On cultural philosophy.
Abstract: The end of traditional metaphysical philosophy triggered the rise of cultural philosophy. Cultural philosophy regards human culture as the reflection object of all philosophies, and it tries to integrate various cultural phenomena into a unified cultural system from the philosophical point of view on the basis of various specific cultural scientific research. It pays close attention to people and history, criticizes rational alienation, thus transcending speculative philosophy and expanding the theoretical horizon of philosophy.
Keywords: cultural philosophy, speculative philosophy, humanization
Since the end of German classical philosophy, modern western philosophy has gone through two turns: towards scientific methodology and language; Rational turns to irrational. The former forms a scientism tendency, while the latter forms a humanism tendency. Behind these two turns, contemporary philosophy is changing from speculative philosophy to cultural philosophy. Philosophers try to reflect on human existence, human thinking, human history, human society and value from a broader cultural perspective, and try to answer the puzzles and crises faced by contemporary human beings and their society with cultural philosophy.
First, the root of cultural philosophy
Cultural philosophy originated from the Enlightenment in18th century. /kloc-The Enlightenment in the 0/8th century violently attacked the feudal hierarchy and theocracy with a more thorough and conscious revolution than the Renaissance, which broke the ideological shackles of deism and made people no longer rely on God, but explain people and their culture by discussing their own characteristics and activities. D'Alembert gave a general description of the zeitgeist of18th century at the beginning of his book Principles of Philosophy. "If we carefully observe the mid-Kloc-0/8th century in which we live, and look at the events that have inspired us, or at least had a significant impact on our thoughts, customs, achievements and even entertainment activities, it is not difficult to see that our ideas are undergoing extremely significant changes in some aspects. & amphellip& amphellip If we think about the present situation of our knowledge without prejudice, it is undeniable that the philosophy of our time has made progress. Natural science is accumulating abundant new materials. Geometry has expanded its scope and brought the torch to the field of physics, which is the closest subject to it. People know the real system of the world more clearly and express it more perfectly. & amphellip& amphellip The discovery and application of a new philosophical way of thinking, and the passion that accompanies these discoveries,&; Hellip& amphellip Thus, from secular scientific principles to religious revelation principles, from metaphysics to appreciation issues, from music to morality, from theologians' complicated arguments to commercial issues, from monarch's laws to people's laws, from natural laws to arbitrary laws of various countries &; Hellip& amphellip all this has been discussed and analyzed, or at least mentioned. " ①
D'Alembert is one of the most important spokesmen of scholars and intellectuals in18th century. His words directly expressed the nature and trend of spiritual life at that time. In other words, the Enlightenment no longer only cares about people's understanding like rationalism and empiricism. Instead, we should use rationality to examine the material life and spiritual life of the whole society and human beings, that is, to examine the whole culture to see if it is a rational and reasonable culture. Therefore, Engels once said: "The great men who inspired people's thoughts for the upcoming revolution in France are themselves very revolutionary. They don't recognize any foreign authority, no matter what it is. Religion, view of nature, society, national system, everything has been criticized most mercilessly; Everything must defend its existence or give up its right to exist in front of a rational court, and the understanding of thinking has become the only criterion for measuring everything. " ② It can be seen that Enlightenment philosophy established the earliest philosophy of cultural criticism.
The direct founder of the theory of cultural philosophy should be attributed to three thinkers: Italian enlightenment thinker G.B. Vico, German enlightenment thinker Herder,18th century theoretical director of hurricane movement, and German philosopher Kant. Vico's "New Science" (full name "New Scientific Principles on Homosexuality of All Ethnic Groups") is the first cultural philosophy work. The main research object of this book is how human beings developed from primitive barbarism to civilized people living a social life. Vico's basic starting point is the theory of * * * human identity. He believes that although the origins and situations of different ethnic groups are different, there must be some basically the same laws in social development, while the new science explores the laws of the origin and development of human culture. This book had a great influence on the later establishment of cultural philosophy. Held, Goethe, Hegel, Morgan, Marx and Engels, the authors of Ancient Society, were all influenced by this book. On the basis of studying the history, customs, religion, philosophy, art and science of various countries, Holder wrote a cultural philosophy book, Reflections on the Philosophy of Human History, in an attempt to find out the objective laws of the development of human society. He attributed these laws to the fact that different nationalities have different cultures because of their different geographical environments.
As a pioneer of cultural philosophy, Kant made the greatest contribution, because Kant comprehensively and systematically discussed human subject from the perspective of philosophy for the first time. Man and his subjectivity are the core issues of cultural philosophy. The great achievement of Kant's philosophy lies in that he surpassed all previous philosophical schools and put forward for the first time that man is a subject different from animals. Man's subjectivity consists of three factors: as far as man's cognitive ability is concerned, Kant put forward the cognitive form from perceptual intuition of time and space to purely intellectual concept (category). With this set of cognitive forms, people can combine sensory materials into knowledge. As far as people's ethical behavior is concerned, Kant believes that as a subject, people must naturally obey the law he set for himself-absolute order, that is, moral court. It is in the process of observing this "absolute order" that moral dignity and its unparalleled power can be displayed. Individuals should bear the obligations and responsibilities of the existence and development of all mankind. Only in this way can people have subjectivity. From the perspective of human emotional structure, aesthetics involves human emotional problems. Kant separated the aesthetic pleasure of human beings, which is different from the functional pleasure and conceptual rational understanding of animals. As the highest and final result of human subjectivity, aesthetics is the unity of law and purpose, the unity of sensibility and rationality, and the free form of human beings. In this way, human subjectivity includes the intellectual structure of epistemology, the free will of ethics and the aesthetic emotional structure, which constitutes the fundamental connotation of subjectivity such as human being is the purpose, human being is free, human being is the unity of sensibility and rationality, and human being is valuable. This laid a solid theoretical foundation for later cultural philosophy.
However, in the period when speculative philosophy prevailed, cultural philosophy could not be greatly developed, because the "rationality" glory that speculative philosophy paid attention to did not lose its luster. The development of cultural philosophy can only be valued by people when modern rationalism is in trouble, especially when Hegel's philosophy is criticized. In terms of social development, after the Enlightenment, the capitalist system was established in major European countries. /kloc-After the middle of the 0/9th century, capitalism has experienced a century of development, and people's creativity has developed unprecedentedly. With the great progress of science and technology, the contradiction between man and nature, man and society has become more acute and complicated. The advanced science and technology created by human beings, in turn, rules human beings and becomes a force of alienation. The western world, which created modern science and democracy, has become an unscrupulous expansionist and invader. All these require people not to think about people's cognitive ability only rationally, but to think deeply about a series of problems related to people from the all-round perspective of culture, such as human nature, existence, history, value, human development, tradition and modernity, which provides social and historical conditions for the emergence of cultural philosophy.
From the development course of philosophy itself, modern rationalism makes people's subjectivity stand out in the development process. Modern rationalism basically uses abstract philosophical thinking methods and modern natural science methods to explain human subjectivity, so it is difficult to fully explain human subjectivity. In this case, we need to find another way, which requires people to further reflect on human problems from the cultural-philosophical level, which creates theoretical conditions for cultural philosophy.
From the perspective of scientific development, since the middle of19th century, with the development of ethnology, anthropology, sociology, history, mythology and other specific humanities and social sciences, especially the development of culturology and cultural anthropology, people's research on specific cultural structures and various cultural events has gradually deepened, providing many specific field cultural materials for people to reflect on culture more deeply. If the achievements of natural science in19th century mainly laid the foundation of natural science for Marxism and positivism philosophy at that time, then the scientific research on human beings in modern times laid the foundation of positivism science for the establishment and development of cultural philosophy.
Second, the connotation and characteristics of cultural philosophy
The so-called cultural philosophy is to take human culture as the object of all philosophical reflection, thus revealing the law of the emergence and development of human culture. This inevitably involves the question of what is culture. In Philosophy of Human History, held first defined three basic characteristics for culture: first, culture is a social way of life, and its concept is a unified and homogeneous concept. No matter the whole or all aspects of social life, people's words and deeds have become an unquestionable part of this culture; Secondly, culture is always a "national" culture, representing the essence of a nation. Third, culture has clear boundaries. As a regional culture, culture is always obviously different from other regional cultures. It can be said that these three characteristics have been regarded as authoritative definitions of cultural theory so far. T.S. Eliot, an English poet, inherited Herder's view that culture covers "the whole life style of a nation, from birth to grave, from morning till night, even in sleep". (3) After all kinds of definitions about culture, we can see the trace of Herder's view.
Hegel first put forward the concept of "cultural science" in19th century. German scholar Creme and British anthropologist Edward? Taylor used this concept one after another in his works about primitive culture. In the 20th century, ostwald, a famous German culturist, explicitly proposed to establish a "culturology" independent of sociology. The establishment of "culturology" first involves the essence of culture. It is worth mentioning that Taylor wrote the book The Origin of Culture at 187 1. Taylor regards human culture as human civilization and puts forward that culture is a complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morality, law, customs and any other abilities and habits acquired by people as members of society. From a higher angle, he observed culture as a whole and tried to explain it in all directions.
Since "culture" is intrinsically related to human civilization, the essence of "culture" is humanization, that is, humanization of human objects (nature)-objectification of objects, and its logical correspondence is objectification of human essential forces-objectification of subjects. This is the most essential rule of human culture. Culture is embodied in the ability, way, process and achievements of human beings to practice creative activities. The labor and practice of social people are the source of culture. On the one hand, culture is the objectification (externalization) of conscious and purposeful human labor, and at the same time it is the subjectivity (internalization) of natural objects and human creation. Culture is the dynamic unity of objectification of subject and subjectivization, externalization and internalization of leisure. "Culture" refers to people's various activities within the society starting from the reproduction of material living conditions. The culture of every particular society is a system of human activities and results under certain historical conditions. Humanization is the result of objectification. Marx revealed the humanization of things and the objectification of people's essential power. On the surface, it is the relationship between people and nature (things), but in essence it implies the relationship between people and society. People are "the sum of all social relations". The whole human culture involves two inseparable organic relationships: the relationship between man and nature and the relationship between people. For people, the relationship between man and nature is superficial, and the relationship between people is fundamental. Therefore, through labor and social practice, human beings coordinate the relationship between man and nature and between people, realize human nature, meet human needs, and create material life style, value system and meaningful world. In short, both material and spiritual achievements are culture. This is the most essential definition of culture and the most profound philosophical reflection on culture, which constitutes the basic connotation of cultural philosophy.
The first characteristic of cultural philosophy, which is different from speculative philosophy, is that it tries to integrate various cultural phenomena into a unified cultural system from the philosophical point of view on the basis of various specific cultural scientific research. The school of cultural evolution represented by Taylor, an early cultural philosopher, believes that culture is the result of natural development and evolution. They pay more attention to the identity and consistency of historical development. They believe that the identity of human psychology determines the unity of human culture. From low to high, from simple to complex, the society and culture of all ethnic groups in various regions have all experienced the same stage of development, affirming the universal law of human historical activities and revealing the general trend of human cultural development. And Richter and Marx? The relativism school of cultural philosophy represented by Weber, Spenger and Toynbee believes that every culture is a unique system. Weber put forward the relative value of various cultures, while Spenger and Toynbee overthrew the western cultural centralism and established a new path for the development of national culture. They see that the emergence, existence and development of a cultural phenomenon are all related to the specific historical conditions of people's lives. It provides a new theoretical framework for human beings to understand their own cultural history and explore future development. As a representative of the school of cultural symbols, Cassirer believes that the most fundamental essence of human beings is the activity of consciously creating various symbolic forms. The function of symbolic activities is to connect the subject-human and object-culture, as well as various symbolic forms-myth, religion, language, art, history and science. , reflecting the relationship between people and culture in different stages.
The second major feature of cultural philosophy is that it greatly highlights human problems on the basis of various specific cultural sciences. From the development history of cultural philosophy, Nietzsche was the pioneer of western cultural philosophy in the 20th century. Nietzsche's philosophy can be said to be "human philosophy". Although he also talked about things and phenomena that are not directly related to people in the world outside people, the proportion is very small. His philosophy is mainly to teach people how to make their lives sound and powerful and become "Superman". Superman is the destroyer of old cultural traditions and values, and the creator of new world, new values and new culture. Therefore, brandeis, a Danish literary historian, accurately called Nietzsche a "cultural philosopher". Dilthey emphasized the understanding of human life, which is vivid and concrete. It has a process, a history, and there is no repetition. Life is always changing, so is human nature. Only when people are in the stream of their own lives can they be integrated with the lives of others and have a sympathetic understanding, so that they can be said to have a real "understanding." Dilthey not only expounded individual life, but also emphasized human life. He pointed out that the characteristics of human life must be reflected in the spirit of the times, that is, in the historical process, all human manifestations are part of the historical process. Dilthey's thought had a great influence on humanism in the 20th century.
Cassirer, a master of cultural philosophy, discussed "what is man" in his masterpiece On Man. He summed up all kinds of philosophical theories about human beings in the history of western thought for more than 2000 years, and pointed out that despite the prosperity of science and advanced technology, human problems have not really been solved, but have fallen into a profound crisis. He believes that man is not so much a "rational animal" as a "symbolic animal", that is, an animal that can use symbols to create culture. He believes that the biggest difference between humans and animals is the difference between "reality" and "possibility". Hellip& amphellip's inferior substances are confined to their world of sensory perception. They are easy to feel and react to the physical stimulation of reality, but they can't form any possible concepts. & amphellip& amphellip, the problem of possibility will only occur in human beings and in the intellectual truth of human beings. "Possibility" means that people "live in an ideal world, that is, to regard the impossible as possible". People can use all kinds of "symbols" to create the "ideal world" they need, and this "ideal world" is a meaningful world-a cultural world built for themselves. Cassirer believes that only in the activities of creating culture can people become real people, and only in cultural activities can people gain real "freedom". For Cahill, cultural philosophy has become the concrete content and vivid display of philosophy, while human philosophy has become the ultimate goal and inner soul of cultural philosophy. It can be seen that cultural philosophers study people with culture and history.
The third characteristic of cultural philosophy is to attach importance to the study of human history. In New Science, Vico tries to find historical laws beyond God's will to oppose the historical theory of religious theology. Spenger's The Decline of the West describes every history and culture as a unique life of history, holding that every history has experienced the same cycle of growth and extinction, and depicts the prospect of the decline of western civilization in a bleak style. Toynbee divided the world's 6,000-year history of civilization into 26 cultural units, and each cultural unit experienced the same "rise and fall cycle" model. The origin of civilization is governed by the law of "challenge and challenge"; The growth of civilization is due to the creativity of a few creative people and the imitation of most people; The reason for the decline of civilization is that a few people lose their creativity and become rulers, and most people no longer imitate, thus resulting in alienation from Germany, a few people violently suppress, and most people rise up and resist, which shows that the period of civilization decline has come, and the symbol of civilization decline is "the birth of a unified country." Collingwood, on the other hand, opposes "historical naturalism" and thinks that natural science is based on natural facts confirmed by observation and experiment, and history is based on spiritual facts confirmed by "reflection"; Natural facts are simple phenomena, while spiritual facts are not phenomena but thoughts. Therefore, in his view, "history is the history of thought", the object of history is thought, and the task of history is to repeat the thoughts of the ancients in his own mind; History is not a "dead past" but a "living past"; Historical knowledge is the repetition of past thoughts contained in today's thoughts, otherwise, it will become a "pseudo-historical concept"
These characteristics of cultural philosophy show that philosophy has shifted from paying attention to world ontology and human cognition to paying attention to human culture, human existence and human history; From paying attention to speculation and rationality to paying attention to human existence and human value, it shows that philosophy has stepped out of the narrow world of speculation and is moving towards a broader cultural world.
Third, the current situation and development trend of contemporary "cultural philosophy"
The combination of western philosophy and culture in the 20th century produced two major cultural philosophy thoughts, namely, scientific cultural philosophy and humanistic cultural philosophy, which realized the transition from modern to post-modern to varying degrees. Cultural philosophy of scientism. From logicism to historicism is the track of its development. Logicalism pays attention to the logical analysis of scientific theories and pursues the clarity and accuracy of scientific language. On the other hand, historical determinism focuses on the social and historical investigation of science, and holds that logic alone will distort science. However, logical analysis has been challenged from all sides from the beginning. 1The scientific revolution at the turn of the century at the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 20th century has injected strong uneasiness and turbulence into contemporary cultural thoughts. From the very beginning, this revolution pushed Newton's thinking frame, on which the enlightenment ideal depended, to a precarious position. As an intermediary from logicism to historicism, Popper waged a systematic and long-term struggle against logical positivism. He once said: "My works emphasize the humanity of science. Science will make mistakes, because we are human beings and people will make mistakes. " The fallibility of science has been confirmed by history for the first time. It can be said that Popper was the first scientific philosopher who consciously constructed a cultural philosophy system, and his philosophy of science, political philosophy, historical philosophy and understanding theory were integrated into a system-cultural philosophy.
From the negation of logical empiricism to the negation of historicism, it tends to be farther and farther away from the tradition of scientific philosophy. From logical empiricism rationalism to negative critical rationalism, from Kuhn's "shyness" and "irrationalism" to Faye Abend's "correct" irrationalism, this means that the philosophy of science has begun to walk out of the limitations of pure scientific culture, which indicates that the philosophy of science has further moved towards humanism and has a stronger cultural philosophy color. This expansion to the humanities field has reached a new synthesis in the American philosopher Rorty. This shift to humanism shows that the scientific trend of thought is being integrated with the humanistic trend of thought through the reference intermediary of culture and history, and is being integrated into the wave of post-modern cultural philosophy.
Cultural philosophy of humanism. To discuss the cultural philosophy of western humanism in the 20th century, we can't help but mention Nietzsche, who, with his rich and complicated thoughts, not only created the western irrationalism in the 20th century, but also created existentialism and postmodernism. As an American thinker pointed out: without Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre would be unthinkable. As a representative of neo-Kantian, Dilthey not only inherited Nietzsche's criticism of positivism and historicism, but also combined history and philosophy to create "spiritual science", that is, humanities. In order to establish his own cultural philosophy, Dilthey first systematically criticized the historical rationality, which laid a theoretical foundation for the later "cultural criticism" of Western Marxism.
Based on Lehmacher's theory, Dilthey not only demonstrated that hermeneutics is the epistemology and methodology of humanities, but also greatly expanded the research field of hermeneutics and provided the possibility for hermeneutics as a philosophy. Therefore, Dilthey is called "the father of modern hermeneutics". Under the dual influence of Dilthey's hermeneutics and Husserl's phenomenology, Heidegger realized the transformation from methodological hermeneutics to ontological hermeneutics, while his student Gadamer made hermeneutics independent, became a philosophy and formed a complete philosophical hermeneutics system. Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Paul and Ricoeur represent the hermeneutic direction of cultural philosophy. They put humanistic research on the philosophical level, or extended the philosophical vision to the field of humanistic research, which not only expanded philosophy in quantity, but also brought about the internal qualitative change of philosophy itself.
When German philosophers developed from Nietzsche to Heidegger to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, in France, there was an ideological movement from structuralism to deconstruction. Originally, the whole modern western philosophy, whether scientism or humanism, is characterized by a thorough criticism and denial of modern reason. The trend of scientism regards the "rationality" advocated by modern philosophy as "arrogant rationality", and holds that modern philosophy, especially Hegel's philosophy, regards philosophy itself as omnipresent, omnipresent and omnipotent rationality, thus turning "rationality" into "God" and causing "rational debauchery", so it is required to transform "arrogant rationality" with "modest rationality" and use the so-called humanistic trend of thought. In particular, Hegel's philosophy alienated people into "rationality" and used "rationality as god" to regulate human existence, which led to "essentialism flooding". Therefore, it needs "rich humanity" to transform "cold rationality", that is, it uses "cultural" French structuralism, and on the other hand, it extends the field of criticism to the whole western philosophy. Like scientism and humanism, it tries to complete the complete disintegration of western metaphysical tradition.
It can be said that the end of western metaphysical philosophy tradition marks the revival of cultural philosophy, and "hermeneutics" and "deconstruction" express this requirement from both positive and negative aspects. The reason for "explanation" is that there are deeper things behind logic, which are released and expounded through explanation; The reason for "deconstruction" is that this deeper thing is covered and suffocated by logical things, so we must first find ways to untie the iron rope of logic and eliminate the weight of logic. ⑦ Both of them tried to use cultural philosophy to fight against traditional metaphysics.
If phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism and other philosophies are based on the "knowledge" of disciplines in various fields of humanities, and even intertwined with humanities research to form a "cultural philosophy", then the central issue of western Marxism is social and cultural issues or cultural and social issues. Therefore, their theory is also called "cultural criticism (continued 96 pages) (continued 92 pages)". Lukacs' theory of materialization (cultural dialectics), Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony (theory of culture and practice), Marcuse's theory of one-sided person (aesthetic dimension of culture), Reich's and Fromm's theory of personality structure and fascist mass psychology (theory of sex and cultural psychology), Lefebvre's criticism of daily life (theory of culture and daily life) and Habermas's theory of communicative behavior (theory of cultural and social contradictions) are all about the existing society. They reveal the cultural-historical and cultural-social dilemmas faced by human beings in the 20th century from different aspects, and thus reveal the deep cultural contradictions and crises in contemporary western society.
As an influential cultural philosophy movement, postmodern cultural philosophy dispels the opposition between scientism and humanism, dispels the illusions of Eurocentrism, Western cultural centralism, anthropocentrism and rational centralism, disintegrates the present metaphysics, deconstructs Logocentrism and linguistic centralism, abandons the pursuit of absolute objectivity, eternal truth and certainty at the moment of "subjectivity dusk", and subverts modern spiritual values in a radical way.
In a word, with the deterioration of contemporary people's various living conditions, psychological states and mental states, traditional speculative philosophy is not enough to reveal these contradictions and problems comprehensively and systematically, so people naturally turn their theoretical focus to "cultural philosophy", trying to examine the contradictions between contemporary people and nature, people and society, and people and their own culture in a broader perspective, so as to find a road to the future and freedom for mankind.
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