Poseidonius spoke of man’s “second nature” in expressing his view that by nature people are indispensably dependent on culture. Johann Herder followed suit but adding his view that the development of language and culture is necessitated by human deficiencies and incompleteness.
Helmuth Plessner explained the development of culture as arising from what he termed “homelessness” and “excentricity”, that is, a fundamental human need to distance ourselves from ourselves in order to plan and ‘lead’ our lives and not just ‘be in the moment.’
Arnold Gehlen believed our “primary” hidden real nature is hidden by our second nature that requires us not merely to live in an environment as animals do, but to create a cultural world, namely representations or versions of the world, to the extent we are able to control and creatively alter such a cultural world. This creation of artificial world-structures, that is, institutions, enables us to construct and mediate norms and values.
Hans Lenk, in summarising the above positions, speaks of our second nature necessarily existing in a symbolic universe since the cultural world is a world shaped by symbols. This follows from the fact that all cultural means of representation are symbolic.
One basic problem with all of the above positions is the view that somehow culture belongs to a “second” nature. This is an error and fails to come to terms with the fact that humans are essentially and inescapably cultural beings. There is no “first” nature. Historically, those who have discriminated between a “first” and “second” nature have conceived of the first as a primitive, wild state and the second as a cultivated state. So Burke thought of culture as a veil that covered something ugly and nasty beneath. He saw criticisms of traditions and customs as highly dangerous because he believed that if the cultural veil was ripped away it would result in people being driven along by their brutish and antisocial passions.
The reality is that people are created in God’s image. We are not animals. Culture is not a secondary development but to integral to the nature God created us with. No sooner had God placed the man in the garden then he had him using symbols to name the other creatures. God created people to be learners, with the privilege and responsibility to transmit their knowledge to their children and children’s children.
There is a veil covering people but it is not the veil of culture, but the veil of blindness to the glory of God as revealed in Christ. Burke’s view was very mistaken. Culture does not protect us from being evil, rather culture itself is an expression of human nature and therefore reflects both the nobility of people as image-bearers and their evil as fallen people.
Posted February 25, 2009
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