Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Culturalism
Axis: Nature and culture — Are human behaviors explained primarily by nature or by culture?
What we take for human nature varies profoundly from one society to another: rules, roles, and ways of feeling are cultural constructions. The human is the being with no fixed nature, but with plural cultures.
Movements 4
Marxismexplicit
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness": there is no fixed human nature given outside history. Human character, values, and needs are shaped by social conditions and the mode of production, which anchors Marxism on the side of culturalism.
Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, preface (1859) · Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846)
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Existentialisminferable
The direct corollary of the thesis of existence without prior essence is the refusal of a fixed human nature determining in advance what we are: man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. What defines us belongs to self-construction and to the historical situation, not to an invariant biological given.
Existentialism Is a Humanism · Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Empiricisminferable
If the mind is at birth a , then character, ideas, and mores are formed by experience, education, and habit. Locke draws from this an entire pedagogy in which people become what education makes them, tilting the school toward cultural shaping rather than a fixed innate nature.
Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1 · Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, 1
Romanticisminferable
What makes a human being is not a universal, fixed nature but their language, their traditions, the spirit of the people that formed them: shows that to think, feel and judge are first of all inherited ways. Humanity exists only in the plural of its cultures, and one understands a person only by going back to the genius of their time and place.
Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language · Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity
Philosophers 8
Sartreexplicit
Sartre denies any human nature: lacking a God to conceive it, there is no common essence fixing in advance what humans are. He does distinguish a human condition, the set of a priori limits of existence (being in the world, laboring there, dying there among others), which is not a given nature but the common frame within which each person makes himself. The position is therefore strongly culturalist, man being what he makes himself, not what he is by nature.
Existentialism Is a Humanism (there is no human nature, but a human condition)
Beauvoirexplicit
Every consciousness, by a movement no sex grounds, sets up before itself an Other it devalues in order to assert itself as the essential one: racism, antisemitism and the oppression of women share this structure. What is peculiar to the feminine condition, and the riddle Beauvoir means to solve, is that women have consented to this role of absolute Other without turning it back, lacking a shared past, solidarity and common labour. The so-called feminine traits are therefore not a nature but the product of this instituted situation, hence a that grants the bodily given without ever letting it settle one's destiny.
The Second Sex (1949), Introduction (woman as "<c>the Other</c>") · The Second Sex, vol. II, "Formative Years"
Marxexplicit
To seek the essence of man in the individual taken apart, as a property he would carry within him, is already to commit 's error: one ascribes to nature what is the effect of a history. Marx therefore shifts the seat of the human outside the individual, into the web of social relations in which he is caught; man distinguishes himself from the animal as soon as he produces his means of subsistence, and changes with the conditions he produces. The consequence is polemical: there is no eternal human nature to invoke against social change, hence a strongly stance, without denying the natural dimension of the producing being.
Theses on Feuerbach, VI · The German Ideology, I (men distinguish themselves as soon as they produce their means of subsistence)
Lockeexplicit
A direct consequence of the : what a man becomes owes far more to education, habit and environment than to any nature given in advance. Locke reckons that nearly all the differences among men come from the upbringing they receive, making him a strong proponent of .
Some Thoughts Concerning Education, §1 ("nine parts of ten are what they are by their education")
Confuciusexplicit
By nature men are close to one another; by practice they grow apart: shared nature is not enough, it is study, habit and the li 禮 (rites) that make the moral difference between men. Confucius stakes everything on formation and culture (wen) more than on an innate endowment, hence a culturalist leaning.
Analects, XVII, 2 (by nature close, by practice far apart) · Analects, XVI, 9 (the grades of knowing: innate, gained by study, gained through difficulty)
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Millinferable
For the empiricist Mill, the mind is largely shaped by experience, education and the association of ideas rather than by a fixed nature. In The Subjection of Women he argues that the alleged feminine nature is in fact a product of custom and education: a that makes character a modifiable social construction.
The Subjection of Women, ch. 1 (women's character as a product of upbringing) · A System of Logic, book VI, ch. 4-5 (ethology, the science of the formation of character)
Husserlinferable
Husserl steadily opposes the that would treat consciousness as one psychic fact among the facts of nature, answerable to causal laws alone. The he combats is precisely this naturalising of mind. Consciousness has a mode of being of its own, that of meaning and intending, irreducible to the thing: it calls for an eidetic description, not a naturalistic explanation. Without denying that the human being is also a being of nature, he refuses to let spiritual life be absorbed into it.
Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911)
Michel de Montaigneinferable
Montaigne holds two threads without cutting either. On one side there is indeed a nature, common to all human beings and even shared with the beasts, to which one should "let oneself go" as to a good guide. On the other, what passes for natural is most often the effect of habit: , that "second nature" and "violent and treacherous schoolmistress", shapes our judgments until it passes itself off as nature itself. Hence a central position, leaning slightly toward the weight of the cultural in what we believe innate.
Essays, I, 23, "Of Custom" and III, 13