Language, Arts, and Human Culture: An In-Depth Analysis

Posted on Dec 21, 2024 in Arts and Humanities

Unit 8: Language and the Arts

Language: Fundamental Concepts

1.1 Language as a System of Signs: Theory of the Sign

Human language is a system of signs produced socially. A sign is anything that we use to represent and communicate something. In linguistic signs, we can differentiate:

  • Significant: The perceptible part of the sign.
  • Meaning: What the sign represents. It may be a specific object or a mental concept.
  • User: Every sign is produced and received by a transmitter/receiver that uses it to communicate.

Each of these aspects of sign language is approached by a branch of linguistics:

  • Syntax: Studies the combinations of signifiers.
  • Semantics: Focuses on the study of the meaning of linguistic signs.
  • Pragmatics: Is interested in the use of language in terms of the relationship established between the statement and the social context, i.e., how speakers produce, analyze, and interpret statements in context.

1.2 Language as a System: Features

The linguistic system is a set of elements or symbols interconnected according to certain rules. They are characterized by:

  • Double articulation: It is organized into two levels: meaningless elements (letters) and significant elements (words). The first fit together differently to form meaningful units.
  • The visual medium or channel: It is sound and sometimes visual.
  • Creativity: Linguistic systems allow the formation of an infinite set of new ones.
  • Conventionality: The relationship between the signified and the signifier is arbitrary.
  • Displacement: It is possible to communicate events, facts, feelings, etc., not confined to the space and time of the interlocutors.
  • Interlocution: Users are simultaneously sending and receiving messages.
  • Self-reference: We can use language to refer to language itself.

Thought and Language

2.1 Approach to the Question

  • Language determines thought; we are limited.
  • The dependency relationship is mutual; there is a relationship of interaction between language and thought.
  • Thought overflows language and has to be spiked with words, expressions, etc.

2.2 Linguistic Theory

  • Sapir-Whorf states that reality has been constructed unconsciously on the language habits of the community, and thus that different communities are not limited to categorizing differently the same world, but actually live in different worlds.
  • Other authors consider that although language influences our way of seeing the world, it is also true that a speaker can be freed from the prejudices inherited from their language to understand reality as it is.
  • Some authors argue that language is a necessary condition of thought, not only because thought cannot develop without language, but because ultimately, all thinking is a language because we think with language.
  • Other authors (Piaget) distinguish between language and thought a non-linguistic thinking, which is called sensorimotor intelligence, which is the ability to perceive and solve problems that we solve through behavior.

2.3 Critical Theories of Language

Language is used to categorize the natural and cultural world. They are valuable arbitrary classification systems. Language is accommodating to new or emerging needs. This is the case of the Eskimos, who have many words for each type of snow with which you can find, while we have only one word, ‘snow’.

2.4 Alternative to Linguistic Theory

We must recognize that there is some limitation as far as language is concerned. As science advances and innovations are emerging continuously, the only solution is to invent language.

3. Animal Language and Machines

3.1 Submission of the Question: The Thesis of Aristotle

Aristotle said, ‘Man is an animal that has achievements, with which it can communicate the good and bad, right and wrong,’ that is, you can talk on the meaning of the word we now speak. Animals have phonemes (sounds emitted by the mouth). The phonemes can communicate feelings. According to Aristotle, animals do not get beyond, cannot communicate over the emotional content.

3.2 What Ethology Tells Us About Animal Language

Animals share with us the capacity of language. Since Darwin, we know that the qualities of an organism are the result of specific developments. As the evolution of humans differs from that of animals, their qualities are different. Those who argue that some animals can use sign language forget that they do so because they have been trained. Without coaches, they could not use sign language. Animals can only communicate feelings.

3.3 The Language of Machines

Machines do not speak despite the artificial intelligence that makes operative mechanisms of computer models to understand the behavior of human thought. Robots can make use of linguistic code, but not have the capacity. We can say that the use of language because those uses are always the man behind and because they are uses that do not incorporate the human faculties.

4. Beauty and the Arts in Their History

4.1 Theory of Beauty: Aesthetics

Beauty is the subject of aesthetics. In the eighteenth century, it was called critical. The artwork was studied as a beautiful object, but the work of art is not beauty. Beauty is objective.

4.2 Theory of Art

Art is born of human concern to capture and communicate beauty. The object of aesthetics. But what is beauty, and how is it captured? The conception of art that gives rise and the relationship between art and ethics have changed over history.

4.3 Beauty and Art from the Greeks

  • Beauty: An objective property of reality. This property is the ‘harmony of forms’ of nature, that is, according to Aristotle, the clear delineation of their environment, the proportion of the parts can be reduced to mathematical relationships, the harmony of parts.
  • Art: Art tries to reproduce beauty. For the Greeks, it is an imitation of nature.

4.4 Beauty and Art in Christianity

Christian art expresses the greatness and beauty of God because if God created beautiful things, it is because God has beauty because no one can give what you do not have. Nature has a beautiful alternative; that is what captures the artist. Christian art can be approached in two ways:

  • If we could not represent God’s beauty, we can represent their creations, namely nature. With this, art imitation becomes a second order.
  • Represent God through what we have the Holy Scriptures. Representation of scenes. The work of art has the function of teaching, praise the art of Christianity, and it is ideology.

4.5 Beauty and Art in Neoclassicism

Beauty is subjective and becomes a feeling that certain things will occur to some people and not others: good taste. For Kant, aesthetic judgment is:

  • Selfless: The appreciation of beauty is a specific feeling that it serves no other with useful beauty justify themselves.
  • Release: The aesthetic pleasure can be transmitted to others by making them partners of ours.
  • You claim to be universal: When we say that something is beautiful, we are confident that everyone can understand our appreciation.

Art is a rational activity, and there are norms. From here, address the task of drawing up the aesthetic canon. Good taste and art are privileges of the wealthy and become a note of social distinction. It represents the social life and who enjoys a vocation cost. It has a moralizing vocation.

4.6 Beauty and Art in Romanticism

Follow the subjectivity but from the hand of the passion that leads to the discovery of a dimension of beauty, the sublime:

  • It leaves the individual sublime awe of the beauty that snatches.
  • The sublime is justified by itself without being subject to any rules or any action.
  • The sublime is attractive, seductive, deceitful.

Sublime beauty is only available to the art genius. Art accepts the will of transgression, which is expressed in a renewal of formal resources and themes of neoclassical art. Topics:

  • Nature: Is presented in all its violence and power.
  • Human being: It is represented from the dark side of life.

The morality that seeks to promote Romantic art meets the requirements of the sublime: passion and transgression.

4.7 Beauty and Art in the World Today

I. From the standpoint of the author:

  • Liberation aesthetic compromise: Mere ‘communicative sign that the author offers the viewer’s interpretation.’
  • Release of the ethical commitment: Art has no moral commitment to a particular.
  • Release of the formal codes of “artistic releases”: Search for new expressive features, experiment with new forms of artistic expression, experiment with new materials, experiment with new artistic specialties.

II. From the point of view of the viewer:

  • Reinterpret the meaning of traditional art from new keys.
  • Offering works in which the author does not impose any sense of the artistic object.

5. Art as a “Sign” of a Season and an Artist

  • The artwork is a sign of a society, its culture, and its history. Through it, we can get information about understanding the world of man and of itself.
  • Art is also on the individual product by the author. The author puts at his disposal the resources of his time, leaving his personal stamp.
  • Each of the aesthetic traditions displayed is the repository of a certain understanding of aesthetics and its relation to ethics.
  • Life is always singular life, and we can only express it with art, not science.

6. Ideological Function of Art

Art is not neutral initially. Its content is always ideological. Art has been used over time to convey ideology consciously or unconsciously.

Unit 7: Human Being, Nature, and Culture

1.1 Notions of Both Concepts: Nature and Culture

Nature is a polysemous term whose meaning is focused on the function of the term in contravention:

  • It is the set of features of one kind of thing, that is, its essence. It opposes the accidental, which is the set of traits that things can be (or not) but do not necessarily who they are.
  • It is the genetically encoded, i.e., genetics, that with which we are born.
  • It is what they have learned the entire natural cosmos, compared to the supernatural, the divine, the sacred.
  • This is what is not human product, compared to the artificial, made/manufactured by man.

The word culture has two fundamental ways:

  • The set of knowledge, behavior patterns, codes, and technological resources a community develops over time.

2. Genesis of Human Culture

2.2 Scientific and Technological Development of Man

1. Fire

Mastery of fire is the biggest event of prehistory. As we understand the capacity to produce at will, as well as transport, power off, etc. It is difficult to date but probably not earlier than 300,000 years. Fire transformed relations with nature and even relations with other tribes. Those who dominated fire dominated the other tribes and animals. Fire gave men a formidable power that allowed them to occupy caves, modified dietary habits, and simple clay pots became ceramic. In all cultures, fire is considered sacred.

2. Agriculture and Livestock

Livestock may appear before agriculture. Livestock emerged last 10 or 12 thousand years and makes man a hunter-gatherer, which assures permanent foresight of other products, like milk or skins. Fixed livestock men to the ground. It is nomadic: the farmers travel a fixed circuit. The earliest forms of ownership are the cattle that must be protected from thieves. The larger animals were captured by force and were for millennia the only machines to transport. Agricultural land must have appeared 10,000 years ago, probably shortly after the livestock. The most primitive form consisted of making a hole, placing the seed, and waiting for the birth and till the soil. The plow appears much later since it requires domesticated animals and complex tools like the plow. It may be that agriculture and livestock have rivaled each other and have faced in the struggle for dominance of the land. Both facilitated an increase in the population, being better fed than the first demographic explosion occurred. With sedentary agriculture appeared the first villages and towns. Both involve a knowledge of the nature of high quality.

3. Ceramics

The appearance date was around 9000 years. The first pieces of pottery were covered or smeared with baskets; they were manufactured with unfired clay until it was discovered that cooking the clay sealed the hardness. Ceramic containers are suitable for storing liquids, so it was no longer necessary to live over the course of a river, and also the cooking of food in their natural state are not consumable. The potter dominates the most advanced technology at that time choosing the clay, kneading, and gave him a lathe. The lathe was used 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and then Egypt used ceramics for the manufacture of sickles and bows in Mesopotamia.

4. The Wheel

It is believed that the wheel is an invention as important as fire. What happens is that we live in a civilization that uses the wheel from very ancient times, and we feel that without the wheel, there is absolute savagery. The potter’s wheel was already known by Sumerians 5500 years ago. The car comes from the wheel, a device unknown to Egyptians until 1650 when the Hyksos conquered the Nile Delta using chariots pulled by horses.

5. Alcoholic Beverages

Agriculture and livestock brought new alcoholic beverages. The oldest is beer made from fermented grains. It was known 6000 years ago in Spain and 5000 years ago in Egypt. In Mesopotamia, beer was considered a sacred beverage. Egypt also knew wine since ancient times, as well as date liquor. Fermented grape honey from the Middle East appeared in 1000 BC.

6. Construction

It is the manufacture of building materials other than a few branches and requires complex preparation of materials. The early works have had to do with water civilizations. The oldest remains have been waterworks, Qanats Persio, tunnels that brought water from the mountains to desert areas. Some channels in Morocco take water from a spring to inhabited areas. Construction peaked splendor in the ancient Egyptian pyramid with the technical and technological. Keops boasts 4600 years ago he had a height of 146m and a square base of 236.45 m. The stones used were carved with other harder stones. They were extracted from quarries by putting soaked wooden wedges and broke the blocks. A technician was also required in the organization of work and workers who worked about 35,000 employees at the same time in a very reduced space. Also include obelisks placed in precise locations, supported on a base without any kind of writing, and were formed in one piece, which sometimes exceeds 1000 tons.

7. Weaving

The first garments were woven animal skins. With them, they could withstand the tremendous cold that caused the last glaciation. It is thought that the art of weaving clothes has to link it to the basketry, as the twigs and woven wire with the same procedure. There are remains of spindles to make thread from the Neolithic, and then the loom had to exist. 5500 years ago, in west-central Asia, there was a textile industry. Contemporary to the textile industry is the cultivation of plants to produce fiber. The oldest textile plant is flax. Hemp is cultivated for fiber and also as a drug. In the Indus Valley, cotton was grown 4500 years ago. Mesopotamia selected sheep and goats for fur. The use of silk was discovered in Korea in the 2nd century BC.

8. Metals

Metallic minerals were initially used as amulets or coins. In Sumer, 6300 years ago, copper was used for the first time. It is believed that copper smelting was used in Egypt for 5600 years. Given that copper melts at 1080ºC and cannot be achieved in a fire, its development requires the existence of furnaces. There were no bellows; metal pipes were used. Metallurgy means the existence of a company with a production of enough food to feed people who are dedicated to the field. Bronze was discovered in America 5000 years ago. It is much harder than copper and easier to merge, although it is malleable and does not allow forging. The brass parts must be fully melted, so the technique of the molds was mastered. Cast bronze with the lost wax technique was discovered in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago. It was the most widely used metallic material for several millennia. Cast iron is used as a meteorite metal. It was precious. The Egyptians knew how to extract the metal from ore 5500 years ago. Between 1700-1500 BC, the Hittites used this metal to manufacture weapons. Between 1000-50 BC, iron prodigiously increased the repertoire of tools that improved productivity in existing trades and, with them, the conditions of life. Iron requires the domain of magnetite and hematite. Smelting requires the use of sophisticated vegetable carbon furnaces.

2.2 Sociopolitical Development

Current men’s political organizations are cultural products that have become as they are, but that did not need to be so, i.e., no natural laws bring men to organize in states and confederations of state (EU). The natural form of human society is… agriculture and livestock population stabilized and fixed at a territory. With agriculture creates the village where he lives. The tribe planting the seeds of conflict with the neighboring villages. A village grows more than others, it expands and imposes on the city-state so others. Although one city-state enters the subject tribes, it conserves a superior garden. The net conflict with other small cities produces the ancient kingdoms that may absorb the neighboring kingdoms and become empires. Empires and kingdoms are our states.

3. Human Nature and Culture Face to Face

3.1 Natural Posture

  • Metaphysical thesis: Man is a natural being.
  • Epistemological thesis: Humans must be investigated using the methods of natural science, concepts, and laws, describing it as changes of the genotype and natural selection.
  • Natural traits of human nature are revealed in their universal dissertation.
  • Ethics: It tends to humanize the animals, recognizing their rights and explaining the ethical evolution.
  • Current: Comparative ethology, sociobiology, neurobiology, cultural anthropology, etc.

3.2 Bodybuilder Posture

  • Metaphysical thesis: Man is a social being.
  • Epistemological thesis: Man is the subject of social science. Concepts and laws describe the human being and are not comparable to those applied to animal behavior. Human traits reflect a cultural variability, preventing the universal.
  • Ethical thesis: It underlines the peculiarity of the human, and morality cannot be explained from its evolutionary utility.
  • Current: Behaviorism, Marxism, structuralism, etc.

5. Feminism

5.1 Feminism of Equality

Women and men are equally rational human beings; there is no reason for legal and social discrimination. Feminism began as a protest movement of women who reject such means as:

  • Recognize that there is a social class, women, which has been forgotten in the consciousness that man has of his own history.
  • This class is defined by a natural feature, its biological gender.
  • It is a kind stained in social proxies, and rights are legally recognized by a patriarchal social structure that distributes social networks for the benefit of the dominant male.
  • This oppressive and repressive social structure can be changed through the silent revolution.

5.2 Feminism of Difference

It establishes the moral superiority of being a woman versus being male:

  • Being male means being violent, aggressive, dominant, exploitative, and patriarchal system base.
  • Being a woman means being sensitive, emotional, peaceful, respectful, and so reservoir if it is moral upon which to build the new humanized culture.

6. Nation and Nationalism

6.1 Related Concepts

  • Nation:
    • The first and most original meaning is the act of birth or being born.
    • Since ancient times, the whole nation called people who have some kind of cultural or morphological peculiarities usually. It is the nation in an ethical sense.
    • In a political sense, it is the state-nation, all citizens who occupy the territory of a state and that are united by the same law.
  • Nationality: The condition of citizens, subjects of the nation-state.

6.2 Nationalism: Different Meanings

Nationalism is movements, both political and cultural, trying to extol the virtues of the nation. Depending on the concept of nation, we will use nationalism or another:

  • State nationalism: Exaltation of the virtues of the population, a nation-state nationalism.
  • Artistic: It consists in the exaltation of popular art forms in different parts of the state. We take as an example Spanish musician Isaac Albeniz.
  • Political-statist nationalism: Nation-state excitement, vindication of his greatness.
  • Nationalism of part of the nation-state: Excitement of properties in an ethnic sense, that is, the exaltation of a party or of an ethnic nation within a nation. It is an exaltation that faces the state-nation. The characteristic of this nationalism in the present context, and not only Spanish, is the political demand, which in one way or another point to the excision of the rest, nation-state, i.e., the independence movement.