Social production as mode of man’s being in culture

The aim of the theme is: to represent one of the most complex notions of philosophy - “culture”; to discuss the essence of social production as a mode of man’s being in culture, reveal relationships between material and spiritual culture.

Key words of the theme are: culture, symbol, a mode of production, productive forces, production relations, spiritual production, spiritual relationships, information society.

15.1. The Concept of Culture in Philosophy. Culture as a Symbolic World of Human Existence

The word “culture” has many different meanings.  For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food.  For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish.  However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. To watch the attempts to grasp the essence of culture, let’s refer to the etymology of the word. It can be traced back to the Latin cultura, deriving from the word colere, meaning both to "cultivate" and to "worship". It is a curious fact that the very origin of the word culture contains the wisdom of the people's understanding of culture as the worshipful cultivation of something, particularly the land. The word "culture" was thus from the beginning related to good action. And action usually means assimilation of our world in some form or another. It may therefore be said that culture is a kind of prism, through which everything essential to us is refracted. Every nation, every level and form of civilization, and every individual attains knowledge of the world and a mastery of its principles and laws to the extent that it masters culture. The forms of culture are a kind of mirror that reflects the essence of every enterprise, its techniques and methods, and the contribution which it makes to the development of culture itself. In this sense man himself is a phenomenon of culture, and not only of nature.

In what forms does culture exist? First of all in the form of human activity, which is generalized into certain modes or methods of its realization, in the sign or symbolic forms of the existence of the spirit, and finally in palpable material forms, objects, in which the individual's purposeful activity finds its embodiment. The practice as human activity covers the following relations:

a) subject - object (man - nature);

b) subject - subject (human interactions);

c) self-change (a person changes himself through activities in the world and communication).

In the process of activity could be seen:

1) actual transformation of reality;

2) communication during this transforming activity and about it;

3) a system of produced norms and values which guarantees the goal-directed character of this activity.

As something created by human beings, culture is at the same time a necessary condition for humanity's cultural existence and development. Outside culture the individual cannot exist as a human being. As water permeates soil, culture permeates every pore of social and individual life. When studying one or another culture we usually think of it as something relatively independent. In reality, culture exists as a historically evolved system comprising its objects, its symbolism, traditions, ideals, precepts, value orientations and, finally, its way of thought and life, the integrating force, the living soul of culture. In this sense culture exists supraindividually, while at the same time remaining the profoundly personal experience of the individual. For this reason, archaeologists cannot dig up culture directly in their excavations.  The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns − they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.

Culture is created by mankind, the nation, the class, the social group and the individual. That is why there are a lot of approaches to classification of cultures, each of which has its own goals. The first classification reckons mostly with differences between major cultural entities, such as Western and Eastern cultures taken as a whole. The differences between them go back to remote antiquity. Unlike the West the East cultivated the idea of rejection of the personal self in favor of the impersonal absolute. There is also a difference in the attitude to the possibilities of reason. On the whole, Europe has moved towards rational and pragmatic knowledge, seeing it as the highest value, whereas the East places rational knowledge lower than introspective and intuitive one, and therefore has a greater range of devices for meditation and auto suggestion at its disposal. Finally, as distinct from the European emphasis on social action, the traditional Orient has preached the doctrine of refraining from action.

Apart from this classification of cultures, there are smaller subdivisions. Of special interest here is the problem of national cultures. Their specificity is largely connected with the territorial, climatic, and ethnic situation of a given people, with its system of values that has been historically evolved and handed down from generation to generation. The greater and richer the range for the classification of various cultural traditions, the richer the spiritual life of mankind as a whole is. So, it is clear that the preservation of the national originality of cultures is one of the most painful problems of the XX century.

As one can see, the objective forms in which culture exists are the fruit of the creative activity of the people as a whole, the masterpieces of geniuses and other great talents. But in themselves the objective and symbolic forms of culture have only a relatively independent character; they are lifeless without man himself and his creative activity. All the treasures of culture in their palpable material form come to life only in the hands of a person who is capable of revealing them as cultural values.

How is one to define the concept of value in philosophy? Value is a fact of culture, and it is social in its very essence. It is a functional and at the same time an objective-subjective phenomenon. In themselves, things, events, outside their relation to man, to the life of society, do not exist as "categories of value". But as soon as a given reality comes into the focus of human consciousness and is made, transformed or modified by it, it also acquires a value aspect of its existence, a meaning. For example, instruments of labor, like everything else made by man, are a value which both determines the mode of their production and demands that they be used in a certain way. Life gives things certain functions − ways of serving man with their natural and man-made properties. This refers not only to humanized nature, that is to say, to the whole massif of civilization, but even to the celestial bodies. They are in themselves significant in the context of the universe, as everything in nature. But man's perception of them, the way he sees and comprehends them and his relation to them are already a phenomenon of culture.

The concept of value is correlative with such concepts as "meaning", "use" or "harmfulness". Use may be of a purely utilitarian character. There may be material or spiritual values (clothes, home, implements of labor, knowledge, skills and so on). We speak of the truth as a cognitive value, which brings enormous benefit to human beings and may also be used for evil purposes, as scientific truths often are. People may be burned at the stake or condemned to penal servitude for the sake of truth. History abounds in the exploits of people who have done good for others. These are moral values.

So, values could be defined as broad tendencies for preferences of certain state of affairs to others (good/evil, right/wrong, natural/unnatural etc.). As the core of a culture many values remain unconscious to those who hold them. Therefore they often cannot be discussed, nor can they be directly observed by others. Values can only be inferred from the way people act under different circumstances.

Cultural values are expressed in all kinds of symbols and systems of symbols, which constitute a huge layer of our value consciousness. Symbols represent the most superficial things and values as the deepest manifestations of culture, with heroes and rituals in between. Symbols are words, gestures, pictures, or objects that carry a particular meaning which is only recognized by those who share a particular culture. New symbols easily develop, old ones disappear. Symbols from one particular group are regularly copied by others. This is why symbols represent the outermost layer of a culture.

Symbols penetrate all forms of culture. Let’s refer to some of them:

1) for ancient Greeks “symbol” is a conditional objective distinctive mark used by members of one social group;

2) in literature “symbol” is a character that represents some idea;

3) in science “symbol” is an accepted representation of the definite measure (e.g. mathematics, physics) through the letters of Greek and Roman alphabets;

4) in art “symbol” is a universal aesthetic category which is shown through comparison with related categories such as image or allegory (expressing of abstract concepts with the help of a particular image, for example, a Winged woman as an allegory of victory for ancient Greeks);

5) in religion “symbol” is a sign to indicate, express transcendence, sacred through sensual (e.g. lotus is a symbol of the highest perfection in Buddhism; the cross is a symbol of sacrificial love, getting rid of sins in Christianity).

Culture is a social phenomenon that embraces not only the past and the present, but also the future. Like everything else in life, culture is historical. The primitive horde and the tribal society and all the subsequent forms of organization are characterized by their own peculiar way of life, perception of the world, and levels of consciousness. For example, the primitive society was full of animist, magic and mythological beliefs and this left its imprint on the whole system of the life, thought, emotions and interrelations of people and their relationship with nature. The Middle Ages had a special type of culture related to the desire to achieve a personal absolute − God. Medieval culture is a culture of religious spirituality and the mortification of the flesh in the name of this spirituality with its orientation on the heavenly kingdom as the highest ideal of earthly existence, to which all the spheres of the life of society are subordinate. The Renaissance epoch has brought different ideals and standards of culture that are permeated with a profound and comprehensive humanism, as expressed in the maxim: everything for the benefit of man and everything in the name of man. The freedom of every person is seen as an indispensable condition for the freedom of all. When Modern Age came into being, everybody began to claim the right of free manifestation of his creative ego. The whole mode of human existence changed. The standards of culture also changed. Everything was subjected to the judgment of human reason and everything that failed this test was rejected. Society was rife with individualism, calculation and pragmatism.

These are very general outlines of the historical types of culture and are not intended to draw strict dividing lines between them. It should also be stressed that to this day huge masses of people on our planet adhere, in varying degrees, to different types of culture. New types of culture are emerging. The expression "mass culture" is today extremely popular in the West. It is mostly used with a tinge of scorn, meaning something "watered down for the majority". But the concept of mass culture may also be understood positively. Mass culture has made accessible art to the masses, to millions of ordinary people, who previously vegetated in a state of ignorance and illiteracy. The term "mass culture" becomes negative when the masses are not raised to the level of real culture, when "culture" itself is prefabricated to suit the primitive tastes of the backward sections of the population and degenerates to a lower level as to be an affront to all real cultivation of the senses.

The contradictory nature of culture also finds expression in the fact that every culture has progressive, democratic and antidemocratic, reactionary, regressive tendencies and elements. The cultural progress defining as defined as the growth of spirituality both in individuals and society as a whole, its regress is expressed in a lack or decline of such spirituality. And this is not compensated by material well-being.