An Essay on Culture
| Autor | Stephan Fuchs - Adan Christian Freitas |
| Páginas | 134-162 |
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7984.2021.83381
134
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134134 – 162
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An Essay on Culture
Stephan Fuchs
Adan Christian Freitas
Abstract
Despite much uncertainty about what culture is, where it comes from, and where it goes once it is
gone, two core understandings are of culture as meaning and value. Both value and meaning are
not well known, let alone understood. We probe some common and conventional understandings
of culture, and trace their intellectual history. In the modern history of the West, Kant’s philosophy
bestows the highest value on Platonic or Platonist ideas and ideals. But they are already demoted
into merely regulative ctions and necessary illusions. After Kant, the history of culture as value
and ideal amounts to the ending of their meta-physical and trans-cendental status. Values and
ideals rst turn into variable and historical a prioris in NeoKantianism and Max Weber, and
eventually become facts themselves – the empirical facts of beliefs about values. Nietzsche
observes this history of value as an arriving, the advent of nihilism. A sign of this arrival is values
being suspected as ideological rationalizations and inations in which class or status interests
and the will-to-power present themselves as Truth. In the light of this truth, culture and values
eventually appear as nothing but symbolic objects and cultural capital. The nihilistic erosion of the
substance of values means that culture is exhausted and nished, giving rise to, and enabling, its
very ourishing as political economics, symbolic industry, and cultural administration.
It is exciting and intriguing, said Moro, to dip one’s head into physics at one time, and then
into metaphysics another time, and so grow old and waste away once
physically, and once metaphysically.
(Thomas Bernhard, Ungenach)
1. Introduction
In the social sciences and humanities, the ubiquity of “culture”
contrasts with much uncertainty and controversy over what, exactly,
culture is, and what it is not. ough culture is not a material object and
physical thing, some objects are cultural and some things are symbolic. But
Política & Sociedade - Florianópolis - Vol. 20 - Nº 49 - Set./Dez. de 2021
135134 – 162
it is not so clear what makes some objects cultural and symbolic, and there
may not be such a thing as a non-symbolic object at all. Come to think
of it, the very idea of “object” and “thing” in their object- and thingness
is cloudy and contested as well. roughout its history, metaphysics has
given various answers to what an object is, what a thing is.
Uncertainty abounds in studies of culture and cultural studies. ey
include such diverse specialties as gender studies, media studies, science
studies, and many more coming every other day or so. Cultural and studies
of culture are, and increasingly so, fragmented along many dierent lines
of division and disagreement (LAMONT; FOURNIER, 1992). ere is
a sociology of culture, inheriting the tradition of sociology of knowledge,
but also a cultural sociology, a cultural psychology (SHWEDER, 1991)
and, of course, cultural anthropology, and vice versa.
Going back to Malinowski (1944), there is a science of culture, as well
as the more recent culture of science (GALISON, 1999). e former is
still torn between scientistic and humanistic views and methods, and the
latter is debating whether there is a unied Science with a single Culture
at all. Logical positivism and analytical empiricism maintain that science
is, at least, a logical unity, whereas historical and cultural constructivism
claim each science, maybe even each of its sub-cultures, has its own culture
or paradigm, which also change over time (BURKE, 2000).
e fragmentation of cultural studies goes along with dierent notions
of culture prevailing in the various fragments. ere is little or no common
ground for understanding culture, and much disagreement over how to
approach and study it. is disagreement cuts deep, and has done so for
a long time, dividing the “Two Cultures” into hermeneutics and science,
qualitative vs. quantitative research, or phenomenology in contrast to
causal explanation (FUCHS, 1993; SCHNEIDER, 1993).
2. Culture as Capital
Despite widespread disagreements, the prevailing tendency in more
recent sociological eorts at coming to terms with culture reduces it to
a form of symbolic and cultural capital. is reduction indicates that no
understanding of culture seems possible anymore, except in operational
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