Nature and Culture: Philosophical Concepts and Historical Relationship
1. The Concept of Nature
The first concept of nature arises from the reflections of early pre-Socratic philosophers, viewing it as cosmos or world, encompassing dynamic elements. For Aristotle, nature refers to beings that move under their own mode and purpose, as opposed to artificial beings. Everything that moves is moved by a first mover, a still and motion generator. After the scientific revolution, laws governing movement emerged. Descartes saw nature as a machine operating according to laws. During the Romantic era, nature was viewed from a more organismic perspective, as a living totality.
2. The Concept of Culture
We can distinguish two types of culture:
2.1. Subjective Culture
Subjective culture refers to an individual’s education and cultivation. Cicero believed that individuals must cultivate their souls as land is cultivated. A cultured person has acquired skills and knowledge through education, distinguishing them from those without training. This type of culture is the body of knowledge acquired in a social learning context.
2.2. Objective Culture
All subjective culture occurs within the context of objective culture. Subjective culture is how objective culture manifests in an individual. Herder defined objective culture as the permanent achievements of human art, science, and language. Objective culture encompasses all human productions within a social context, shaping their reality.
3. Historical Relations Between Nature and Culture
Aristotle distinguished between natural entities and those resulting from human actions (art). Rousseau, emphasizing the contrast between nature and culture, suggested that people in remote villages, closer to nature, were happier and morally superior, proposing a return to nature. Herder viewed both nature and culture as components of human beings, with culture as humanity’s second nature. Marx considered humans social animals producing their own living conditions. Freud saw culture as a source of repression of natural instincts, particularly sexual and aggressive ones, necessary for social interaction.
4. From Nature to Culture: The Role of Learning
The clash between culture and nature is often presented as the disjunction between learning (culture) and heredity (nature). Subjective culture is formed as individuals acquire knowledge through learning, contrasting with instinct. Nature is genetically programmed, acquired during the embryonic process.
Instinctive behaviors limit response possibilities, while learning allows for flexible action. Learning enables the construction of culture. Only animals with this ability generate culture.
Learning Mechanisms:
- Education and Awareness Programs: Acquiring new behaviors through reinforcement and consequences.
- Imitation: Requires advanced brain development to understand the intentionality behind the behavior to be imitated.
- Assimilation of Information: Unique to humans, requiring capabilities like language and logical reasoning.
5. Instincts, Language, and Symbols: Learning and Inheritance
In humans, biological evolution has progressively replaced instinct with learned responses. A unique element in human cultural evolution is the symbol.
Language is the repository of knowledge, transmitting information across generations, enabling humanization and establishing a cultural world. Sociobiology and primate research blur the lines between nature and culture based on innate versus learned behaviors. Some innate behaviors require a suitable environment to develop, such as nest-building in gorillas.
6. Culture as a Social Product: An Exclusively Human Domain
Humans are characterized as creators of their own cultural space. Culture is a product of nature that becomes distinct and opposed to it.
The difference between animal and human culture lies in the complexity of human cultural productions and the capacity for accumulation facilitated by language.
Culture is a complex whole encompassing knowledge, science, art, law, morals, manners, and habits acquired as a member of society. Characteristics of human culture:
- Complexity: A set of interrelated elements of different natures.
- Transcendence of the Organic Body: Humans expand their biological survival capabilities through culture, building tools to improve adaptation.
- Social Product: Culture arises from a web of social relations; a solitary individual cannot create culture, as it is the result of social interaction.