Understanding Culture and Philosophical Methods
Two Ways of Understanding Culture
There are two ways of understanding culture: one is as something inherent to an individual formed as part of a community or nation, and the other is as a broader concept. This leads to two explanations of the concept of culture:
- Pedagogical Culture: Represents a human ideal that should be achieved. It amounts to a series of knowledge and information that should be kept or activities that make ethnographic sense.
- Ethnographic Culture: Culture is a way of life and interpreting nature and society. The product of a culture is the set of beliefs, traditions, and techniques of a determined ethnicity.
What we owe to culture: Culture ensures that we not only have a physical environment, like any animal, but also a world. We inhabit places with culture, dream time, and feel duty-bound to live. Our life is shaped by the landscapes and geographies in which we are born and live. Humans cannot live without remembering and without planning; human life is meaningless without time. Every culture offers a way of life for individuals participating in that culture.
Elements of Culture
The contents of culture are:
- Normative institutions: Town hall, museum, etc.
- Ideas: Including knowledge, beliefs, or values shared by a group.
- Materials: Cultural world, physicochemical techniques, and shapes produced in a broad sense (agriculture, livestock, etc.).
Attitudes Towards Cultural Diversity
- Ethnocentric Attitude: This attitude views other cultures from its own perspective, judging other ways of looking at life from its own point of view. It is an assimilationist attitude (xenophobia and racism).
- Attitude of Cultural Relativism: According to this position, cultures cannot be judged from the outside. Each culture is a way of understanding the world incompatible with any other.
- Attitude of Cultural Hospitality: This attitude considers respect for other cultures essential but does not exclude dialogue. Cultures are ways of expressing humanity. Embracing this plurality is a source of human wealth.
Philosophical Methods
Dialectic
It is the first great philosophical method. Socrates is the creator, and it was enhanced by his disciple Plato in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It is the truth that we all discover through dialogue; that is, it is still what we know. The truth can only be discovered in the process of question and answer.
Rationalism
The most significant representative is Descartes in the 17th century. The method is deductive (from general to particular) and similar to that used in mathematics. It is a universal and accurate method.
Empiricism
English empiricism was developed by David Hume. The human mind is like a blank sheet that is limited to receiving information from physical nature through the senses. It basically uses the inductive method.
Transcendentalism
Created by Immanuel Kant. What is important is not to describe things but to give them reason; that is, to study the conditions of possibility that one wants to analyze. It is about analyzing those elements without which the study would not be possible.
Hermeneutics
It was constituted as a method and as a school in the 20th century through Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. A great precursor was Nietzsche in the 19th century. It was born from the phenomenological method but transforms it. We can never put aside our cultural work. The appropriate way is to explain these budgets that guide all comprehension.
Hominization and Humanization
Before considering the philosophical implications, we should analyze the process by which humans have come to be an independent species from a biological standpoint. This process is called hominization. Alongside this term, we usually find humanization, which refers to the cultural and less physical characteristics that characterize the human being. It is very difficult to establish a clear distinction between them; we could say they are two sides of the same coin. Many proposals have been launched on the evolutionary development of our species, but none can be presented as definitive.
The Human Being: A Biocultural Animal
Human biology does not develop without external elements, and culture always presupposes certain biological processes. Thus, we have the so-called cultural paradigm, a way of explaining the human that integrates the biological and the cultural. For each of us, the biological is as natural as the cultural. A human being without culture is an absurd contradiction, like a round square.