Child
of a culture
The
human reality is child of the difference
and
it does
not cease generating differences. Thanks primarily to speech. The
spoken word constitutes properly the relevant difference of humans in
the middle of all other beings. Man pronounces an infinite verb
metaphor which
unceasingly carries infinitely beyond.
The
countless cultures presuppose a constituent
matrix,
a common matrix which gives rise to the universal human dimension.
What can this matrix basically be? Is it identical to the logos,
the archaeological Verb which generates the humans as human, the
anthropogenous
logos.
You
find humans only where a culture exists. And there is no culture
without the speech. This speech is multiform through space and time.
A general-purpose speech made up as well by constructive gestures, by
symbolic systems as by verbal sonorities. A speech at the same time material
and ideal. A speech alternately and prophetic. There is no humanity
without such a speech by which the human specificity is said while
being constituted and constitutes itself while being said.
There
is what is
given with
the birth. There is what is
given by
conquest. This two dimensions support one another. The
borders are indistinguishable. Man is absolutely unable to make an
experiment of what would be simply biological without the spirit. Man
is fundamentally a physico-bio-psycho-socio-spiritual
unit.
The biped and vertical posture is it a natural or a cultural
phenomenon?
In man matter is kneaded with spirit. In man the spirit embraces
matter. In any form and on any level we try to determine them,
already
what
is 'natural' appears with an index of 'culture', already
the
'culture' does not exist without 'nature'.
The sense is only
at home in a space of difference. Of such a space you can try to
trace the coordinates. You find them in the four fundamental dynamics
of the human project. Namely being-oneself,
being-towards,
being-with
and
being-more.
These four dynamics play amply through our lexicons, in form of the
root-prefixes - In
-
Ex
-
Cum
-
Trans
-
which are also the dynamics of our verb.
A
culture generates more and more differences. But already it is
constituted starting from a concentration
of differences.
At the origin of the multiple historically appeared cultures there is
a first requirement, although nonsufficient, something like a 'oasis'
of human density, along a river, for example, or in a fertile plain.
Any culture is inseparable from an agriculture which settels an
increasing human concentration. No great culture was constituted
without cereal,
this miraculous concentrate of glucids, protids and lipids with its
mineral salts and its vitamins…
This
concentrated human environment integrates a maximum of personal
differences, since man is the only species where individualities are
strongly different and are all the more strongly different as they
form a greater community. It is such a community embracing a maximum
of difference which becomes the source of an outstanding culture. Such a
community concentration induces a whole series of other
diversifications
and
other intensifications
such
as for example the differentiation of tasks or the more intensive
production of subsistence. It is always a concentrated
difference
and at
the same time a differentiated
concentration which
makes up this
explosive mixture
provocating
humanity.
The
cultural matrix is the epistemological and pragmatic space which
defines, for a given humanity and at a given time, the reference
frames and the coordinates of knowledge and action, always
conditioned according to possibilities and impossibilities.
Concretely it says that intelligibility and feasibility, science and
technology, comprehension and creation, function always inside
certain limits and certain determinations.
Each culture, each
cultural moment, conceals epistemological and pragmatic obstacles,
i.e. resistances to what is thinkable and practicable. These
resistances refuse at the same time their setting in light. No
culture is conscious of its own obstacles. It is only starting from
the outside that they are revealed. From an other culture. Or from an
other prophetic look.
Epistemological
and pragmatic revolutions make up the rupture
of such or such an obstacle in a given cultural space-time. At the
same time, they open a new space and a new way for systemic
readjustments.
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