word "culture" comes from the Latin term meaning the cultivation of land, as well as education and development.Initially, it was connected with the rural way of life and interaction with nature.From this sense, the concept of culture in philosophy is as a specific way of organizing and development of human life, represented by the products of material and spiritual labor, and the system caused some social norms and cultural values.Culture is also often referred to as a set of attitudes towards nature, society and ourselves.For convenience, forms of culture are divided according to the historical stages of development - for example, antique, Renaissance and so on, by groups or communities of people - national, ethnic or multi-ethnic, world, the culture of the individual ...
term "civilization" also has a Latin origin, butits value is not the agrarian and urban motivated, and is associated with concepts such as citizenship and the state.Culture and civilization in philosophy may be close in meaning - for example, the word "civilization" is often used as a synonym for culture.But as a rule, in a strict sense, is the degree of civilization of a society that follows the "barbarism" and share the historical stage of development (ancient, medieval ...).We can say that these two concepts are the two faces of the same whole.
However, until the XVIII century the scientific community actually lived without the terms "culture" and "civilization".Philosophy has introduced them in the lexicon rather late, and at first they were considered synonymous.However, representation, similar to these concepts by value, have long existed.For example, in China, they are traditionally denoted by the word "ren" (Confucius), in ancient Greece - "Paideia" (Education), and in ancient Rome, even divided into two words: «civitas» (the opposite of barbarism, civilization) and «humanitas» (education).It is interesting that in the Middle Ages more than appreciated the concept of civitas, and in the Renaissance - humanitas.Since the XVIII century, culture is increasingly identified with the ideals of the Enlightenment in the spiritual and political sphere - reasonable and harmonious forms of government, science, art and religion.Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot and Condorcet match in the judgments that the development of culture corresponds to the development of reason and rationality.
it always positively perceived by thinkers of culture and civilization?The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment contemporary, gives a negative answer to this question.He found that the more a person moves away from nature, the lower the real happiness and natural harmony.This criticism and acted on German philosophy, classics which have tried to make sense of these contradictions.Kant put forward the idea that the problem is good or bad culture and civilization, can be solved with the help of the "world morality", the German Romantics Schelling Genderlin tried to do this with the aesthetic intuition and Hegel believed that all solvable within the philosophy of self-consciousness of the AbsoluteSpirit.Herder believed that all the contradictions characteristic of the history of culture, as it develops by type (eastern, antique, European), each of which reaches its maximum, passing the following achievements.Humboldt suggested that one of the most essential features of national culture is the language, which forms the national spirit.
However, classical German philosophy is often considered the development of culture as a single-line process, and therefore its position does not cover all variety, which gives the world culture and civilization.Philosophy of the XIX century (especially in the face of neo-Kantian Rickert and Weber, as well as representatives of the "philosophy of life") has criticized this position.Neokantians recognize the very essence of world cultural values, which call for a person to perform due, and affect its behavior.Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian opposed type of culture, and Dilthey - discursive and intuitive, calling the first "liquefied fluid intelligence."Marxism was looking at the culture and civilization of the material basis and social group (class) character.
Since the end of the XIX century also began the study of culture from the standpoint of anthropology and ethnography (Taylor), was created by the structural analysis of culture as a system of values, semiotics and structural linguistics (Levi-Strauss).For the twentieth century is characterized by such a direction as the philosophy of culture, which represents the essence of the characters (Cassirer), intuition (Bergson), or archetypes (Jung).Philosophy of culture, as well as representatives of the existentialists and philosophical hermeneutics, seen in each local culture, a universal meaning, which is revealed when interpreting its symbols.Although there is such a position that rejects such a thing as a world culture and civilization.The philosophy of Spengler and Toynbee considers polycentrism crops proof of the absence of generally accepted in different civilizations and universal laws.
