Sunday 7 October 2018

Georg Simmel’s work on culture |Urs Fuhrer

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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