The origins of the term “culture” can be
traced back to the Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, who claimed in his
Tusculum Disputations, 2000 years ago: “Cultura animi philosophia est.”
This formulation makes sense only if “cultura”
denotes a process, as it also does in “agri cultura.”
The cultivation of land, plants, and
animals was the congenial basis on which Cicero postulated a cultivation of the
mind, which we called philosophy.
Cicero’s approach had long receded into
the collective memory of the European nations when the Baltic vicar Johann
Gottfried Herder took it up 1800 years later in his Ideas towards a Philosophy
of History of Mankind, which appeared in 1778.
For Herder, culture also denotes a
process, but one which he relates to the central goal of his age, i.e. enlightenment.
Along the Herderian line of reasoning,
Hegel came up with his idea of culture as “objective spirit.”
The
era of the “cultured individual:” the 1840s to the 1920s
Hegel’s “objective spirit” inspired
metaphors for a new orientation towards culture.
The guiding metaphor of the theories of
objective spirit, was that culture was the “coagulated spirit” that, through
the hermeneutic-understanding view of the subject, becomes re-subjectifiable.
Excerpted from: Cultivating Minds: Identity as Meaning-making Practice, Routledge,
2004.
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