Culture and Life: A Synthesis
1. The Relationship Between Culture and Life
Contrasting culture and life and claiming the fullness of their rights before it is to make a profession of faith anti-cultural. If one interprets the above as well, perfect practice is a misrepresentation. Values remain intact; culture only denies its exclusivity. For centuries, people have been speaking only of the need that life has of culture. Without the least undermining this need, it is argued here that culture needs life no less. Both inherent powers—the biological and the transcendent of culture—are in this way face-to-face with the same title, without subjection to one another. This allows fair dealing both to present the problem of their relations in a clear manner and to prepare a more frank and robust synthesis. Therefore, what has been said here is only preparation for this synthesis in which culture and life melt away.
Recall the beginning of this study. The modern tradition offers two opposite ways of dealing with the contradiction between life and culture. One, rationalism, to save culture, denies any meaning to life. The other, relativism, tries the reverse: it fades the target value of culture to make way for life. Both solutions, that to previous generations seemed sufficient, do not resonate with our sensibilities. Once again, blindness and livelihood are complementary. As our time does not have such clouded vision, as is clearly the sense of both powers in litigation, it neither agrees to accept that truth and justice and beauty do not exist, nor to forget that there needs to be support of vitality.
2. The Application of Knowledge
Let’s clarify this particular point to better define the portion of culture: knowledge.
Knowledge is the acquisition of truths, and the truths revealed to us about the universe are the transcendent (transubjective) aspects of reality. The truths are eternal, unique, and unchanging. How can their insaculation be within the subject? The response of rationalism is limited: knowledge is only possible if reality can penetrate it without any distortion. The subject then has to be a transparent medium, without any peculiarity or color, equal today to yesterday morning, therefore extra-ultravital. Life is peculiar, developing—in a word: history.
The response of relativism is no less exhaustive. Knowledge is impossible: there is no transcendent reality because all reality is a peculiarly shaped enclosure of the subject. It would then deform reality, and this distortion would cause each individual to be taken by the alleged reality.
It is interesting to note how in recent times, without agreement or intent, psychology, biology, and the theory of knowledge, in reviewing the facts that both attitudes were based on, have had to correct them, agreeing on a new way of considering the issue.
3. The Selective Capacity of the Human Subject
The subject is neither a transparent medium, a pure “I,” identical and unchanging, nor does the receipt of reality occur in this strain. The facts impose a third opinion, a synthesis of the two. When a sieve or grid is interposed in a stream, it lets some things go and stops others; it can be said that it selects, but does not shape. This is the function of the subject, living with the cosmic reality that surrounds it. It neither lets reality pass without more, as would happen to the imaginary rational being created by the rational definition, nor pretends it is an illusory reality. Its function is clearly selective. Of the many elements that make up reality, the individual receiver will pass a number of them whose form and content coincide with the grid mesh of the senses. Other things—events, facts, truths—are left out, ignored, not collected.
An elementary and purely physiological example is found in vision and hearing. The ocular and auditory apparatus of the human species perceive vibrational waves from a certain minimum speed to a certain maximum speed. The colors and sounds that are beyond or closer to the two limits are unknown. Therefore, vital structure influences the reception of reality, but this does not mean that their influence or intervention brings about a distortion. All of a wide range of colors and sounds, real, very real, reaches inside and is known.
As with colors and sounds, so it occurs with truths. The psychic structure of each individual becomes a teaching organ, equipped with a shape that allows the understanding of certain truths and is doomed to inevitable blindness to others. Also, every village and every age has its typical soul, i.e., a grid with mesh size and profile that will provide a rigorous set affinity to certain truths and an incorrigible inability to reach certain others. This means that all ages and all peoples have enjoyed their congruous portion of truth, and it makes no sense that some people at some time intend to oppose others, as if they alone had them fitted in sharing the whole truth. All have their place in the given time series; none can hope to get out of it because this would make them an abstract entity, with full waiver of existence.