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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