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«Наука через призму времени»
Апрель, 2018 / Международный научный журнал
«Наука через призму времени» №4 (13) 2018
Автор: Щученко Элла Владимировна, Магистр
Рубрика: Культурология
Название статьи: Culture and Civilization
Дата публикации: 22.03.2018
УДК 008
КУЛЬТУРА
И ЦИВИЛИЗАЦИЯ
Щученко Элла Владимировна
студент, магистр
Белгородский Государственный Национальный
исследовательский университет, г.Белгород
Аннотация.
Существует несколько концепций понимания культуры и цивилизации. Среди наиболее
знаковых концепций стоит отметить концепции А. Тойнби, П. Сорокина, О.
Шпенглера. Цель данной статьи – рассмотрение соотношения понятий «культура» и
«цивилизация», а также подходов к определению цивилизации различными
культурологами и философами. В работе ставятся следующие задачи: рассмотрение
теории «локальных цивилизаций» А. Тойнби, изучение типологии цивилизаций П.А.
Сорокина, выделение основных позиций понимания соотношения культуры и
цивилизации О. Шпенглера.
Ключевые
слова: культура, цивилизация, культурология
CULTURE
AND CIVILIZATION
Shchuchenko Ella
Student, Belgorod, master, Belgorod State national research University
Annotation. There are several concepts of understanding culture
and civilization. Among the most significant ones concepts of A. Toynbee, P. Sorokin, O. Spengler should be
mentioned. The purpose of this article is to examine the correlation of the
concepts "culture" and "civilization", as well as approaches
to the definition of civilization by various culturologists
and philosophers. The following tasks are set in the article: review of A.
Toynbee's theory of "local civilizations", scrutiny of the typology
of civilizations of P.A. Sorokin, highlighting the
main positions of understanding the correlation of culture and civilization of
O. Spengler.
Key words: culture, civilization, cultural studies.
Throughout the history of the world, there emerged and
developed a great number of different cultures, and each one was original and
unique. Along with the cultures there are also various civilizations,
that have their own unique features and characteristics. The problem of
the correlation of civilization and culture is multi-faceted and the matter of
its comprehension and understanding is very acute at the moment.
Modern cultural studies understand civilization as a
certain stage of development. Scientists believe that primitive in primitive
cultures there were no those norms of communication, which later became known
as civilization norms.
Civilizations appeared approximately 5 thousand years
ago in some regions of the Earth and they had discrepant organizational and
communicative principles. Civilization implies a high level of culture
development, creation of values of both spiritual and material culture.
The term "civilization" comes from the Latin
root, meaning "civil." The concept of civilization appeared in the
Ancient times as a definition of the qualitative difference between the ancient
society and the barbarian environment. Later, in the era of the Enlightenment
and in the 19th century, the term civilization was also used as a
characteristic of the higher stage of socio-cultural development
("savagery-barbarism-civilization").
There are three meanings of this term:
1) civilization is based on technocratism
and is opposed to organic culture, that is characteristically to traditional
cultural philosophy, originating from German romanticism;
2) the
movement of the world from the divided to the unified;
3) pluralism of separate isolated civilizations.
In order to form a more precise concept of
civilization, it is worthwhile to study a number of certain cultural and
philosophical phenomena that N. Danilevsky calls
cultural and historical types, O. Spengler -
developed cultures, A. Toynbee - civilizations, P. Sorokin
- metacultures.
It should be mentioned, that these social and cultural
supersystems do not coincide neither with the nation,
nor with the state, nor with any social group. They go beyond geographic or
racial boundaries and are a part of the civilizational
scheme.
In the majority of scientific and reference literature
civilization is understood as a certain stage of development of society, which
is associated with a particular culture and has a number of features that
distinguish it from the pre-civilized stage of society development. So the
following signs of civilization can be picked out:
1. availability of the state - a certain administrative structure,
that coordinates various spheres of society's life;
2. availability of written language;
3. availability of a written fixed legislative system, since the
written law is a distinctive feature of a civilized society;
4. a
certain level of humanism.
Thus, a lot of nations transferred to the civilizational stage along with the expansion of religion,
based on the humanistic moral values of Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and
Judaism.
Morphological doctrine of cultures identifies two theories:
theory of the stadial development of civilizations
and theory of local civilizations. The first one is represented by the American
anthropologist F. Northrop, A. Krober and P. Sorokin, the second one - by N. Danilevsky,
O. Spengler and A. Toynbee.
Stadial theories study civilization as a single process of
progressive development of mankind, when certain stages that began in primitive
times and continue till now can be singled out. Stadial
theory highlights universal laws of development common to all mankind.
The theories of
local civilizations are aimed to studying large historically established
communities that occupy a specific territory and have specific features of
social-economic and cultural development. The leading role in the theory of
local civilizations is played by the individual.
A. Toynbee (1889-1975) is among the most prominent
representatives of the theory of local civilizations. In his monumental study
"A Study of History" (1934-1961) he puts forward the theory that
"local civilizations" should be the primary area of historical
analysis.
The growth of the civilization of Toynbee is not only
connected with the geographical expansion of society. The scientist indicates,
that "the growth of civilizations is a progressive movement...
Civilizations are developed by the impulse that draws them from a challenge
through an answer to a further challenge; from differentiation through
integration and again to differentiation. This process has no spatial
coordinates, because the progress, which is called growth, is a cumulative
translational movement, and its cumulative character is manifested both in the
internal and external aspects "[5, 213].
According to Toynbee, civilizations start to decay
when they lose their moral fibre and the cultural
elite turns parasitic, exploiting the masses and creating an internal and external
proletariat. So they meet a Challenge. A challenge that is successfully met
produces a change in society that can be called growth. For example, in Western
civilization, which Toynbee calls Western Christendom, an early challenge to
the scattered and disorganized society that existed after the collapse of the
Roman Empire was the pressure of barbarians to the north and east of Western
Europe, and the response that was created was the set of social, political, and
military institutions that we call feudalism. The feudal system remained in
place until further challenges provoked further innovations by Western
Christendom, which in turn constituted further growth.
The theory of "local civilizations" promoted
by A. Toynbee was not supported by all researchers.
The most sharply his position was criticized by P. Sorokin (1889-1968). In contrast to Toynbee, he notes
several trends in the process of modern civilizations development. The first
one is a shift in the center of creativity.
Another tendency is connected with the permanent
decline of sensational culture, which is based on the belief that there is no
reality, no values beyond the evidence of our senses. Having superseded the
spiritualistic culture (based on faith in the kingdom of God), sensationalistic
culture spread throughout Europe and dominated during the XV-XXth centuries.
According to P. Sorokin, the
beginning of the XX century is characterized as a period of destruction of
values of the sensual type of cultural development. The sensual super-system
has reached its peak point of development. The most important are material
values that are ahead of spiritual perfection. Truth is not an absolute any
more, everything is relative, and it began to be considered only from the point
of its usefulness.
The loss of absolute values influenced the position of
present-day humans. The reason for the crisis state of culture and society was
that humanity entered a transition period from one form of culture to another.
This transition began at the end of the 19th century, but a new form of culture
is only being formed.
Many culturologists and
philosophers define the concept of P. Sorokin as a
cyclic one. However, the author himself believed that his theory is the theory
of "undulating movement of cultures."
According to Sorokin, history
does not repeat itself, but repeat only central themes of cultures that exist
in the most diverse cultures, depending on various states of the psyche or
religion.
P. Sorokin defined the
historical process as an endless fluctuation of these cultures. But, unlike
other representatives of the cyclic theory, considering progress as a
characteristic of one of the phases of the "cycle" (the phase of
"flowering" of civilization), P. Sorokin
denies historical progress. He says that any old culture is equivalent to a new
culture and we cannot speak about an ascending development of history. The
historical fluctuation of cultures is like a transition of water from one state
into another: from solid to liquid and then to vapor.
Great contribution to the development of the theory of
civilization was made by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936).
In 1918 was published O. Spengler's book "The Decline of the West" (Russian edition -
"The Decline of Europe").
The dialectic of the development of each culture is in
the cultural and historic accord of the same stages of the development of any
living organism: childhood, adolescence, maturity, wilting. All cultures go
through these stages what makes the periods of development of all cultures
absolutely identical, the duration of the phases and the period of existence of
the culture itself - metered, unbreakable.
According to Spengler, “Each
Culture has its own possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay,
and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one
mathematics, but many. Each is in its deepest essence different from the
others, each limited in duration and self-contained....” [8].
Spengler opposes the idea of a single "universal"
historical process, a single line of evolution of mankind, which passes through
consistent stages of development, i.e. translational motion, which, using
social, epistemological and other criteria, historians have so far defined as
progress.
To the theory of the unity and continuity of the
process of world history as a general picture of the development of mankind, Spengler opposes the doctrine of a plurality of
civilizations ("cultures") that are complete, disunited in space and
time, equivalent in terms of the fullness of the possibilities realized in them
and the perfection of expression and language of forms achieved.
The soul is the heart of every culture, and culture is
the symbolic body, vital incarnation of this soul. The opposite of culture and
civilization is the main axis of all Spengler
studies. Culture is:
-
the
powerful creativity of the maturing soul,
-
the
birth of a myth, as the expression of a new feeling of God,
-
the
flowering of high art filled with a deep symbolic need,
-
the
immanent action of the state idea among a group of peoples united by a uniform
world-feeling and the unity of the life style.
Civilization
is the old age of culture, its gradual dying. Symptoms of this dying, according
to Spengler, are materialism and atheism, social
revolutions and the spread of scientific views.
Spengler has nothing against the conveniences and achievements
of civilization, but he warns against a civilization that supersedes true
culture: "Culture and civilization are the living body of spirituality and
its mummy."
The
transfer from culture to civilization is, according to Spengler,
the transfer from creativity to infertility, from becoming to ossification,
from "heroic deeds" to "mechanical work." Here, literature
and art are no longer needed, but only bare technicalism
is needed.
Going
into civilization, culture freezes, dies: “The Civilization is the inevitable
destiny of the Culture. Civilizations are the most external and artificial
states which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion,
the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming. They are an
end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again” [8].
Civilization,
according to Spengler, is "the inevitable fate
of culture", its logical consequence, completion and outcome. Civilization
as "become" is the inevitable end of culture as "becoming."
In conclusion, we can say that civilization is first
of all the achievements of culture. And culture is able to outlast states and
dynasties. Sometimes one civilization is attributed to different states
succeeding each other for millennia, as was in the case with the civilizations
of the Near East. Any civilization can spread by capturing more and more people
and nations. Civilization, as a definite society with a certain system of
elements of culture, can disappear, transferring its cultural achievements to
other civilizations. Sometimes two civilizations, different from the point of
view of some researchers, unite in one single civilization (for example, in the
Greco-Roman civilization). Civilizations can exist in parallel, simultaneously,
and can arise one after another. But in any case, the history of civilizations
is the history of culture. The study of civilization is the study of its
culture.
Список литературы:
- Гуревич П.С. Культурология: Учебник. – 3-е изд., перераб. и доп. – М.: УИЦ «Гардарики»; Литературно-педагогическое агенство «Кафедра-М», 1999. - 288с.
- Габидулин Р. Культурология. Мировая культура: Курс лекций. – Архангельск: Изд.-во Поморского госуниверситета, 1998. – 416 с.
- Культурология. XX век. Словарь. СПб. – Университетская книга, 1997, - 640 с. – (Культурология, XX век)
- Культурология: Учебное пособие / Составитель и отв. ред. А.А. Радугин. – М.: Центр, 1998. - 304 с.
- Тойнби А.Дж. Постижение истории. Пер. с англ. - М.: Прогресс, 1991.— 736 с
- Шпенглер О. Закат Европы. – Мн.: Харвест, М.: АСТ, 2000. – 1376 с.
- Spengler, Oswald. The decline of the West / An abr. ed. by Helmut Werner ; Engl. abr. ed. prep. by Arthur Helps ; From the transl. by Charles Francis Atkinson. - Repr. - New York : Random house, Cop. 1962.
- Stockton, Donald. The Oswald Spengler Collection: Biographical Essay; Extracts From The Decline Of The West; The Hour Of Decision // URL: http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/DeclineOfWest.pdf (дата обращения: 13.03.2018)
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