On the Nature of Culture

The title might seem like a paradox.  Are not “nature” and “culture” radically distinct, even opposed to each other?  To answer this we must ask: what do we mean by “nature” and what do we mean by “culture”?  Our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up these questions.

I have often said, with only a part of the tongue put into the cheek, that the history of modernity consists in a series of divorces: of soul or mind from body, of rule from the ruler, of law from nature, of nature from culture, and so sadly common today, of husbands from wives and wives from husbands.

Among these divorces, the one on which I want here to focus is that of nature from culture.  First, it is important to note that “culture” in its contemporary sense, as a thing, a being, is relatively recent: appearing in concrete terms no earlier than the late 18th century.  But second, it is also important to note that claiming a separation of “culture” from “nature” suggests a belief that the two can be understood as united.

While misunderstandings of “nature” today abound, and make reconciling the two terms rather difficult, so too a great confusion concerns the object signified by the word “culture”.

A Provisional Definition of Nature

Because our Happy Hour will not concern itself with the “nature” of nature (that is, the intelligibility account of what nature is), but the nature of culture, we should but can only provisionally offer here a brief definition of nature.  Simply stated, what we mean by “nature” is “the intrinsic principle of motion and rest in that to which it belongs, through itself and not by virtue of some other.”

This (paraphrase of Aristotle’s) definition gives us a lot to digest.  In what sense, given this understanding, could culture be understood to have a nature?

The First Question of Culture

This is our first question to ask: that is, whether “culture” is such a thing as could be said to “have a nature”.  What do I mean?  Well, on the one hand, the definition of nature above means that a thing possessing a nature can be understood in terms of that nature.  A human being has intrinsically possessed capabilities and ends through which we can understand what it means to be human, or what it means to do things which are “inhuman”.  We might regard heinous acts such as murder or rape, for instance, to be inhuman not only because of how they victimize others but also because they are out of keeping with the nature possessed by the perpetrator.

Is “culture” a thing like a human being, then?  We talk about it as though it were; but it is not so clear.  And so let us ask whether “culture” can be said to have a nature.

The Second Question of Culture

Regardless of the answer to this first question, we have another important one to ask: namely, does “culture” name anything at all?  If so, what is that which it names?  If we think about the ways in which the term commonly is used today, it seems in some cases to signify something relevant to our experience.  But what is that “something”?  Is it the same something in every case?  Consider these two descriptions.  First, T.S. Eliot (1948: Notes Towards the Definition of Culture):

The term culture has different associations according to whether we have in mind the development of an individual, of a group or class, or of a whole society.  It is a part of my thesis that the culture of the individual is dependent upon the culture of a group or class, and that the culture of the group or class is dependent upon the culture of the whole society to which that group or class belongs.

Second, the linguist Daniel Everett (2016: Dark Matter of the Mind):

Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains and ranked values.  Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment.  The roles, knowledge and values of culture are only found in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members.

Eliot’s description and the first sentence of Everett’s definition place culture, primarily, outside the individual.  Paradoxically (or perhaps, contradictorily), Everett’s third sentence seems to reduce its existence to a materialistic instantiation in the individual.  Eliot ties it to “development”.  Everett calls it “dynamic”.

The developmental notion exists in a related expression of antiquity; as Cicero writes in his Tusculan Disputations (II.13), cultura autem anima philosophia est: “philosophy is the cultivation of the soul”.  St. Augustine, in his De civitate Dei, relates this cultivating to the worship (cultus) of God—which use defined the term’s meaning throughout the Scholastic period.

What unites or distinguishes all these meanings?

Cultivating through Conversation

I make no pretense that we can solve the question in a single conversation; but perhaps we can together, through conversation, at least make clear just what the question, “what is the nature of culture?” actually means.  So please join us this Wednesday (26 August 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET) as we think through these and related questions:

• Can culture genuinely be said to have a “nature,” or does calling it a “thing” already reify what is really a set of relations, practices, beliefs, etc.?
• If nature is an intrinsic principle of motion and rest, where would the corresponding principle of a culture reside—in individuals, institutions, classes of persons, society as a whole, or somewhere else?
• Does the modern opposition between “nature” and “culture” illuminate human life, or does it obscure older understandings in which cultivation perfects rather than opposes nature?
• When we move from Cicero’s “cultura animi”, the cultivation of the soul, to the modern idea of “a culture” as something possessed or enacted by a whole society, do we lose something critical?
• John Deely, in a number of texts, identifies “culture” as the “fulfillment of nature for human animals.”  What might this mean?  Might it help us think through the relationship between the two objects?