Retrospect: the Nature of Culture

Our Philosophical Happy Hour (26 August 2026) inquired into the nature of culture.  Here is a brief retrospective survey of our discussion.

The word “culture” remains laden with confused significations.  Sorting out its meaning, organizing the uses of it, and identifying the proper phenomenon it names proves no easy task.  Yet even a relatively short conversation may help us gain some bearings; and that is just what we accomplished.

1. Terminological Associations

When hearing the word “culture”, it is not uncommon for several things to occur in the contemporary mind: especially art—music, painting, literature, the things of “high culture”—as well as food, folklore, and particular customary practices (celebrations, religious attendance, etc.); but so too business (work culture, including expectations of dress, mannerism, professionalism, etc.), as well as regional and ethnic inheritance (Mexican culture, Norwegian culture, Japanese, Australian, etc.).  Tied into these considerations may be elements of geography and climate, and other naturally-occurring phenomena, resources, genetics, and the like.

But also, and more importantly, it was recognized that language has a determinative effect on constituting whatever it is that we name “culture”—most especially a commonality of language.  Such articulation seems to give form to common matter, without which “culture” seems never to emerge.

2. The Constitution of Culture

Thus it happens that—whatever “culture” is—it seems to rely upon language.  As a language for any group of people goes, so too it seems does their culture; whatever is grown is grown in the soil of language.  This does not reduce culture to language, but claims that all the norms, customs, habits, practices, or whatever else might fall under the associated significations of the term can do so only insofar as they somehow involve, or are involved by, language.

For this reason, I believe, the “nature” of culture today seems elusive: we suffer an impoverished understanding of language.  We do not know the differences between names and the things they name, nor of the different ways in which objects may be constituted independent of language or only through its role in our minds.

3. De-Reifying Culture

To put this otherwise, culture has, in a sense, become “reified”: turned into a thing, treated as though it were independent of the human minds without which it would never exist at all.  We would do well to think long and deeply on what Cicero says in his Tusculan Disputations (II.13): cultura autem anima philosophia est – “philosophy is the cultivation of the soul”.  It is worth noting that for Cicero, philosophy was what he most credited with his own education: not what he learned in the schools of rhetoric, but in the academy, as the deepest wellspring for his own eloquence, in which wisdom was thought to reside.

The word “culture”, that is, names a real phenomenon: but it is not a thing.  It is a pattern we create and in which we participate through our linguistically-mediated actions.  Bereft of linguistic competence, we can neither build nor participate in any culture worth the name.