its specific features with the situation and the characteristics of its development. Each cultural element must be related to the characteristics of the culture of which it is a part. The value and meaning of this element can only be considered in the context of a particular culture. Warm clothes are good in the Arctic, but ridiculous in the tropics. The same can be said about other, more complex cultural elements and the complexes they constitute. Cultural complexes concerning female beauty and the role of women in society are different in different cultures. It is only important to approach these differences not from the point of view of the dominance of "our" culture, but from the point of view of cultural relativism, i.e. recognizing for other cultures the possibility of other, different from "our" interpretations of cultural patterns and realizing the reasons for such modifications. This point of view, of course, is not ethnocentric, but helps to converge and develop different cultures.
It is necessary to understand the basic position of cultural relativism, according to which certain elements of a particular cultural system are correct and generally accepted because they have proven themselves well in this particular system; others are considered wrong and unnecessary because their application would give rise to painful and conflicting consequences only in a given social group or only in a given society. The most rational way of development and perception of culture in society is a combination of features of both ethnocentrism and cultural relativism, when an individual, feeling pride in the culture of his group or society and expressing adherence to the main samples of this culture, is at the same time able to understand other cultures, behavior of members of other social groups, recognizing their right to exist.
Conclusion
List of sources used
1. Culture, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, vol. 13, pp. 594-597, third edition, Moscow, publishing house "Soviet Encyclopedia", 1974.
2. Cultural studies. Edited by Radugina A.A., Moscow, Center, 1997, p. 304.
3. Arnoldov A.I. Man and the world of culture. M., 1992
4. Buber M. I and You M., 1993
5. Mezhuev V. M. Culture as a philosophical problem // Questions of Philosophy. 1982 N 10.
6. Svasyan K. A. Man as a creator of culture // Questions of Philosophy. 1987 N 6.
7. Philosophy of culture. Managing editor Mzhvenieradze V. V. M., 1987
8. Cultural studies. XX century. Anthology. M., 1995
What is culture? Why has this phenomenon given rise to so many conflicting definitions? Why does culture, as a certain property, turn out to be an integral feature of various aspects of our social existence? Is it possible to identify the specifics of this anthropological and social phenomenon?
The concept of culture is one of the fundamental ones in modern social science. It is difficult to name another word that would have so many semantic shades. For us, such phrases as “culture of the mind”, “culture of feelings”, “culture of behavior”, “ Physical Culture". In everyday consciousness, culture serves as an evaluative concept and refers to such personality traits that it would be more accurate to call culture rather than culture.
The American culturologists Alfred Kroeber and Klij Kluckhohn, in their joint study, devoted to a critical review of the concepts and definitions of culture, noted a huge and growing interest in this concept. So, if, according to their calculations, from 1871 to 1919 only 7 definitions of culture were given, then from 1920 to 1950 they counted 157 definitions of this concept. Later, the number of definitions increased significantly. L.E. Kertman counted more than 400 definitions. This diversity is explained primarily by the fact that culture expresses the depth and immensity of human existence.
When asked what culture is, V.S. Soloviev answered in bewilderment: “There are Voltaire, and Bossuet, and Madonna, and the Pope, and Alfred Musset, and Filaret. How can you dump all this in one heap and put it in place of God?
1. MAIN CONTENT OF THE CONCEPT "CULTURE" and its place in the system of human activity
The term "culture" (from Latin cultura - cultivation, processing) has long been used to refer to what is done by man. In such a broad sense, this term is used as a synonym for social, artificial, as opposed to natural, natural. However, this meaning is too broad, vague and therefore needs to be clarified. In itself, this clarification is a rather complicated undertaking. Indeed, in modern scientific literature there are more than 250 definitions of culture. Specialists in the theory of culture A. Kroeber and K. Klakhohn analyzed over a hundred basic definitions and grouped them as follows.
1. Descriptive definitions, which are based on the concept of the founder of cultural anthropology, E. Taylor. The essence of these definitions: culture is the sum of all activities, customs, beliefs; it, as a treasury of everything created by people, includes books, paintings, etc., knowledge of ways of adapting to the social and natural environment, language, custom, etiquette system, ethics, religion, which have evolved over the centuries.
2. Historical definitions, emphasizing the role of traditions and social heritage inherited by the modern era from the previous stages of human development. Adjacent to them are genetic definitions that assert that culture is the result of historical development. It includes everything that is artificial, that people have produced and that is transmitted from generation to generation - tools, symbols, organizations, common activities, attitudes, beliefs.
3. Normative definitions, emphasizing the value of the adopted rules and norms. Culture is the way of life of the individual, determined by the social environment.
4. Value definitions: culture is the material and social values of a group of people, their institutions, customs, behavioral reactions.
5. Psychological definitions based on the solution of certain problems by a person at the psychological level. Here culture is a special adaptation of people to the natural environment and economic needs, and is made up of all the results of such adaptation.
6. Definitions based on learning theories: culture is the behavior that a person has learned, and not received as a biological inheritance.
7. Structural definitions highlighting the importance of organization or modeling moments. Here, culture is a system of certain features, interconnected in various ways. Tangible and intangible cultural attributes, organized around basic needs, form social institutions, which are the core (model) of culture.
8. Ideological Definitions: Culture is the flow of ideas passing from individual to individual through specific actions, i.e. through words or imitations.
9. Symbolic definitions: culture is the organization of various phenomena (material objects, actions, ideas, feelings), consisting in the use of symbols or depending on it.
Each of the listed groups of definitions captures some important features of culture. However, in general, as a complex social phenomenon, it eludes definition. Indeed, it is the result of human behavior and the activities of society, it is historical, it includes ideas, models and values, it is selective, studied, it is based on symbols, that is, it does not include the biological components of a person and is transmitted by mechanisms different from biological heredity, it is emotionally perceived or discarded by individuals. And yet this list of properties does not give us a sufficiently complete understanding of the complex phenomena that are meant when it comes to the cultures of the Maya or the Aztecs, Kievan Rus or Novgorod.
History can be regarded as the expedient activity of people. It is this activity approach that allows us to answer the question of what is culture? Speaking and thinking about culture, we imagine not only the products of human activity, but also this activity itself: masons erecting pyramids or building the Acropolis, modern automated production with its high technical culture. It is clear that the activity carried out with the help of a stone hammer or a conventional saw differs significantly from the activity of a worker setting up an automatic line, which includes machine tools with program control.
In accordance with what has been said, consider culture as a combination of all types of transformative activity of a person and society, as well as the results of this activity, embodied in material and spiritual values.
2. CULTURE AS A SYMBOL OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL REALITY
Values are understood as material and ideal objects that can satisfy any needs of a person, class, society, serve their interests and goals. The world of values is diverse, it includes natural, ethical, aesthetic and other systems.
Value systems are historical and tend to be hierarchical. One of higher levels such a hierarchy is occupied by universal human values.
Emphasizing the difference between material and spiritual values, many researchers distinguish between material and spiritual culture. Material culture is understood as a set of material goods, means and forms of their production and ways of mastering them. Spiritual culture is defined as the totality of all knowledge, forms of thinking, areas of ideology (philosophy, ethics, law, politics, etc.) and methods of activity to create spiritual values.
There is a rational grain in this distinction, but it cannot be absolutized. Here one must always remember the relativity of the boundaries of material and spiritual cultures. It is even possible that it is more accurate to speak about the material and spiritual aspects of a single phenomenon of culture. In fact, the machine is material, but it would be only a heap of scrap metal if it did not embody the idea of the designer, the talents, and skills of the workers who made it.
Both in the definitions of the phenomenon of culture itself, and in the classifications of different cultures and the identification of the patterns of their development, today there is a significant discrepancy. Some culturologists understand culture as the fruit of the spiritual creativity of people and therefore reduce it to spiritual culture. Others, relying on the traditions that have developed in anthropology and ethnography, include in the concept of culture all aspects of the life of society, except for those that are completely beyond the scope of conscious activity (for example, population density). But what is a typology (classification)? Typology in modern scientific literature is understood as a method of dividing the systems of objects under study and grouping them using a generalized model. This method is used for the purpose of comparative study of essential features, relationships, functions, relationships, levels of organization of objects.
Culture is a unique characteristic of human life and therefore is extremely diverse in its specific manifestations. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the specificity of specific manifestations of culture has attracted serious attention from researchers. Since that time, such concepts as "communicative culture", "culture of human relations”, “culture of communication”, “culture of working conditions”, “culture of working and free time”, “culture of management”, “information culture”. Without going into an analysis of the available definitions, it should be noted that some researchers associate culture with information and sign systems in which it is encoded. For others, it appears as a unique technology of human activity. Still others see it as an extrabiological system of human adaptation. Fourth - the degree of freedom in human activity. Finally, almost everyone knows the understanding of culture as a set of material and spiritual values created by man almost from the school bench. This diversity is not accidental. Versatility generic concept(culture) manifests itself in each of its types.
But culture not only introduces a person to the achievements of previous generations accumulated in experience. At the same time, it relatively severely restricts all types of his social and personal activities, regulating them accordingly, in which its regulatory function is manifested. Culture always implies certain boundaries of behavior, thereby limiting human freedom. Z. Freud defined it as "all the institutions necessary to streamline human relationships" and argued that all people feel the sacrifices demanded of them by culture for the sake of opportunities for living together 1 . This should hardly be argued, because culture is normative. In the aristocratic environment of the last century, it was the norm to respond to a friend’s message that he was getting married with the question: “And what kind of dowry do you take for the bride?”. But the same question asked in a similar situation today can be regarded as an insult. Norms have changed, and this should not be forgotten.
However, culture not only restricts human freedom, but also provides this freedom. Having abandoned the anarchist understanding of freedom as a complete and unrestricted permissiveness, Marxist literature for a long time simplistically interpreted it as a "conscious necessity." Meanwhile, one rhetorical question is enough (is a person who has fallen out of a window free in flight if he realizes the need for the operation of the law of gravitation?) to show that the knowledge of necessity is only a condition of freedom, but not yet freedom itself. The latter appears there and then, where and when the subject has the opportunity choice between different behaviors. At the same time, the knowledge of necessity determines the boundaries within which free choice can be exercised.
Culture is able to provide a person with truly unlimited possibilities for choice, i.e. to exercise his freedom. In terms of an individual, the number of activities to which he can devote himself is practically unlimited. But every professional type of activity is a differentiated experience of previous generations, i.e. culture.
Mastering the general and professional culture is a necessary condition for a person's transition from reproductive to creative activity. Creativity is the process of free self-realization of the individual
The next function of culture is symbolic. Mankind fixes, transmits the accumulated experience in the form of certain signs. So, for physics, chemistry, mathematics, formulas act as specific sign systems, for music - notes, for language - words, letters and hieroglyphs. Mastering culture is impossible without mastering its sign systems. Culture, in turn, cannot translate social experience without wrapping it in specific sign systems, whether it be the colors of a traffic light or national spoken languages.
And, finally, the last of the main functions of culture is value. It is closely related to the regulatory one, because it forms in a person certain attitudes and value orientations, in accordance with which he either accepts or rejects the newly known, seen and heard. It is the value function of culture that gives a person the opportunity to independently evaluate everything that he encounters in life, that is, makes his personality unique.
Of course, all these functions of culture do not exist side by side. They actively interact, and there is no more erroneous idea of culture than the idea of it being static and unchanging. Culture is always a process. It is in perpetual change, in dynamics, in development. This is the difficulty of its study, and this is its great vitality.
The language of culture is a set of cultural objects that has an internal structure (a set of stable relations that are invariant under any transformations), explicit (formalized) or implicit rules for the formation, comprehension and use of its elements, and serving to implement communicative and translational processes (production of cultural texts). The language of culture is formed and exists only in the interaction of people, within the community that has adopted the rules of this language. Mastering the language of culture is a key element of socialization and acculturation. The study of the language of culture is carried out by semiotics (analysis of the sign representation of the language of culture), linguistics (analysis of natural languages), cultural semantics (study of the language of culture as a means of expressing meaning).
The set of signs (alphabet, vocabulary) and the rules for their combination (grammar, syntax) in the language of culture is always finite, and therefore limited in relation to the variety of phenomena of reality and meanings. Therefore, the consolidation of meaning in the language, its meaning involves not only formalization, but also metaphorization, a certain distortion; the signifier gravitates over the signified. This situation is exacerbated when information is “translated” from one language to another, and the more significant the distortion, the more the principles of meaning (referencing) differ in these languages. The variety of expressive means of the language of culture, and, consequently, the principles of their meaning, make the issues of their “translatability” (the possibility of expressing meaning by means of different languages) and “priority” (the choice of a particular language in a particular communicative situation) very complex.
Other important point functioning of the language of culture is understanding. During communication (exchange of signs), there is inevitably a certain inadequacy of understanding (due to the difference in individual experience, degree of familiarity with the language, etc.), a moment of interpretation (rethinking) that distorts the original meaning. The understander always has a certain idea of what is being understood, expects a certain meaning and interprets the signs in accordance with this idea (this problem is considered in ethnomethodology, hermeneutics).
The language of culture can be differentiated by reference to a certain area of reality or human activity (language of art, slang of mathematics); by belonging to a certain (ethnic, professional, historical-typological, etc.) subculture, linguistic community ( English language, hippie language); by symbolic representation, its types (verbal, gestural, graphic, iconic, figurative, formalized languages) and types - cultural orders (hairstyle language, costume language); according to the specifics of semantic expressiveness (information content, emotionally expressive, expressively significant) and orientation to a certain way of perception (rational knowledge, intuitive understanding, associative conjugation, aesthetic empathy, traditional attribution); on the specifics of internal grammatical, syntactic and semantic rules (semantically open and closed languages, languages with complete and incomplete syntax, etc.); by focusing on certain communicative and translational situations (the language of political speeches, the language of official documents); in terms of priority and popularity at a particular level of culture, in one or another of its specialized forms, in one or another subculture.
The language of culture in the broad sense of this concept refers to those means, signs, forms, symbols, texts that allow people to enter into communicative relations with each other, to navigate in the socio-cultural space. Culture appears as a semantic world that determines the way of being and attitude of people, expressed in signs and symbols. A sign is a materialized carrier of an image. A symbol is a sign that has no objective meaning, through which the deep meaning of the
object. With the help of the symbol, man has found a way to convey information by means that surpass the possibilities of language. For example, the coats of arms, emblems, banners, images - the “troika bird”, the “dove of peace” - in addition to the visual-figurative form, convey abstract concepts and ideas. Of particular importance are figurative-symbolic systems in religion, art (“ artistic languages”), and each type of art introduces its own figurative and symbolic language: the language of music, dance, painting, cinema or theater, etc.
Culture expresses itself through a world of symbolic forms passed down from generation to generation. Symbolic, forms in themselves are only the outer side of culture. Only thanks to the creative activity of man, the symbolic world is filled with deep content. Therefore, to define the concept of culture only through symbols, i.e. it is impossible to identify culture and the world of symbols. Understanding the language of culture and mastering it gives a person the opportunity to communicate, store and translate culture, opens the way to the cultural space, so the language can be called the core of the culture system, its main structural element. The language of culture is a kind of universal form of comprehension of reality, which contributes to the organization of new and already existing concepts, images, ideas.
CONCLUSION
Culture is a spiritual component of human activity as an integral part and condition of the entire system of activity that provides various aspects of human life. This means that culture is omnipresent, but at the same time, in each specific type of activity, it represents only its own spiritual side - in all the variety of socially significant manifestations.
At the same time, culture is also a process and result of spiritual production, which makes it an essential part of the total social production and social regulation along with the economy, politics and social structure. Spiritual production also ensures the formation, maintenance, dissemination and implementation of cultural norms, values, meanings and knowledge embodied in various components of culture (myths, religion, artistic culture, ideology, science, etc.). As an important component of total production, culture is not limited to non-productive consumption or service. It is an indispensable prerequisite for any efficient production.
The human world is the world of culture Culture is the assimilated and materialized experience of human life. Any historical type of culture in its specificity represents an inseparable unity of two components - the actual culture and the culture of accumulated, or cultural memory. To all the questions that arise before him, a person is looking for an answer in the culture he has assimilated. Culture is a unique characteristic of human life and therefore is extremely diverse in its specific manifestations. Culture is a complex system, the elements of which are not just multiple, but are closely intertwined and interconnected. Culture reveals its content through a system of norms, values, meanings, ideas and knowledge, which are expressed in the system of morality and law, religion, art and science. Culture also exists in a practically effective form, in the form of events and processes in which the attitudes and orientations of the participants, i.e., various strata, groups and individuals, have manifested themselves. These processes and events, which are part of a common history or are associated with some manifestations of economic, social and political life, also have a cultural background, turn out to be facts and factors of the cultural history and cultural heritage of a given society.
Culturology: Textbook for universities Apresyan Ruben Grantovich
12.1. Relationship between culture and activity
Disclosure of the nature and history of the development of culture in conjunction with the structure and content of human activity is one of the areas of modern cultural studies. However, the understanding of the connection of culture with the whole variety of human activities was not characteristic of various stages of historical development. Initially, the concept of "culture" was closely connected with its etymological meaning "cultivation", because it denoted the expedient human impact on nature, agriculture. But then it also began to mean upbringing, that is, a kind of "cultivation" of the person himself. So, the Hellenes saw in "pandeia", which meant "education", the main difference from the barbarians.
In the Middle Ages, culture was associated with signs of the perfection of the individual. In the Renaissance, it correlated with humanistic ideals, and later with the ideal of enlightenment. Throughout a long historical period, there has been a tendency to perceive culture only as a spiritual phenomenon, opposite to the sphere of material production. It seemed that culture manifests itself only in the forms of spiritual and political development of a person and society: art, science, morality, religion and forms of government were attributed to cultural phenomena.
For the first time in the depths of German classical philosophy, judgments appear that connect culture with labor activity person. We meet similar judgments, for example, in the philosophy of Hegel, although "Hegel knows and recognizes only one type of labor, namely, abstract spiritual labor."
The Marxist stage in the development of the theory of culture is distinguished by the fact that the essence of culture is correlated with the practical activity of man. According to K. Marx, labor becomes the source of culture. At the same time, the conditionality of the culture of society and the individual was noted by the level of development of productive forces, natural and economic conditions of life. At the same time, the founders of Marxism warned against the vulgarization of historical materialism. In polemics with their ideological opponents, they had to defend the main principle - the primacy of the material, economic conditions of social development. At the same time, they emphasized the mutual influence, interdependence of economic factors and factors of spiritual culture, the impact of science, politics, art, that is, cultural phenomena, on the economic development of society. The dialectical approach to the interpretation of the interaction of culture and practical human activity, characteristic of the position of K. Marx and F. Engels, is often overlooked in modern criticism of Marxism.
The idea of the relationship between culture and production, labor and art was recognized in the first decade of Soviet power. It found organizational embodiment in the activities of the Central Institute of Labor (CIT), established in 1921 by A.K. Gastev. In his book How to Work, work culture was correlated not only with a set of working conditions, but also with the culture of the worker himself, with the culture of relationships between members of the production team. Developing methods for teaching labor culture, A.K. Gastev paid attention not only to the elements of labor technology, but also to the manifestation of an interested, responsible attitude to work, the manifestation of the spiritual culture of the individual.
Unfortunately, in the following decades, the idea of a connection between the culture of work and the culture of the individual, material and spiritual culture, did not receive proper development. To a certain extent, this can be explained by the fact that for a long time the issues of culture and labor were studied in parallel, without intersecting. Culture was the subject of study of philosophy, sociology, art history, and labor was predominantly the subject of analysis of economic science. A purely economic approach was reflected in the fact that, if the problem of labor culture was revealed, it was understood as the culture of conditions, organization of labor and the quality of its results, but not the culture of the working person. In other words, they evaluated mainly the object, and not the subject of labor.
Moreover, in the philosophical theory, the problems of the correlation of scientific, technical and spiritual progress were treated as alternative ones, their interdependence was not analyzed. It was only in the 1960s that a number of studies drew attention to the illegitimacy of opposing these processes. The most consistent and reasoned new approach was formulated by L.I. Novikova in Aesthetics and Technique: Alternative or Integration. The author emphasized that the unreasonable opposition of these spheres of human activity adversely affects both the pace of scientific and technological progress and the development of the aesthetic culture of the individual.
It is significant that in the same period, the essence of aesthetic activity began to be interpreted differently. The attitude to it has changed as an activity only in the field of artistic creativity and the perception of works of art. The researchers drew attention to the functional connection of aesthetic activity with various types of social practice: industrial, scientific, economic. It was during this period that the rapid development of technical aesthetics as theoretical basis design, artistic design.
Analyzing the dynamics of ideas about the essence of culture, B.C. Bibler draws attention to the fact that the concept of culture, which was previously fixed in the historical consciousness, limited to the range of phenomena related to art, philosophy, morality, religion, in the 20th century “is shifting more and more clearly to the epicenter of modern life ... Understanding culture as the focus of human spiritual activity is combined with understanding of culture as a kind of cut of values and, perhaps, in the first place, its material, material activity.
In this understanding, culture turns out to be interconnected with all types of human activity. Human activity is diverse, because it reflects everything possible relationship man with peace. It is possible to distinguish cognitive, creative, artistic, scientific, communicative, economic, environmental and other activities. The diversity of human activity also determines the multidimensionality of culture as a process, result and quality level of any activity.
The idea of the relationship between culture and multifaceted human activity is the common thing that unites the positions of various researchers of the phenomenon of culture. But there are different approaches to assessing the relationship between culture and activity. Some view culture as the result of activity. This approach is called axiological or value approach. Others, as the main content of culture, consider its influence on the development of man himself as a social being. This is a dynamic, or anthropological, approach to the interpretation of culture. Still others interpret culture as a mode of activity achieved at a certain stage in the development of culture (functional approach). However, with certain differences, these approaches do not contradict each other, but give an idea of a multilateral analysis of the relationship between culture and human activity.
Researchers also characterize the structure of culture in different ways, since they take as a basis different classification activities with which the structural components of culture are associated. But one way or another, the analysis of the content of culture is based on the content of activity. To imagine the possibility of classifying culture according to the mode of activity, consider the views of some philosophers.
Based on activity theory, M.S. kagan draws attention to two main functions of culture: ensuring the progressive development of society and mobility, dynamism of human self-improvement. He distinguishes three layers of culture: material, spiritual and aesthetic.
The artistic culture of M.S. Kagan distinguishes it as an independent one, arguing this approach with the culturological function of art, its unique ability to create around itself a relatively autonomous sphere of activities, one way or another related to art. Transformative activity is associated with artistic creativity.
E.S. Markarian approaches the structuring of the phenomenon of culture, defining culture as a special way of activity peculiar only to man. He classifies culture on the basis of its adaptive functions. The first is the natural-ecological subsystem, which allows society to adapt to the natural environment. The second subsystem is socio-ecological, adapting society to the socio-historical environment. The third defines the interaction of individuals within limited space environment to meet needs.
For the classification of culture proposed L.A. Zelenov, characteristic is the desire to correlate the structure of culture with the structure of human activity as clearly as possible. Based on the principle of polarization, he first of all classifies activity, starting from its generalized spheres and ending with specific types of activity, correlating the corresponding structure of culture with a specific type of activity. So, for example, he divides all social activity into the production of things and people. The production of things is carried out in two forms: natural-thing and symbolic. Natural things correspond to economic and ecological culture. The sign form of production also corresponds to two types of culture: scientific and artistic. .
Structuring the content of culture in accordance with the structure of human activity has not only theoretical, culturological significance, but also significant practical meaning. The activity approach to the consideration of the essence of culture allows not only to reveal the multidimensionality of culture, but also to substantiate the penetration of culture into all types of human activity. In relation to any kind of activity, culture characterizes its qualitative level. Culture is manifested both in the goal and motives of activity, and in the moral and value choice of means to achieve the goal.
The analysis of activity from the standpoint of culture makes it possible to assess the progressivity or regressivity of the content of activity, its significance for the development of a person and society, compliance with cultural traditions, value orientations of social development. This is the essence of practical cultural studies. It allows one to explain the priorities in the development of one or another component of culture, depending on the leading trends in scientific, technological and social progress, and to understand the value meaning of cultural development.
So, in the early 30s of the last century, under the influence of industrialization, the development of technical culture was an urgent need for social development. In modern conditions, the transition from industrial to post-industrial society has determined the special value of information culture, which involves the development of an analytical mindset, the ability to abstract, transfer algorithms of actions to new conditions, and mastery of computer literacy.
The importance of the design culture associated with the design of both technology and finished products, complex design, capable of foreseeing the feasibility of the process of activity and the competitiveness of labor results.
The value and normative system of culture in modern society more and more difficult. Those values that in an industrial society were on the periphery of cultural development are brought to the fore. German psychologist Rolf Rüttinger, analyzing the culture of entrepreneurship, cites the results of a study by the Batelle Institute. They note that the importance of such values as obedience, hierarchy, centralization is decreasing; they are replaced by others: self-determination, participation, collective, orientation to needs, creativity, disclosure of personality, ability to compromise, decentralization.
At the turn of the third millennium, the value of an ecologically healthy environment is of particular importance. The prerequisite for such a change in value priorities was a real threat to the health and life of humans and wildlife. The installations of the ideology of the Soviet period, which focused on the transformation of the environment "in the interests of man" and in order to create the "material base of communism", turned out to be disastrous for nature.
Changing the course of rivers, flooding floodplain lands with artificial seas, thoughtless destruction of forest resources led to a violation of the ecological balance. Moreover, the reason was not only in illiterate management, the lack of the necessary production culture, but also in erroneous ideas about the unlimited creative possibilities of man. Introduction state control behind the activities of environmentally harmful enterprises, the activities of the "green" do not yet solve the problem. It is necessary to change the value orientations, stereotypes and norms of behavior, which determines the ecological culture of the individual and society as a particularly significant component of the manifestation of a culture of activity in modern conditions.
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Relationship between culture and man. Culture is the experience of people's activity, which, in the final analysis, is of vital importance for the entire given concrete community as a whole. This socially significant or generally significant experience of people's life is fixed in the vocabulary, grammar and general system of the language, in the structures and ways of thinking, works of literature (proverbs, sayings, fairy tales, stories, novels, etc.), various kinds of techniques and methods actions, norms of behavior, and finally, in different kind man-made material things (tools, structures, etc.). Norms of behavior, techniques and methods of action, rules of mental activity, rules of grammar - all these are various forms of praktograms.
All phenomena in which a generally significant experience is embodied are called phenomena of culture.
Due to the fact that culture as experience is always embodied in the phenomena of culture, exists in them, the totality of the latter can also be characterized and is usually characterized as culture. Culture, first of all, is a program of activity, behavior. The main meaning of socially significant experience is that it acts for each specific person who has mastered it as a guide to action, as a program of his behavior (4, p. 23). The lifetime of a sociohistorical organism always exceeds the lifetime of any of its members.
Therefore, the inevitability is the constant renewal of its human composition. There is a change of generations in the society. One is replaced by another. And each new generation, in order to exist, must learn the experience that the outgoing one had. Thus, in society there is a change of generations and at the same time the transfer of culture from one generation to another.
The concept of continuity is inextricably linked with the concept of culture. Culture is the experience of human community, which is transmitted from one generation to another. Thus, in human society there are programs of behavior, and these programs are passed on from generation to generation. However, they are transmitted in a completely different way than genetic programs. The latter are recorded in DNA molecules and are translated through germ cells. The program that determines the behavior of people is transmitted, bypassing the mechanism of biological heredity.
The means of its transmission are an example, a demonstration, a language (articulate speech). When applied to genetics, one speaks of heredity; when applied to culture, one speaks of continuity. Of course, culture is not only transmitted, but enriched and developed. However, no enrichment, no development of culture is possible without the transfer of experience from generation to generation. Culture always includes both experience gained from previous generations, i.e. traditions, as well as the own experience of the new generation, i.e. innovation. And here we are faced with another concept - accumulation, accumulation.
Socially significant experience, which is a program of human activity, is not only transmitted, but also accumulated. The process of cultural development is cumulative. There is no doubt that the structure of society, first of all, its socio-economic structure determines what a person becomes. However, as is clear from all that has been said above, the socio-economic structure of society does not form a person's personality directly, not immediately.
Directly, directly, the personality of a person is formed under the influence of the program of behavior existing in society, and this program is culture, in which the leading role is played by public will, morality. This is the reason for the conclusion of a significant number of researchers that the decisive force of human socialization is culture, that it is in the presence of culture that the main difference between man and animal lies. Culture is a shared experience. Therefore, it is always the experience of certain aggregates of people.
Different human communities lived in different conditions. Therefore, each of them developed its own experience, different from the experience of other associations. Just as human society as a whole has always been a multitude of sociohistorical organisms, human culture has always existed as a multitude of different cultures. Such cultures were, for example, ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Hittite, Roman, Russian, etc. They are called local cultures.
Culturally, such sociohistorical organisms also differed, which belonged to the same socio-economic type, i.e. to the same socio-economic formation or paraformation. On the basis of one and the same socio-economic structure, essentially identical cultures arose, but in outward manifestation they were very different from each other. And it was inevitable.
When in the era primitive society If there was a division of one or another primitive community into several new ones, then in the sociohistorical organisms that arose, one and the same culture initially existed. However, in the process of further development, differences in experience gradually began to accumulate, and after the passage of a certain time, we no longer have one culture, but several, albeit closely related, but, nevertheless, different cultures (6, p. 56). Different cultures, i.e. different programs of behavior make the people who carry them different.
The personality of a person is specific not only socially, but also culturally. Cultural specificity has always existed, at all stages of the development of human society. With the transition from a primitive society to a class, civilized one, ethnic groups arose. An ethnos, or ethnic community, is a collection of people who have a common culture, speak, as a rule, the same language and are aware of both their commonality and their difference from members of other similar human groups.
With the emergence of ethnic groups, cultural specificity or cultural specificity took the form of ethnic specificity, or simply ethnicity. As a result, the individual has since been characterized as both socially defined and ethnically specific. The socio-economic structure through culture determines the essence of a person as a social being - a person, and the originality of culture shapes the ethnic manifestation of this social essence.
Personality does not remain unchanged. It changes with changing society and culture. Changing culture is possible without changing society. Although culture is always a product of society, always an accident and not a substance, it nevertheless always has a certain, and sometimes a very significant, degree of independence, which is most clearly manifested in its development. Already the transfer of culture from one generation of members of society to another is a process different from the process of development of society.
And if we take into account the accumulation so characteristic of the process of cultural development, it becomes clear why a considerable part of researchers began to consider culture as something completely independently and independently evolving. As a result, the concept of culture has largely overshadowed the concept of society. All this was sufficiently clearly manifested, for example, in the work of the famous English ethnologist E. Tylor (1832-1917) "Primitive Culture" (1871). Subsequently, it was discovered that culture can be transmitted not only within society, from one generation to another, but from one society to another.
In the case of cultural diffusion, culture is separated not only from the people who created it, which also takes place in intergenerational transmission, but also from the society that gave birth to it. As a result, among diffusionists, culture finally acted as a substance, and the concept of society receded into the background, and for some of them it completely disappeared, which can be seen in the work of the German ethnographer L. Frobenius (1873–1938) “The Origin of African Cultures” (1898) . In any case, after the discovery of cultural diffusion, it became clear that the culture of one or another group of people can undergo changes as a result of the influence of the culture of another group of people.
Under certain conditions, there may even be a substitution of one culture for another. At the same time, cultural (ethnic) assimilation can affect not only individual representatives of a particular ethnic group, not only its individual divisions (sub-ethnic groups and ethnographic groups), but also cover the entire ethnic group as a whole.
Most often, this is accompanied by a substitution of the language. The most striking examples are the replacement in the territory of Mesopotamia at the end of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. Sumerian culture of Akkadian and in the Nile Valley in the second half of the 1st millennium AD. ancient Egyptian culture - Arabic. As a result, in both cases, there was a change in the ethnic specificity of the individual, while maintaining mainly his social essence (5, p. 45). 4. Values and meaning of human existence What is, by and large, more important for a person: to know why the stars shine, or where to get a livelihood? The latter, apparently, is still “closer to the heart” of an ordinary person, more urgent.
Yes, God bless her, with the Universe and its structure, we would have to deal with earthly, everyday affairs and be able to live life with dignity. (Or even just to survive, which for many people on Earth to this day is a considerable achievement.) But it is not enough for a developed person to simply exist, satisfying his natural needs. He absolutely needs this existence to have some meaning.
The need for the meaningfulness of being arises from the expediency that is constantly present in human actions. Whatever we do, we always do it “for something”, for some purpose. Whether we work, study, play, create technical devices or works of art - everything is subordinated to certain goals, which fill with meaning, that is, justify and justify our actions.
And even death is not terrible for a person if it is accepted in the name of a lofty goal (protection of the family, homeland, fulfillment of duty, etc.). The senselessness of activity (remember Sisyphus) is the most terrible punishment. But if practically every action of a person is expedient and meaningful, then, obviously, his whole life should have the same character. It must be meaningful! It should have cross-cutting, powerful and worthy goals. To determine what they are, what can give a person's life an acceptable meaning - this is the main task philosophizing, its "basic question" (3, p. 23). However, attempts to immediately establish what could be the meaning human life face serious obstacles.
It turns out that the meaning of individual human life cannot be found in it itself. Just as the meaning of the existence of any thing created by a person (a computer, for example, or a book) is found not in it itself, but in its relation to a person and other things.
Therefore, the meaning of the life of an individual person can exist only if the life of the human race, its entire history, has at least some meaning. And the latter, for the same reasons, can make sense only when there is at least some sense in the existence of nature, the Universe, of which it is a part. Well, the “part” cannot have a meaning, but the “whole” does not. That is why philosophy includes knowledge not only about man, but also about society as a whole, its history, as well as about nature, the Universe, etc. At the same time, the Universe or the biosphere is of interest to philosophy not in itself (this is the subject of natural science), but only in their correlation with a person, his goals and values. Thus, the problem of being is the problem of the way, goals and meaning of the existence of the world as a whole, which alone can fill individual human existence with meaning (2, p. 98). Is there a meaning to life? But isn't it too reckless to demand meaning and goals from the universe? Are we not attributing to the Universe our own human characteristics, just as the ancient Greeks endowed the Olympian gods with their passions and vices? Such a danger certainly exists. In philosophy, it is called anthropomorphism (from the Greek anthropos - man, morphe - form), i.e. reasoning about the structure of the world by analogy with the organization of social life.
But there are no less serious grounds for believing in the legitimacy of raising the question of the meaning of being.
The question of the meaning of a phenomenon is usually asked by the words “why”, “for what”, “for what purpose”. In the natural sciences, these questions are considered practically forbidden. To ask why opposite charges or bodies with mass are attracted to each other is somehow absurd.
But there are other examples as well. For biologists, for example, questions like “Why do deer have antlers?” or “Why do cats have crooked claws?” don't seem strange at all.
They even have a completely satisfactory answer: to perform a certain function that arose in the process of evolution of a certain species. (And this applies not only to bodily forms, but also to the forms of behavior of living beings.) Does this mean that the evolution of living things has goals and meaning? Literally, probably not. But metaphorically, figuratively - definitely, yes. The evolution of living systems (and, as it turned out in recent years, not only living systems) has a clearly expressed direction of changing their properties.
This orientation, which has the character of regularity, makes it possible to interpret the world as a whole in terms of "meaning" and "goals". The latter in this case do not mean the subjective intentions and expectations of people, but an expression of the objective necessity of this or that phenomenon. Man, for example, is mortal. The finiteness of human existence, in principle, should make all his efforts meaningless. Why suffer if you disappear without a trace anyway? What's the point of this? And meanwhile there is a meaning. Only not individual, but generic, evolutionary. The mortality of all living things is an adaptive mechanism by which biosystems improve themselves. It is the rapid change of generations that provides scope for the action of natural selection.
It is this alone that makes it possible to "reject" unsuccessful mutations, to fix successful ones, and to continuously "test" new forms. Without this mechanism, evolution would have stopped long ago, and the matter would certainly not have reached a reasonable person. Or let's take a more harmless example.
Why "fathers and sons" almost never find mutual language? All the forty thousand years of the existence of mankind, the older generations lament that "the youth today is not at all the same", and the young shoots are outraged by the conservatism of their "mossy ancestors". But if the conflict of generations is so stable, it means that society needs it for some reason, i.e. does it have any meaning? Well, of course there is. The meaning is the same - evolutionary. The permanent rebellion of "children" against "fathers" makes the transmission of norms and traditions of culture from one generation to another less rigid, more flexible and mobile.
This opens up a lot of new, previously unexplored opportunities and directions of development for the society. Just imagine what would happen if the "children" always obeyed their "parents" in everything. Yes, the development of society would simply stop. Or at least it has slowed down a lot. Thus, many social and biological phenomena "make sense" in the sense that their necessity is inherent in the very mechanism of the evolution of living nature.
And in the XX century. It turned out that not only living matter is evolving, but the entire Universe. The evolution of the Universe also has its own direction, i.e. as if "aspiration" to some global "goal". Therefore, "meaning", i.e. the necessity of biological and social evolution can find its explanation in the mechanism of the development of the Universe as a whole, of which it seems to be a natural fragment. The "meaning" of the existence of our world is, in fact, the laws of its existence and development.
They are certainly objective. The meaning of human existence is a category largely subjective. To combine and harmonize these meanings, to catch their “resonance”, to find a reliable foothold for finite human life in the infinity of the objective world means to solve the problem of being. The role of meaning in human life is as follows: 1. The pursuit of meaning is a survival value. When a person has a meaning, he does not think about it, but simply lives, works, creates, not noticing it, like the air that we breathe, like natural light, against which we see all other objects.
Meaning is associated with significant goals and values that we aspire to. F. Nietzsche has this saying: “Whoever has a “why” to live can endure any “how”. The meaning just gives the answer to the question “why”, it sets that precious goal for which it is worth fighting. 2. Human life cannot lose its meaning under any circumstances.
Meaning can always be found. The meaning is what inspires a person for life - but it can be found in old age, and in illness, and in a situation that seems to be a dead end, and people who have youth, material opportunities and a time perspective, all the more should not put up with meaning loss. 3. Meaning cannot be given, it must be found. Meaning is not a thing. A person himself gives meaning to reality, no one can do it for him, just as one cannot see or breathe for another.
The discovery of meaning is not the result of a purely logical operation like deductive inference. Its acquisition is rather like the perception of a holistic image, with which we "grab" suddenly. Meaning is suddenly revealed to us against the backdrop of reality. 4. Meaning can be found but cannot be created. A person is not a being isolated from society and culture, he is closely connected with other people and those "objective meanings" that circulate in culture. Man is characterized by "transcendence" beyond himself - an exit to fellow tribesmen, associates, to humanity as a whole, where he finds a variety of meanings. At the same time, meaning is associated with the personal choice that a person makes, it is the result of free will, an act of will. This also means that the meaning chosen, given to the situation, entails the full responsibility of a person for his understanding and those practical actions that follow from it. 5. The search for meaning is not neurosis, it is a normal property. human nature in which humans differ from animals.
Every society sets its members a certain system of higher values that can give meaning to life.
These values are located, as it were, on three levels: The first level is the values of the transcendental, which make it possible to comprehend life in connection with death and give meaning to death. This is the idea of God and the gods, of the absolute principles underlying the world and setting the system of moral absolutes. The values of the transcendent cement the society, they, as a rule, are built into an ideological system that directly affects the emotions of people, as a result of which religious meanings are passionately experienced.
True, in the 20th century there were states that practically abandoned the values of the transcendent and replaced them with different options"secular religion": faith in the world revolution, in the ideal of communism as the highest "earthly truth" that determines morality and the meaning of life and death. The second level is the values of society and culture: political ideals, state, its borders, its history. The second level is usually closely related to the first.
It also includes the dialectic of the regional and the universal: one can find a high meaning in serving humanity as such and dedicate one's life to such service. The third level is the values of personal life flowing in the world of everyday life, these values are different for different eras, but in most cases they include health and long life, a wise attitude to the ups and downs of fate, certain activities and success in it, achieving social status, creating a family and procreation, love, good relations with other people.
In real life, all types of values - and hence meanings - are closely connected and intertwined, they do not mechanically lag behind each other, they form a single alloy. The more hierarchical and despotic a society is, the less the individual is allowed to choose his "higher values". The leading meanings turn out to be prescribed and strictly set, people learn them from childhood, experience them like piles, and they have no doubts about whether they should live, work and try.
The more democratic the society, the more freedom for personal choice, but at the same time, there is a loss of common values, that which unites people in a semantic sense.
End of work -
This topic belongs to:
The main philosophical ideas of F. Aquinas
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