CULTURE AND HUMAN NATURE

MAIN TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

A. Cognitive Activity
B. Tendential Activity
C. Unity and the Permanent Structure of the
Human Being.
D. Conclusion
INTRODUCTION
We have:
Indicated the phenomenon of culture externally.
Delineated the different responses of the individual
as soon as becomes aware of it.
Described the general characteristics of cultural
phenomenon as determined by different disciplines.
Made calculations confronting the fact of culture.
Affirmed that culture is a human behavior shaped
by membership in a determined social group and
with human environment correlative to such
behavior.
INTRODUCTION
Now, there is a need to deal with culture
wherein the human being is indispensably
related.
Philosophically, this involves radical
questioning:
On what is the human being

On what really exists given the fact that

the human being is the place of truth?
INTRODUCTION
1.Culture is the most complex and a global
phenomenon.
It presupposes the existence of human
individuals in reciprocal relation in terms of
their intricate behaviors.
The task that we will tackle here is to obtain
the sketch or schema, which implicates
these individuals, in the components of their
behavior and in the nature of their existence.
INTRODUCTION
2.Human behaviors are shaped by this or that
culture.
What must be the elements or aspects of
which they composed themselves,
what relations and interdependencies
among such elements that allow the
comprehension of the complex
configurations, flexible and extremely
varied of the said behaviors?
INTRODUCTION
2. Human behaviors are shaped by this or that
culture.
What is the result of the analysis and of
the synthesis regarding these?
Is it enough to conceive them as the
development of purely animal activity?
Or do they involve at least some of their
composite elements and consequently in
the ensemble of their organization? .
INTRODUCTION
3. Such behaviors imply much knowledge of
the natural and cultural environment as the
other and of its role in the environment.
a) But what is the nature of such knowledge:
purely sensible, empirical, or structural and
external?
b) Such behaviors imply tendency, impulses,
attitudes, aspirations towards the known, but of
what nature?

2.
INTRODUCTION
4. With these questions, we will try to come up
with a comprehensive philosophy of the
human being.
- Here, we will explain gradually the strict
relation between the philosophy of culture
and philosophical anthropology.
- We will demonstrate how culture
implicates and presupposes man in his
permanent structures of possibility.
INTRODUCTION
5. In this chapter, we will speak first cognitive
activity and then the implicit tendency in all
cultures, and finally the unity of the
permanent structure of man.
a) The treatment of culture as a whole, of all
cultures, avoids whatever reduction to
empiricism.
b) And we take note the philosophical
treatment of this proposition.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

1. We have said that culture implies obviously

certain knowledge of the natural and cultural
environment of the other on the part of the
participating human individuals.
- Such knowledge is immediately sensible,
empirical, that is based on the senses with
which man is endowed and with the
perceptive and imaginative elaboration of the
data, which they furnish.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
o It is noted, for example, that the indigenous people,
those who are directly dependent on the natural
environment for their sustenance, are very
knowledgeable, sensitive to any signs.
o This sensitivity of indigenous peoples is incredible.
This is very true to the Pigmy in his jungle.
Polynesians who are known to be great navigators across

the islands of the pacific.

Without the formal education on navigation and the aid of

sophisticated instruments for navigation, their familiarity with

the natural environment at sea is fantastic.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

2.In general, anthropologists have learned the

culture of indigenous peoples.
- They inform us that, among the indigenous
cultures, there always exists knowledge in the
full sense of the word: conceptual knowledge.
- We will divide such knowledge into the
following: utilitarian, creative, and
disinterested.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
o First, the Utilitarian knowledge: we do not only know
the nutritional and medicinal use of the varied plants
and animals (as it is done by the Indians of the
Amazon).
there is also such knowledge which refers to the production
of instruments for destruction and for war (for example the
boomerang of the natives of Australia which from the
technical point of view is considered primitive by the world);
instruments made of various materials: wood, bones and
stones (Aztecs and the Incas who has not known metals),
fibers of plants and animal skins, feathers
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
For the great inventions of the Neolithic villages we
cite Levis-Strauss: "It is in the Neolithic that confirms
the mastery, on the part of man, of the great arts of
civilization: poetry, weaving, agriculture, and the
domestication of animals.
There is obviously knowledge in the full sense of
means to end and by its invention of instruments.
Therefore, the utilitarian knowledge, implied in every

culture, contains without doubt the intellective

activity.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

o Second, the Creative: the creative aspect

departs from that impression of restricted
instrumentality. It is at the same time
productive and disinterested, we understand
that it refers to the psychical cognitive activity
which leads to art.
Art exists to a certain degree in all cultures, as
we indicated its presence in the cultural
phenomenon.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
It seems that art is restricted only to the human specie.
Levis-Strauss affirmed this. He conceived art as the
installation in place of structure prevalent in the
contingency of a model.
Lonergan: it is the intelligent discovery of new forms
unifying and connecting the content and the experiential
acts with the simultaneous liberation of the experience
from its biological utility and of the intelligence from the
construction of the verified and of the proofs because
the work itself constitutes the convalidation.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
In metaphysics, there, we see beauty as the
synthesis of the one, true, and the good, but
proportionate to man - the embodied spirit - which
has the need of vebrating harmonically on all the
levels of its psychical activity.
Susanne Langer: "creation of forms symbolizing
the human feeling".
All these authors in authority confirm this creative
dimension as actualized in the works of art.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY

o Third, final, is Disinterested knowledge.

Here the psychical activity tends immediately
to know through the same process of
knowing & ends up to its reason for being.
This confirms the presence of intellective
activity more authentic & typical in all
cultures. In short, this is the kind of
knowledge of something for its own sake.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
We begin with the systematic knowledge of
nature. A good reference to this is the first
chapter of the La Pensee Sauvage of Claude
Levi-Strauss.
As specialist on indigenous peoples, he
demonstrates his observation on their behavior.
He shows the refinement of their classifications of the

names of minerals, plants and animals, and of their

proper anatomical parts by the indigenous peoples -
even classifications of environmental sectors.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
These classifications are attentively verified
in case of doubt on the identification of an
encountered sample.
The act of classifying is the work of the intellect
that knows (distinctions, relations and unity of
property).
Conceptualizing, and verifying, and to doubt
a proposition is the work of the intellect
which seeks the truth of the affirmations.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
Cognitive activities manifest themselves also in predicting
the climate - based on observation of plants and animals;
also movement of the stars as bases for their calendar.
The temporal order of succession, simultaneity and
regular rhythm is not learned from experience alone but
through the intellective activity.
This knowledge of intellective level is certainly natural and a
human reality that we find in all cultures - a more or less
coherent and unitary comprehension of all reality.
The earth and the heavens, man and society, the
rhythms discovered they are all correlated if not in
technical philosophical systems, at least in rites, myths,
beliefs,
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
Cultures manifest the present connections
everywhere:
Between science (to know directly based on experience),
magic and religion
Example: the celestial bodies and the organization of
the state (the pharaoh is the son of the Sun-God Rha,
the city-state conceived as the farm of a god)
Between technics and rites
Between human sexuality and fertility of the land
Between the human blood of the Aztec sacrifice and the
continuity of the natural rhythm of day and night,
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
No culture is completely satisfied with the reality
known and with the coherence glimpsed there.
It puts itself the question of origin by justifying,
valuing, founding the cultural behavior and the
universal picture with which it inserts itself.
Eliade: All myths would be myths of origin: the
great myths of creation, the cosmogony.
Regarding some aspect of the daily life, they seek
the exemplar model in the behaviour of the first
human ancestors or divine.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
Finally man is not totally absorbed by the vision of things
elaborated by culture in which he is inserted:
For instance, the further elaboration of myths and the
capacity of inserting there what is brought by other
cultures:
Paul Radin claims that in all peoples even in indigenous

cultures, there is always individuals who are called

"thinkers", interested in the analysis of cultural patrimony
to which he participates.
All these seem to imply clearly the knowledge of the limits of
the reality known, of the end as such, and because of its
transcending it towards being and the Infinite.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
In summary, all cultures imply an unlimited intellective search
of truth - partly than total.
All cultures implied :
the presence of properly intellective acts which render
human knowledge in the full and total sense of the term.
Since it is true that cognitive intellective activity (with all its
difficulty, defects and errors) takes part in every culture, it
is also true that it is related to experience.
Experience directly concerns the natural environment,
man, society, technic and also arts, which is the matter.
Indirectly, reasoning with its conceptual systems
transcends and moves from it.
COGNITIVE ACTIVITY
Finally, these knowing, thinking, believing, and presuming - in
sum the fruit of intellective activity proper to a culture - are
transmissable, as the ensemble of culture, through tradition.
This presupposes the proper disposition, the incarnation of
the intellective knowledge in the behaviours and in the
objects that rather result, as the origin of knowledge
departing from the perceived data in these same behaviours
and objects.
in other words, the privilege of certain sensible constellations
in birthing the act of comprehension and in facilitating or
verifying of the concepts which leads to judgment.
TENDENTIAL ACTIVITY
Culture is not only considered in terms of
cognitive knowledge, but the combination of
intellective and the experiential.
Here, it is in such context that we can
understand the existence and the nature of the
tendential activity which animates the behaviour,
reflects itself in the world of cultures.
TENDENTIAL ACTIVITY
Only the fact that the intellective knowledge informs the
behaviour and directs it towards the environment known by it.
It indicates the presence of the tendential acts towards the

reality as it is presented by the intellective activity.

Such is volition, the acts of the will.

If it does not have the tendency towards the reality according

to the intellective knowledge which men of diverse cultures

have, behaviours do not exist:
i.e. the means-to-end types of a given culture, the action

that tries to reach or realize the known ends through ways

proportionate as means: technic, social behaviour, rites,
etc
TENDENTIAL ACTIVITY
If there are no tendential activities, the disinterested
knowledge would not be possible because of the lack of the
direct experience, and of the impulse to reflection which
constitute the investigation.
There would not be artistic and literary expression and
also that which is most important, talking.
Such tendential acts are directional and limited: a tending to
that which it knows, as modality offered in some way together
with the ends.
It is this, which explains such commonality of ends, of
means, of aspirations, which animates the participants to
a common culture.
TENDENTIAL ACTIVITY
There are enormous differences of emphasis, of themes, of
forms offered by every single culture.
In the religious field, in some primitive culture the
thanksgiving cult hides the love of esteem towards divinity,
Also the oblative love or of true fascination in some
tendencies in Great Religions as for example (bhakti) or
the love towards a personal God in Hinduism
Also a similar diversity of emphasis, often prevailing in the
relation between persons or groups.
Also the diverse forms in family relations or social living
conceived and proposed by every single culture.
TENDENTIAL ACTIVITY
The cognitive arrangement and direction of volitive acts to a
given cultural model also includes the affectivity of important
thoughts and crystallizing in language and the scale of
values.
In the religious field, symbols possess an enormous
importance, as they involve intelligence at the same time,
but more on the imaginative and perceptive level, they move the
affections: symbols-objects (mode of seeing and imagining the natural
objects and all cultural objects and symbols-behaviours (rites, gesture
of courtesy, ceremonies).
Eliade insisted that many of its myths move the actual fact of
Western society and that of the Soviets, which pretend
themselves to be scientific and rational.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

We have discovered the presence of the same levels

of acts of the human being in all cultures. We have
gathered that same principle of the diversity of these
cultures.
This diversity consists in the different combinations of acts, in
proper to its culture (original cultural behaviors), and in a
correspondent cultural world - consist of the meanings of
those same acts and modifications of natural and human
environment proper to such behaviors.
Each culture possesses its own world: knowledge of
the reality, assumptions, beliefs of oneself
symbolically, and also the scale of values gathered
there.
Each culture possesses modes or schemes of
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

The individual is drawn towards the acquisition of culture,

which occurs starting from infancy - through the tradition,
which to him becomes fact - inserting himself there in a mode
more or less result according to his talents and temperament,
according to the course of his individual life and according to
his personal choices.
Tradition leads the apprehension in the broader sense of the
word: perceptive, imaginative, affective and motor (bodily
movements), cognitive apprehension with acts of
understanding favored by a part, apprehension of the will
which results to behavioral and thus whole life.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

Any culture realizes some human potentials inherent in the

acts and dispositions of the individual inserted in that culture.
The unity of any single culture is excludes that which is
incompatible with its elements.
The imperfection of the unity or integration of any culture is
due to the complexity and to the difficulty of the human
knowledge, to the limits of experience conditioned by the
environment and of the biology.
The same types and levels of acts, all these indicates the
permanent structure of the human being in philosophy of
man, which valid for all the human beings, the same is also
valid when it pertains to culture.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

The determination of permanent structure requires an

metaphysical analysis, however its premises in the
structuration of the human activities are confirmed by the
study of the human being in his/her cultural diversity.
In our study of culture, we see very clearly and radically that
the permanent structure of the human being is essentially a
possibility or virtuality of actuation.
The human being is a being that extremely flexible,
essentially not given but constantly making himself.
The permanent structure is no other than a sketch of
possibility actuating in diverse modes, and such actuation is
its destiny to be accomplished.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

The permanent structure - in a measure that it considers itself

in correspondence to the presupposed levels of activity -
becomes always less determined 'ad unum', always more
opened.
The human being is properly this most opened structured
possibility of activity and perfection which is constituted by
that which we call permanent structure, the a priori of the
activity.
Such is the basis or the roots of similarity among all cultures:
in human nature, in that permanent structure of possibility
through the most varied activity, but composed always by the
same levels and types of acts that are interdependent.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

Whenever the intelligence aspires for the truth and the

will for the good, they submit to the limits, conditions
and exigencies of the experiential level and that of the
biological level.
Cultures are therefore solutions to similar problems,
diverse actualizations of the same realizable", who is
the human being in his/her existent nature.
Finally, culture in its diversity assumes the social
aspect of man. It presupposes the reciprocal
dependency among human beings from the point of
view of the biological for its generation.
UNITY AND THE PERMANENT STRUCTURE OF THE
HUMAN BEING

It presupposes the importance of living together to

facilitate the development of intellective knowledge
assisted by the procurement of perceptive-imaginative
configurations which provokes knowledge and
gathering the evidence.
The human being has need for other human beings in
a way that embraces all of his being, thus resulting the
relationship of each other in reciprocity in his humanity
itself, his existence and his destiny.