Culture
as Possibility of Symbolic Meaning
Geeta
Manaktala
It
is necessary to understand the content of Culture in the broad and comprehensive
sense. This in itself is a
challenge because no exact definitions are possible, even desirable in the case
of such emotional and intellectual complex as the culture of a specific society.
Culture like love will always elude definitions and remain an awareness beyond
words and concepts, a precious belonging that is within us and also around,
linking us to a whole expanse of life and retain its uniqueness in time and
space. To each of us, it will have a special meaning and significance.
Cultural
Identities are constructed through constant negotiation of the “I” and the
‘other’. It is a way of life
based on principle of inclusively, diversity and co-existence.
It negotiates the precarious nuances of the Homo sapiens and its psyche
and produces a pattern of expressions and action through what could be described
as its civilizational manifestations, broadly evident in its cultural expression
seemingly abstract and significant in its ramifications.
In fact, with culture, the medium is the message. “Culture only becomes
an issue, something that is explicitly thought about because certainties about
one way of life have been called into question. The wide dissemination of culture raises important issues.
It is not adequate to answer the question ‘What is Culture?’ by
defining it as ‘the best’. This simply raises further queries, who decides what ‘the
best is? Who has access to ‘the
best? To put in another way. Who is to be taken as cultured?
We often hear and speak of ancient culture, modern culture, a cultured person, cultured behavior, and the like, evidently with some faint feeling that it is good to be cultured. This will naturally mean that culture is that which is related to the good, which springs from the good and also promotes the good. Without entering into the discussion of the nature of good, knowledge of which no doubt, is essential. To have any idea of what true culture is, we may say safely that culture is the result of an understanding or at least of a real aspiration for an understanding of the position of man in the world. Culture is tilling, cultivating, refining “the working of the ground in order to raise crops”, the condition consequent upon the development and strengthening of inherent powers and capacities – physical, mental, moral or spiritual, the transformation of nature into a methodical structure of proportion and completeness, conducive to and responsible for the peace and happiness, not only of the individual, but of mankind as a whole. A certain type of education is at the background of culture. Culture refers to whatever is the best and the highest what is capable of being known.
Culture can be regarded as a human value, which however consists in a
perfect equilibrium of the three fundamental values of truth, beauty and
goodness. The harmony of these three values in a crystallized form appears to be
what we usually understand by ‘culture’. As a human value, culture is
something, which is to be achieved by conscious effort, by the self-cultivation
of the individual. The culture of the individual is dependent upon the culture
of the group or class and that again is dependent upon the culture of the whole
society to which the group or class belongs.
Normally
a scholar is regarded as a man of culture. Similarly a musician, a painter or a
priest-each one is regarded as a man of culture. But culture as such comprehends
all the disciplines or all human achievements in one whole where each has its
own contribution. Proficiency in any one of human efforts does not constitute
culture, because the culture of the individual cannot be isolated from that of
the group and the culture of the group cannot be isolated from the whole
society. Therefore culture is several cultural activities of several human
beings-all taken into account at once. It is only by “an overlapping and
sharing of interests, by participation and mutual appreciation that the cohesion
necessary for culture can be obtain”
By
Cultural activity we do not mean, an activity of physical adjustments alone. It
is profoundly different, it is subjective, there are human cravings, which are
deeper than the physical, and demand specific fulfillment. There is a body of
‘expedients’ that are devised by mankind for its survival; it is a response
to the ‘Animal’ in man to the challenge of ‘Nature’. But the human
challenge is unique and is profoundly different from that of the lower animals,
in that not only it tries to get over the physical world, but creates a new
world of its own. It works not only through instincts, but also through
aspirations and ideas. It is these human aspirations and ideas that can make a
civilization and create ‘Culture’.
Everything that occurs within a culture has meaning because cultural
elements represent the view and outlook of that cultural group. By looking
closely at a variety of cultural practices and attempting to interpret the view
of these practices, we can try to figure how a cultural group thinks, and what
the members think is important. To
analyze a society, social scientists examine certain components of culture. A
few indicators of culture that exist in society are symbols, norms and rules of
behavior, values and objects. Thus
culture of a society is comprised of at least three distinct elements: What
people think or what ideas they uphold? What they do ie. what values they pursue
and the material products or aesthetic forms they create, which largely moulds
the tradition of the past and the aspirations for the future. Ideas give rise to
habits and beliefs thereby perpetuating themselves through social institutions
that provide stability. Aesthetic forms reflect the artistic expressions of a
culture in its visual arts, music, poetry as well as the sense of beauty
manifested in the day-to-day living of individuals and social groups. The values
of a culture are formed by the interplay of both ideas and aesthetic forms and
provide norms of conduct, standards of behavior, and sources of faith and
vision. Of these three elements of culture, the values are of the greatest
importance. Values develop the precious assets of wisdom and discrimination in
specific culture; and they also provide the dynamism for action and change, and
impart vitality and quality to the life of the people.
The understanding of a particular culture requires a correct
comprehension of the ideas underlying it and a measure of intelligent of its
aesthetic forms; it is, however, the values of a culture that contain its
essence and offer the best way of understanding it and participating in it. A living and a vital culture are rooted in authentic and
healthy traditions, have the capacity of continuous renewal and adaptation, and
are developed by new aspirations and bold innovations. In this way the past, the
present and the future are reflected together.
The humanities and the arts, the sciences and the technologies, the
network of communications and relationships, the magic of poetry and the
transcendence of religion, all these sphere of action and speculation form the
pattern of culture. The rich and fascinating diversity of these patterns is a
precious heritage of mankind that needs to be preserved and developed.
From the earlier period of human society, man has created values because mere facts never satisfied him. He has consistently examined facts in terms of meanings and values. The tendency to evaluate factual realities in terms of ends and means is the proof of man’s interest in those objects and activities, which carry some value. As constituents of Culture only those ideas, habits had technical processes were evolved by man, which contributed to the enrichment of life that ‘entails’ deep changes in man’s personality
To continue our point in a different way, we may invoke Rabindranath’s celebrated distinction between “reality’ or “truth’ of art and fact.
A fact is one we know or perceive dispassionately by standing apart from it. But the reality or truth of art is fused with human involvement, his in-depth feeling, imagination and intimate experience or realization. Rabindranath Tagore says,” What we call literature and fine arts are imbued with profound joy of human realizations….” Or “actually speaking, art is encounter with the form of nature not as it is, but as it is constantly taking shape within human heart. Art is the music that nature evokes in man.” What Tagore wants to point is that art reveals not the world’s physical structure, but its human significance. Its truths are enacted and confirmed in our consciousness. To say that (a) A chair and (b) Van Gogh’s famous painting of a Yellow Chair. In a sense both (a) and (b) are given, but the way they are given are completely different. (a) Is a concrete thing, which gives itself completely and is given to awareness as it is. Similarly (b) is also given but not in the same sense as (a). What is given in a painting or a song does not stand apart from the way or the manner in which it is given. A natural or a physical object like a chair may also exist in a non-relational context. But the artist’s famous Yellow Chair ‘exists’ or acquires meaning only in the context of artist’s intense experience or realization. A simple chair out there is transformed into an art object “only when” in the words of Dewey, “it lives in some individualized experience. We do not ordinarily look at our familiar chair or table as though we see in it some in-depth mystery or light that was never on earth before. But the artist sees in it a possibility or significance in his creative involvement in the object. It is quite meaningless to speak of possibilities with regard to an ordinary chair, though we can meaningfully talk about the possible ways of using them. And this makes the difference between our ordinary experience of material object and our aesthetic experience. An art object like a painting has no readymade and no unchanging essence but “is revealed every time it is aesthetically experienced.” It’s meaning changes and it is filled with different possibilities under the impact of sensitive and imaginative attention. Even the artist himself finds different meaning in it at different times and in different stages of his development. An art object unlike the natural object exists not because of any core of “monotonous identity” but because of its capacity to renew itself under the imaginative gaze of the artist. Thus the ordinary chair is only given in our senses as such, but it is not anchored in any creative involvement that discerns several possibilities in it. On the contrary an art object is given not as such but only in the context of emergent possibilities or meanings under contemplation of varying degrees of acuity and intenseness. A tradition has no fixed and compelling structure, which an artist has to follow blindly. This would destroy creativity and originality.
Therefore culture is learned and not biologically inherited and involves arbitrary assigned, symbolic meanings. The ability to assign arbitrary meanings to any object, behavior or conditions makes people enormously creative and readily distinguishes culture from animal behaviour. Animals can be taught to respond to cultural symbols, but they do not create their own symbols. Moreover, animals have the capability of limited tool manufacture and use, but human tool use is extensive enough to rank as qualitatively different and human tools after carry heavy symbolic meanings. The symbolic element of language, especially speech, is again vast qualitative expansion over animal communication systems. Speech is infinitely more productive and allows people to communicate about things that are remote in time and space. Speech is one achievement of this process that uniquely identifies us as humans. Even for that matter is artistic expression. Both are sign practices dependent on, and probably generative of the achievement of symbolic representation, and both reveal how to be human is to be a living, communicative symbol. In case of a symbolic sign, the process of interpretation comes to the foreground from cultural perspective; that is to say that to be human is to be an interpreter. The very achievement of symbolic significance starts upon the vast capacities.
Therefore, culture generically is the distinctive characteristic of man
as apposed to animals. It implies
the whole pattern of human thought and behaviour, which is not genetically but
socially transmitted. Animal behavior or interaction is more or less rigid or
species determined and biologically adaptive response to a relatively constant
environment. Human behaviour, on
the other hand has indeed biological foundation, but this does not mean that
human behaviour can be explained biologically.
For man as Rabindranath Tagore puts it is an angel of surplus, possessing
a dimension of self-conscious meaning and purpose, and so his behaviour is not a
mere rigid, mechanical biological response to his environment but shows infinite
variability. Through his diverse inter-action man continually modifies his
environment and in this process continually recreates himself. Taken in this way
culture is nurture as contrasted with biological needs, refinement or
reformation of human nature through manifold interactions with environment”
Culture, therefore, is the context where an individual not only becomes an
aspect in handling and operating differently certain tools and executes certain
performances but also learns how to regulate his life according to certain
values and norms. In other words,
there is a scope of individual improvement qua individual.
The development of intelligence and physical power “say Rabindranath,”
is equally necessary in animals and men for their purpose of living; but what is
unique in man is the development of his consciousness, which gradually deepens
and widens the realization of his immortal being, the perfect, the eternal. It
inspires those creations of his that reveal the divinity in him – which is
humanity – in the varied manifestation of truth, goodness and beauty, in the
freedom of activity, which is not for his use but for his ultimate expression.
The individual man must exit for man the great, and must express him in
disinterested works, in science and philosophy in literature and arts, in
service and worship. This is his
religion, which is working in the heart of all his religions in various names
and forms. He knows and uses this
world where it is endless and thus attains greatness, but he realizes his own
truth where it is perfect and thus finds his fulfillment.”
Toynbee
calls this a process of “Etherealization”. Etherealization is the tendency
of a ripening culture to withdraw itself from the life of mere external world
and concentrate more on the human element. It is suggested that cultural
development is a gradual crystallizations of more defined instruments. According
to Tonybee “It connotes omission and elimination whereas in the concrete
examples of the phenomenon from which we have inferred the validity of our law
the ultimate effect which the law
produces by its operations is not diminution but an enhancement of practical
efficiency or of aesthetic satisfaction or intellectual understanding or of God
like love” When man is freed from the compulsions of the external form he is
lead to be engrossed in issues that concern his destiny, good and purpose.
Tonybee remarks, “Growth that growing personality or civilization tends to
become its own environment and its own challenger and its own field of
action”.~
The etheralization, Tonybee tries to show affects even the secular aspect of “Culture” and communal life. The cumbrous first adaptations are replaced in the course of our strivings by a more integrated and simple alternatives. Language becomes increasingly classic, and art forms begin to gain a more integrated style.~ The original dumb response and reaction slowly becomes a conscious endeavor. Physical action is increasingly reduced to a lower status, and the attention is directed more towards the spiritual. These has been according to Tonybee characteristics of growing culture.~ This is a shift from external to the internal aspect of life. Now there is a marked change in all explanations of the problems with which the men are confronted. When culture becomes alive to such a transfer of the sphere of its activities it does not preoccupy itself with mere biological adjustment. It then becomes more concerned with the problem of human Destiny. Tonybee believes, “The criterion of growth is towards self-determination is a prosaic formula for describing the miracle by which life enters into kingdom.”~
Hence the motivating idea of culture is to augment man’s powers in the pursuit of enhancing his physical and mental capacities manifold. It is no longer a myth that man should have arrogated to himself the status of the crowning glory of evolution or that he is superior to other forms of life, including the strongest, the swiftest, the fiercest and the largest of animals. No animal, however abominable, can capture man alive, but man can capture any animal alive with relative case. This is due to his culture and the artifacts or tools he has created through centuries of his untiring endeavor. Culture is nothing but the ever changing and developing nature in the entire multiplicity of objectifications of human activity. The human activity is objectified not only in material objects but spiritually, as well, Science education, professional skills and talents, works of art, for all their material “tangibility” are objectivations of social consciousness and knowledge. The same is true for spiritual needs as cultural phenomena they are necessarily objectified, all the while remaining spiritual rather than material needs. It is often been held that objects, which enter as elements into culture, are not “natural” or independent or self-subsistent. They are dependent on self-consciousness and as items in it; there status is symbolic or expressive. What they express is a certain self-realization”.
The culture of a person therefore consists in the sense of values fashioned in the light of his knowledge. The consciousness that constitute culture is as much a value consciousness as it is a factual consciousness, it is the consciousness of the actual and the possible apprehended as significant. Man is constantly picturing to himself the possibilities of his existence; these possibilities constitute the values for which he lives. Being conscious of these possibilities man succeeds in emancipating himself from the other factual necessity and in affecting his entry into the realm of values. To live in the realm of values, is for him to be attached to and anxious for things whose existence is bound up with his own creative longings and aspirations with the requirements of his specifically human or spiritual self.
Values are immediate objects of self-conscious individual experience. The knowledge and experience of the individual enter social communication and tradition in the form of symbols. In this sense the world of culture is a world of symbols expressive of knowledge and experience evolved in the process of value seeking. Culture emerges as a revelation in the individual psyche and enters social tradition creatively as symbol. The determinant of culture lies in the dialectical interplay of seeking, experiencing, reflection symbolizing and communication. The understanding of culture involves understanding the work of ideal processes of human self-realization within a historically given context of symbols and meanings.
Cultural nuclei are the products of the conflux of the fields of creativity and appreciation. After they come into existence through the conflux of the fields of creativity and appreciation, they acquire relative independence. Cultural nuclei may be called ‘transpersonal’ in the sense that they are objective and relatively independent. Transpersonal cultural nuclei tend to raise a society to higher and higher stages of cultural progress and refinement. There is a cultural diversity in a society in which there is a preponderance of cultural nuclei. There is cultural diversity only in a free and ‘open society’. The possibility of cultural diversity is ruled out in a totalitarian and ‘closed society’.
Culture is the excellence of a Society. It is possible for almost all types of societies to have cultural nuclei, which may be either few or large in number. In aboriginal and mediocre societies cultural nuclei are sparsely distributed through out their respective populations. In a civilized society there is dense constellation of cultural nuclei. These cultural nuclei are formed when creative appreciative persons in the various walks of life are continuously completing circuits between creation and appreciation of values. Cultural nuclei are formed through the integration of various sorts of values, such as intellectual, aesthetic and ethical values.
It is not surprising if one recalls that culture is nothing except a tradition of symbols expressive of values. Symbols in value show a triadic relationship where the conventions of a community of users mediate between the symbols and their significance. When this community in their conventions changes, the symbols too tend to become opaque. The process of seeking to preserve the living character of the past symbols can never be more than partially successful, for human creativity itself produces change incessantly. Just as the mirror reflects the object for the observer only when it is adjusted at an appropriate angle and under conditions of proper light, so is the effectiveness of symbols historically conditioned. And all cultural expressions fall within the general category of symbolism. Culture is in between nature and quasi-natural reality or civilization. The idea of nature is the invariant order of heteronymous invariant order apprehended through the analysis of perceptible phenomena. The idea of culture on the other hand is the idea of autonomous order of values, of ideal modes of self-realization. Cultural apprehensions begin with the discrimination of the ideal and the actual where the ideal is necessarily presented through the symbols. Its boundaries in space and time may be said to be constituted by the boundaries within which its symbols are effectively operative i.e. culture may be said to constitute the area of communication.
Thus culture is the realization of the value images of the human soul through action. This realization is both individual and social. The formation of the value image is indeed a fundamental principle of reality. Born out of bare awareness, passing through the process of semiosis, these value images acquire a determining character. Inarticulate or articulate symbol that expresses these images are the primitive constituents of a culture.
Human acquaintance with the world begins with bare awareness, which
gradually becomes more and more significant.
In this process the bare impressions get their locus outside as more or
less fixed, and these become, the referents. Repeated experience of the
referents leads to the formation of images in the mind.
But these images are fleeting, and the mind in the beginning is more or
less susceptible, not yet capable of exerting any conative pressure. A
traditional image is either a natural thing, like a tree, or an artifact, let us
say a crown. The crown a hat of
distinction has been symbolic from the start, not so the tree; for in its
original context or when such context has been projected around it. Even when so removed or improved, its meaning is
inconsistent, differing from time to time and from place to place. In a culture at a time tree may come to mean virtue, or
aspiration, and custom, affirming a general agreement, enriches it.
Men of another time and place may find tree an image for home or mother,
and for years all will applaud the association as the most normal thing in the
world. Traditional images owe such
meanings neither to necessity nor to chance, however, but to something in
between. Finding a tree the image
of mother or aspiration demands something of a tree may be quality appearance or
shape else the association, lacking felicity, cold not endure still less”.
Then arises the conventional symbols – the names; and the uttering of these names brings in the images. Images are not symbolic by themselves; they become symbolic depending on their surroundings. Traditional and conventional images such as landscape, gardens are symbolic in character. The red rose that is an embodiment of love gets its symbolic meaning when presented to someone. Take an example from Rabindra Nath Tagore, the sunlight falling on the dew drop on the lotus flower, symbolically speaks of the natures beauty
People have culture primarily because they can communicate with and understand symbols. Symbols allow people to develop complex thoughts and to exchange those thoughts with others. Language and other forms of symbolic communication, such as art, enable people to create, explain, and record new ideas and information.
A
symbol has either an indirect connection or no connection at all with the
object, idea, feeling, or behavior to which it refers.
While exploring the problem of culture we have already noted the role of symbolism. However the anatomy of Symbolism calls for the sharpest distinction between memories triggered associations of physical effects to physical causes, such as clouds meaning water, sun-meaning light etc. We must underline non-mechanical and non-natural relationships between what we have called in the text arbitrary signs and its significance. Infarct the whole of verbal speech but for few antopoetic words such as Hish, Aha, are interjections, are in that sense non-natural signs. Red has nothing to do with the ethereal waves or the term square with the shape square. We use such simple words by arbitrary index ices except of naming ie. Why they are symbols. How do you do? Is a symbol? All interjections, addresses organize discourse. All these symbols are ruled governed parts of our speech, which make our communication transparent, unequivocal. This is what symbols do? They render and articulate the domain of thought. Culture in other words is a way of expanding the Universe, extending the domain of facts into Meanings. Culture is an on going process.
To convey new ideas, people constantly invent new symbols, such as for mathematical formulas. In addition, people may use one symbol, such as a single word, to represent many different ideas, feelings, or values.
Thus, symbols provide a flexible way for people to communicate even very complex thoughts with each other. For example, only through symbols can architects, engineers, and construction workers communicate the information necessary to construct a skyscraper or bridge.
People have the capacity at birth to construct, understand, and communicate through symbols, primarily by using language. Research has shown, for example, that infants have a basic structure of language—a sort of universal grammar—built into their minds. Infants are thus predisposed to learn the languages spoken by the people around them.
Therefore, Culture is a
constant effort to concretize and embody the depth, nobility and the unexplored
domain of unfolding world of meaning. Symbols
stand for a concept, idea, object or anything that, overtime groups of people
have come to recognize as having a specific meaning. Language is full of shared
Symbols. They work by subtraction,
not addition simplification is the condition of the greatest possible
compression and intensification: Character and situation alike take on a
symbolic quality and are made to point to a range of experience beyond them”.
Symbol is composite of image and context, which takes the place of
description or exposition. In the
case of private symbols, those created by the artists are used throughout a
piece of body of work; the context is the work, and the symbols meaning complex
is created by repetition within, and association with, that context.
In the case of public symbols, the context is the culture, which allows
these symbols to be recognized and understood by members of the group.
Symbols can also have different but equally valid, meanings to difference
people. The aspect of symbol has
been described as a process of “reverberation” [The metaphoric process is] a
process of tension is the apprehension of meanings somehow held in relation to
each other, and to a central drive of interest, so that each meaning is more
clearly defined’ in relation to the other… more than the conceptual
understanding is involved, it is only through readers imagination responding to
the imagination of the Poet… that the work becomes alive… the imagination
thus conceived is an instrument of knowledge – not “knowledge of”
something fixed and definite, but knowledge as a “something” and echoing in
the heart of the hearer.”
Symbolism is not like other figures of speech. While images denote, symbols connotes. Symbols suggest something indefinite while images are limited, if not definitely assigned. Culture is objectifying and expressing truth by symbols. Universe, which is experienced and created by feelings. Culture thereby implies a set of psycho biological processes that permits to the man to transcend the sensitive experience throughout the abstraction which is a manifest interpretation in signs and symbols to convert the universe in a world appropriated, used and semantized. Culture is one and Universal, it refers to the possibilities of human interpretative mediation.
When we find ourselves in this world of
symbolic representations and images of ancient Persia, India, and Egypt, all
seems strange to us. We feel that we are groping about in the midst of problems.
These images do not entertain us of themselves. The spectacle neither pleases
nor satisfies us in itself; we must pass beyond the sensuous form in order to
penetrate its the more extended and more profound meaning. In other productions
we see at the first glance that they have nothing serious; that, like the
stories’ of children, they are a simple play of the imagination, which is
pleased with accidental and particular associations. But these peoples, although
in their infancy, demand a meaning and a truer and more substantial basis of
ideas. This, indeed, is what we find among the Indians, the Egyptians, etc.,
although in these enigmatical figures the meaning may be often very difficult to
define. What part must it play amid this poverty and grossness of conceptions?
How far, on the contrary, in the incapability of expressing by purer more
beautiful forms the depth of religious ideas, is it proper to call in the
fantastic and the grotesque to the aid of a representation of which the
aspiration is not to remain beneath its object? This is a difficult point to
decide.
Language primarily and minimally speaking
is a system of symbols. Culture is much dependent upon communication as
communication upon culture. Language essentially performs a social function
helping us to get along together, to communicate and achieve a co-operation and
understanding amongst us. As such language has to obey certain rules- rules
which are available to all of us when we use language.
In other words, however arbitrary the nature of signs may seem, once they
are accepted in the corpus there is no more anarchy in their combinations.
Their combinations are well organized and rule-governed all the moves we
make must be according to rules. However
fascinating it may seem to us, there cannot be a private language. Just as any
sound is not a word, any handling of the pawns on the chessboard is not a
‘move’. Similarly, any
utterance is not a significant statement. A
move is either correct or incorrect, a statement either true or false.
Where intelligibility and communications are the ends, absence of rules
will defeat the very purpose. A
full set of elements with rules of combination is what is meant here by a
‘system’. Moves in ordinary language are or may not always be predictable,
but at least they, must be identifiable to elicit response in a definite
context. Symbols are the words in a language.
They are symbols as opposed to their being ‘iconic’ as well as for
their self-transcending reference to things and entities; all art is the
symbolic representation.
To begin with any sign, notation of symbol comprising the distinct simple particle could be chosen caparacially or arbitrary, but as we proceed with the game and start playing their mutual reciprocities and compatibilities, one is faced with the regime of inborn necessities taking possession of the entire proceedings of the game as it works and ends up in a gestalt and totality of inward meaning structure which shows itself as a source as the outcome of the entire game which is started as an arbitrary show ends up as a self explanation, self justified whole emerging from step to step. This injection is the biography of creativity of person of culture. But in culture we let them play their own game. Poetry cannot be ungrammatical but can take liberty with grammar, assimilate the rules of grammar and proceed to a high up rules of creativity, and then it is articulated in the on ward march. It has the capacity to transcend the empirical plane. In the interest of the incarnating vision a verbal ilog becomes an icon.
Therefore consciousness is creative and its creativity is freedom. There are two opposing forces at work one drags it towards the sensuous given the referent, the ‘natural signs’ and the other pulls it away from the subservience to matter. It is because of these two forces acting simultaneously that symbolic forms range along a scale- some dominantly sensuous and some dominantly intelligible. Normal human consciousness is unable to entertain any object having either of the bare sensuous content or the new meaning content. When the human soul repetitive passes into the stage of conceptual thinking, myths are formed. It is psychical but a universal process. Myth formation is an expression of freedom. Myth making is the result of the bondage freedom oscillation of human consciousness. When it oscillates towards freedom the images become more suggestive. The world of facts then gets transformed, taking new complexion of meaning. Value images are born out of the experience of human soul, its contact with the real world. These experiences are capable of abstracting into and sometimes building forms and patterns out of the empirical, into a realm beyond the empirical. The world of facts and the world of values merge into one. But though this code of configuration grows over and above the real world. The world of myth rises above the real world; its figures and images are but the substitution of another form of materiality a bondage to the sensuous. Myths are important determining constituents of culture. Mythology therefore, is born out of an inherent necessity of the human soul, which must communicate through language
The
effort to express the content of experience, which lies deep in the unconscious
regions of one’s personality, searches for a device. The whole of that felt
unity is not translatable into rigid concepts or intellectual artifacts. Yet the
expression must take place, otherwise there would be no art, no literature, and
no philosophy. So our intellect employs different signs in order to have
communication with others. This employment of a sign for a congeries of
psychological correlates is called the process of symbolizing. In every human
activity symbols play a vital role. Tensions of life can be removed only if the
gap between the inner world and the outer world is bridged. The mechanical and
somatic activity cannot do anything for man’s emancipation from the isolation
in which he is put. Symbolism therefore is an act of will by which hitherto
meaningless movements or sounds are freely superimposed with a meaning. The
original arbitrary creations gets a social significance by constantly
interacting with the external environment.. Contrariwise, in course of long
petrifying traditions, these symbols loose their inherent dynamic element of
‘will’ that has forged them into service. Unconsciously a body of such
symbols with a common denominator becomes organic to a person of society. That
society owns these instruments as their most sacred attainments. Hence there is
a tendency in all cultures to associate this organized set of symbols with
attitude towards theism. Such symbolic transformations are to be found in all
cultural activities.’ One cannot go behind these symbolic expressions to
intuit ‘nature’ or ‘things’ in themselves” directly, since experience
is formally constituted of ‘symbols’ which determine all our human
perspectives…’
Thus there is a set of symbolic activities in the background of all cultural functions bring about varied products. Art, Music. Architecture, Economy and even government are shown to be derivatives from such primary artifacts of cultural feelings. In Splenger’s words,” Every thing, whatsoever, that has become, is a symbol and expression of a soul. Only to one having the knowledge of Men will it unveil itself. The restrain of law it abhors.”
Thus a cultural life is full of such symbolic acts of will. By harnessing the interior workings of human effort, these processes arrive at an articulate body of integrated symbols, which are so necessary for cultural development and growth. In every cultural area we are brought to see a type and a characteristic group of significant symbols. The importance of their determining role in the cultural activity can never be over exaggerated. Those are the basic foundations with the help of which alone, the varied achievement of culture could be fabricated.
Thus symbols play the most important role in the interpretation of culture. It is indeed necessary to investigate what cultural symbolism means and how it expresses the ‘cultural potential. ’Culture and its symbolism at every level are free from the stresses and strains of mere biological drives. There is a peculiar liberty, the ability to incorporate new meanings into trivialities as symbols that culture ushers in for man. And this proves the fact that though man is situated in the world of struggle and physical scramble he can raise to higher order of ‘values’ by the free choice that becomes the vehicle of his feelings. ‘Symbols’ liberates spirits from drudgery of mere routine, Thus Sri Aurobindo writes, “The widest spirituality does not exclude or discourage any essential activity or faculty, but works rather to lift all of them by its touch and makes them the instrument of the light, power and joy of the divine Being and the Divine Nature.”
Such is the vision that enlivens the dead moulds of civilization into dynamic aspiring humanity.
The time of change calls… for a change of value base. The appropriate value base must respond to characteristics needs of Globalization. By Globalization we here mean, that we must learn to live in the globalized world as our ancestors lived in a village. For this we need an appropriate philosophy…. and if philosophy is taken as a source of globalized culture. Kirti proposes a ‘contemporary paradigm’ that would lead to responsibility, collaboration, trust, mutual understanding and peace. He says, “That only by deliberately engaging in breaking down the walls of distrust can we open the way to the trust on which friendship is based. History has brought us to the brink of a ‘high tech’ global society… The pressing task is to learn how to collaborate with sincerity…The way to such collaborations passes through, both the kenosis and a metanoia. Kenosis means emptying oneself of the ‘old man’. This emptied self can then be filled up through the metanoia to open the eyes to a new way of seeing, the contemporary way or paradigm. With this new outlook, we can become a ‘new man’ that sets no limits on love.”
Department
of philosophy
Panjab
University, Chandigarh
INDIA