CARLO HUBER, S.J.

I shall begin with a Wittgensteienian approach, looking into how the two terms "culture" and "philosophy" are used. If ever one is at a loss about how to tackle the meaning of something, and especially, the relation of such complex things as philosophy and culture it is advisable to take this Wittgensteinian approach and look at how these terms are actually used. In the end we may have more questions than answers!

At a first glance it is evident that culture is used as a plural noun: there are different cultures, whose differences are strongly underscored in a "global" society, especially for their proper values against totalitarian "colonialistic" tendencies. Philosophy in contrast generally is used in the singular, but frequently with an added adjective such as ancient, modern, contemporary, Greek, German or Chinese, etc. But one should not forget Husserl’s advice in his Krisis der eurpäischen Wissenschaften: that "philosophies can live only in the plural" 1 

This is, of course, a remark on "surface grammar" (Oberflächen-Grammatik), but I think it important and we will return to it. But first we will have to look more deeply into what Wittgenstein calls "depth grammar."

For this analysis, we need the following and I suppose, well-known terms:

Universals—particulars-singulars;

Univocal—analogous:

Analogous in various ways: Naturally, systematically

Familyresemblance (Wittgenstein)

Inbegriff (Kant)

We will start with an analysis of culture because it is the more complex and, so to say, broader term; even philosophy generally is considered a part of culture, even if it develops only at a certain level of culture and after a certain time. But philosophy certainly is considered one realisation of culture, and we have to treat it first because of our overall interest in Chinese culture and philosophy. But my topic is, of course, of a wider and generally actual context, even in relation with faith and religion, or rather with their philosophical consequences and presuppositions. The so-called "inculturation of Christian faith" is a problem not only for Christian theology, but precisely for the various cultures. One now has to use the plural into which Christian faith must be inculturated, and, frequently, within the underlying philosophical background of a certain cultural tradition.

To point out that it is a general problem, I want to cite an example from Italy: In Italy one speaks since the risorgimento and the time of the reunification of Italy, but still of a cultura laica in opposition to a cultura cattolica. But then the question arises: Do Dante, Michelangelo, Mancini and The Vatican Museum belong to Italian culture or not, whereas Italian industry, the Italian market certainly do! Or, enlarging the horizon to a universal level: Do the Gilgamesch, Confucius, the Greek tragedies, and Nietzsche belong to culture "toute courte," because they were not Christian? Some years ago, the title of a meeting of Communione e Liberazione at Rimini was: La fede deve diventare cultura, "Faith must become culture." I strongly disapproved.

The point is that culture is not a strictly particular concept nor is it of itself a religious term; its logic is very different from the logic of religio and even more from that of faith if understood as Christian faith.2 Nevertheless, religion certainly is considered part of a particular culture. We speak today of cultures in the plural, and we have problems with the diversity within various cultures.

But even it is, not only the historically or geographically distant cultural areas which create difficulties of common understanding. A sign of this difficulty is the extreme importance given today to "hermeneutics" in philosophy.3  Also, the cultural changes in European culture, of a long-standing Christian cultural tradition, for instance in Italy and the United States—bring home to us the inevitable philosophical problems of global understanding and communication.

Etymology. But we have to start with a short etymological memory of the term culture.

1.Culture (cultura) is a derivative from the Latin word colere (cure, pflegen, take care, etc.). Its original meaning is best seen in its composites: agriculture, horticulture, etc.

2. "Take care of the soil," "take care of a garden," etc. Taking care of something implies interest, dedication, knowledge, competency and even apprenticeship to be able to take care of something. This is especially manifest when we speak of medical "care" or "cure." Only intelligent, rational, provident, and free human beings are capable to take care, are capable of culture, with the possibility and necessity of developing its various fields or horizons.4 

Enlargement and Further Specifications of the Term Culture. Not only according to Wittgenstein, but also since the time of Aristotle, it ha been noted that in order to grasp the meaning of a term one has to consider what the term is opposed to and by which manner of opposition.

1. In ancient times culture (cultured) was opposed to barbaric, which means people who cannot speak a "decent" language, namely Latin or Greek, who have no scripture and certainly no literature. Culture itself acquires thus a strongly linguistic meaning—the capacity to speak (and to write) correctly. the "common" languages that have a literature and a tradition: Latin and Greek against "barbaric." And so one uses culture in the context of such people in contrast to barbaric, wild, savage people. This certainly is in part. But the next question is whether culture is a value term.

2. This use of culture, by the Humanism of the Renaissance (not withstanding Rousseau and the romantic bon savage) has a long tradition. Even Heinrich Heine was proud that he had learned some Latin with the ex-Jesuits at Cologne (the order was suppressed from 1773-1815), noting that some Latin gives a sort of cultural flair even to a simple shoemaker.

3. European culture from the Renaissance onward, slowly, but especially during the later 18th and 19th centuries, came into closer contact with non-European people that undoubtedly had writing, art, literature and a well-organized society. At the same time, under the influence of Romanticism, the national languages in Europe gained greater esteem. All this changed the situation. The French fashion of chinoiserie also played a rather important part in convincing people that not only through knowledge of Latin or of some classic European tradition became the criteria for the culture as a value-term.

4. From then on, a person who knows and lives consciously the culture and the good style of the life to which he belongs, and as far as possible also others, is a person of culture, a Weltbürger. This way the term culture becomes, again not withstanding Rousseau and some Romantic tendencies, clearly a value-term associated with the ideal of Bildung, especially during 19th century. But it still highlighted certain aspects of an evolved "high" culture, for example, literature, social organization and, later, sciences and technique. In this way culture also started to become more and more a plural term: cultures.

5. With the consequent contentual development towards a global term Inbegriff, culture becomes a general term with possible particular and singular applications.

Culture as a Global Term or "Family concept," on the One Hand, and as an Inbegriff General Term on the Other Hand. The term culture is an extremely comprehensive and complex term. It contains today much content in a global and often not, in a specific and clarified way; it is therefore not easy to delimit. In fact, it tends to comprehend everything that is human.

What follows is not a complete list of the contents of culture, but only an indication of its extreme breadth. The term culture includes the traditions and the patrimony of a certain historical and/or geographical human population together with its environment in a somewhat determined cultural area that has developed historically and has a certain unity; all arts with their specific style, all literature and, preceding it, a language with its vocabularistic, grammatical specifications and semantical relations, the juridical, political, social and economic system with their evolution, technology and the educational system, the scholastic and other; religion with its history, whether true or mythological, its rites, feasts and their structures; especially the moral and social values commonly accepted whether religious or secular; and, of course, it includes philosophy and perhaps even logic, mathematics, etc.

On the other hand, we speak of prehistoric cultures, of early Mesopotamian or Chinese culture, of modern global culture, of the various cultures of different peoples, and even of personal culture. This way culture (cultures) is clearly not a singular but a plural term. Under this aspect there is the study of various cultures in a comparative way, analogous to comparative studies of religion(s), as if culture (and religion) were normal, general, and distributive terms arrived at by abstraction and having generalizing common features in a Lockian mode. But culture is not a general term arrived at by abstracting a general essence from various items. If we consider what, according to the first list, is considered to belong to culture, there is no common essence, no really common features found in all cultures. Culture is rather what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls a term of "family resemblance": a word used for many things not because of a common essence but because of a similarity between the first and second item and another similarity between the second and third and so on, like the similarities one finds in a large family. The examples Wittgenstein himself gives are game, language, proposition, number, etc.5 

As we have seen, the term culture becomes more and more comprehensive, even to becoming philosophically all-comprehensive for every typically human activity and manifestation is culturally determined: is culture—the typical consequence of this is "cultural ethics," but also a cultural worldview, cultural epistemology, and cultural metaphysics. Philosophy as a whole is cultural. It is clear that one is human only insofar as one possesses in some way cultural expressions and activities. But then the various parts or aspects of a culture, which is not the same in a single culture, are the same, are not single parts which could be called a culture. Culture becomes an Inbegriff in a Kantian meaning6  and "culture" is again singular, but in a special and all-comprehensive way.

A Further Consequence. According to this double evolution of the term culture, we have a further consequence: cultures can no longer be graded; there are no simply higher or lower cultures. This, of course, means not that one cannot compare single aspects of a cultures among themselves, for instance technology, production, and so on, but that this must be done on the parameters of these single aspects and their corresponding special sciences. It is not done by a non-existing overall parameter for a culture. For aesthetics, literature, social organization even the first evaluation, the one for production, etc., is possible.

The consequence is that culture is not a value concept in itself. It can be judged only from outside; for instance, from morals, human rights, or from Christian faith, human dignity, and–maybe, philosophical rationality. These constitutes absolute values, which culture does not. This excludes, of course, any cultural elitism, whether European, American, or others.

In many ways the depth grammar for the term philosophy is similar to that of culture. Philosophy has many different parts: philosophy of knowledge, philosophical psychology, anthropology, ethics, logic, philosophy of language, ontology, metaphysics, and so on. But these parts do not differ in the way that various specific sciences—mathematics, physics, biology, etc.—differ among themselves. Philosophy has long been called a scientia universalt in opposition to the scientiae particulares.. Since the time of Thales, it wants to give a rational explanation as against myth, religion, and faith, which do not interest us directly in this context. It concerns a whole as a unity which could be a totality of objects such as nature, world, and universe, a subjective totality such as self, soul, knowledge, will, and freedom, or one of origin, the transcendent, God.7  Every "part" of philosophy is always the whole and entire philosophy. Historically, too, the various philosophical schools, or even different important philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Thomas, Descartes, Kant, and so on—are different, but nevertheless, one speaks about philosophy in the singular. There are strong connections and revivals of all important philosophical positions through the ages, such that one cannot study philosophy by just following and understanding one single author. One cannot understand Heidegger without knowing Plato, and knowing at least some Greek. The age-old problems turn up ever again, as do similarities in their solutions, too. This way too, philosophy remains a singular unitary concept. But, again, we do not arrive at it by abstraction and generalization of various philosophies, to a universal distributive term. Philosophy is again rather a family term like culture, but it has an even stronger, historical, unity and a different beginning.

Philosophy did not arise with the beginnings of humanity; it began at a certain moment inside history, at the time of the Presocratics in Greek Jonia and then with Socrates at Athens. Thus, it does not belong simply to human nature, and it is not absolutely necessary in order to be a human being, nor is it necessary for every single human being, as are culture and perhaps religion. It is probably a spontaneous and necessary evolution of the human mind, but not from the very beginning and necessarily for everybody. It is a historical family concept; I would call it an Inbegriff, but in a different way than culture.

Philosophy in its historical existence has a stronger unity of content and even historical continuity than culture. Single cultures have a beginning, but also an end. They may simply die out, or are superseded or suppressed by another "stronger" culture; but if they live on they remain different in themselves. Philosophy has a beginning, but no end. The so often decried "death of philosophy" (Compte’s three stages), or even the "end of metaphysics" (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Vattimo, etc., as a Telenovella), first of all were themselves philosophies and always brought back metaphysics; e.g., the analytical ontology of Strawson, and the people interested in indexicales (Castaneda, Runggaldier, etc.).

Philosophy is, then trans-historical not withstanding its historical origin and history. The history of philosophy is after all a part of philosophy itself, as Husserl, Heidegger and Gentile strongly insist but of which Plato and Aristotle with their references to earlier philosophers were strongly aware.8  That is the reason why the history of philosophy belongs to philosophy itself, and why one cannot do philosophy without a good knowledge of history of philosophy as a whole. This, of course, does not mean that one cannot specialize or has to do so. One cannot know everything equally well. But on the other hand, one cannot understand Heidegger without knowing Plato, Aristotle, and Kant; Husserl without Descartes, Stuart Mill and Hume; or Wittgenstein without Kant and Schopenhauer (at least not the Tractatus, or the Investigations without the Tractatus), and so on. It is the same with different schools: One cannot understand English Empiricism without knowing Descartes; French-German Rationalism and Leibniz without Locke; nor Linguistic Analysis without the English Hegelianism of Bradly and Green.

But in the same time, philosophy is transcultural. European philosophy has influenced Eastern and Chinese philosophy, but the converse is also true: Indian philosophy influenced Hegel, Schelling, Bradly and Schopenhauer, to give just a few examples. But what is more important, philosophy is always critical, first of itself and its own history. It is self-reflexive, which culture in its plurality cannot be; and it is its own measure because it is self-referential and self-foundational. It is one and in a very important way singular. In a certain way it alone is the sole measure of cultures, besides supernatural revelation. This presupposes that human beings are capable of trans-historical and trans-cultural communication. This is an epistemological question depending on our human capacity to know truth, notwithstanding the fact that we commit errors. Humans are even trans-historical and trans-cultural, which brings us to an anthropological and even a metaphysical foundation of communication, truth, humankind, and philosophy itself.

With all this the difficulties of trans-historical and trans or intercultural communication and understanding, especially in philosophy, are neither resolved nor denied, but rather highlighted for philosophy itself belongs to culture and always is somehow culturally determined. The actual importance given in philosophy to hermeneutics is proof of this. But one should not reduce all philosophy to hermeneutics, nor should one cherish a skeptical attitude in this respect like Kippling’s: "East is East and West is West; and never the twain shall meet."