Culture is a notoriously vague term employed to designate groupings as small as a particular school or affinity group (sometimes labeled as “sub-cultures) and groupings as large as “the West.” Despite its seemingly inevitable vagueness (no blood test for culture and any culture that one dares to identify will also be riven with conflicts and dissenters that belie its coherence), it is also hard to deny culture’s “stickiness.” Habits of daily practice, the ways people interact, and the beliefs/values they hold prove fairly difficult to alter. Efforts to wipe out religion are a good example. Over a thousand years of hostility to Jews across Europe into Eurasia couldn’t kill Judaism off.
I mentioned in my previous post, when commenting on the work of Andy Clark, that his understanding of how expectations (pre-existing categories and projections of what any situation is likely to present to the self) seemed excessively individualistic. So the following sentence from Nicola Raihani’s book, The Social Instinct (St Martin’s Press, 2021) resonated for me: “The idea that beliefs function more as signals of group membership than as vessels of epistemic truth might help us to understand why our brains seem to be chock-full of software that enables us to defend these ideas, even in the face of countervailing evidence” (218). At the very least, our take on what the world presents to us is influenced by our need to establish solidarity with some particular others as much as that take is tuned into the non-human elements of the situation. Not only are our beliefs in many cases adopted from others, but we cling to those beliefs in order to remain in good standing with those others.
The other side of this coin is what I have called the desire of many post-Romantic artists to see things straight off, free from any prior cultural designation. Here is Nietzsche’s version of that desire (aphorism 261 of The Gay Science, quoted here in full from the Walter Kaufmann translation). As we would expect from Nietzsche, he recognizes the paradoxes embedded in that desire—and how it runs straight into conflict with Kantian “communicability.” “Most” originals bow, in the end, to the conditions imposed by communicability; these geniuses (to use Kant’s term) end up assigning names, bringing what they have apprehended back into culture’s warehouse.
“What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are , it takes a name to make something visible for them.—Those with originality have for the most part also assigned names.”
McGowanBlog 