Absolute Error

What Would It Be Like to Be Cultured? (Peter Bieri)

Cultural cultivation is something that human beings do with and for themselves. One cultivates oneself. Others can educate us, but cultivation is something only each individual can do for themselves. This is not mere wordplay. Cultivation is indeed something very different from education. Education is acquired with the aim of being able to do something. If, on the other hand, we cultivate ourselves, we work on becoming something; we aspire to be a certain way in the world.

How can we describe cultural cultivation?

1) Cultivation as Orientation in the World

Cultivation begins with curiosity. If someone's curiosity is killed, then the possibility of cultivating themselves is taken away. Curiosity is the insatiable desire to know everything there is in this world. It can be directed in many different ways: upward toward the stars, downward toward atoms and quanta, outward toward the diversity of species, and inward toward the fantastic complexity of the human organism; backward toward the history of the universe, the Earth, and human society, and forward toward the question of what the future holds for our planet, our way of life, or our perception of ourselves.

The range of things that can be known or understood is enormous and grows every day. Cultivation cannot mean running breathlessly after everything. The solution lies in creating a rough map of what can be known and understood and also in learning how to find out more about specific areas. Cultivation is, therefore, a dual learning process: one learns about the world and one learns how to learn.

This generates two things, both equally important. The first is a sense of proportion. To be cultured, one does not need to know the exact number of languages spoken on Earth. But one should know that there are roughly 4,000 rather than 40; that China is the most populous country but not the largest; that there are not hundreds of chemical elements; that the speed of light is neither 10 million kilometers nor 1 kilometer per second; that the age of the universe is not millions but billions of years; that the Middle Ages did not begin with the birth of Jesus Christ, and that the modern age did not begin 100 years ago. It is also about correctly weighing the importance of certain people and their achievements. For humanity, Louis Pasteur was more important than Pelé, the invention of the printing press and the light bulb had more impact than the invention of the razor and lipstick.

The second thing generated in the process of organizing oneself toward the world is a sense of precision: an understanding of what it means to know and understand something accurately: a stone, a poem, a disease, a symphony, a legal system, a political movement, a game. No one knows more than a small section of the world with precision. But this does not require the idea of cultivation. The cultured person is one who can imagine what precision is and that it means something very different in various areas of knowledge.

1.1) Cultivation as Enlightenment

The cultured person is thus someone who knows how to orient themselves in the world. What is the value of this sense of orientation? Knowledge is power. In terms of cultivation, this cannot mean dominating others using knowledge. The power of knowledge is different: it prevents one from being a victim. Those who have knowledge about the world are harder to deceive and can defend themselves when others try to use them for their own interests, in politics or through advertising, for example. Orientation in the world is not the only orientation that matters. Being cultured also means understanding the question of what knowledge and understanding consist of and what their limits are. It is about facing the question: What do I know and what do I understand? It means taking stock of knowledge and understanding. This includes questions like: How do I verify my convictions? How reliable are they? Moreover, do they really ensure what they seem to ensure? Which arguments are good and which are deceptive sophisms? The knowledge in question here is second-order knowledge. It distinguishes the naive scientist from the cultured one and the serious reporter from the simplistic one, who never valued being critical of their sources. Second-order knowledge protects against becoming a victim of superstitions. When does one event make another probable? What is a law, and how does it compare to a fortuitous correlation? What distinguishes a genuine explanation from an apparent one? We need to know this when we want to assess a risk and when we want to form an opinion about the forecasts that bombard us. Someone who is alert to these matters will maintain a skeptical distance not only toward esoteric literature but also toward economic forecasts, political campaign arguments, psychotherapeutic promises, and bold assumptions about brain research. And they are irritated when they hear others mimicking scientific formulas. Those who have cultivated themselves in this sense know how to distinguish between mere rhetorical facades and genuine thoughts. They can do this because two questions have become second nature to them: "What exactly does that mean?" and "How do we know this is so?" Asking these questions over and over again makes one resistant to rhetorical skill, brainwashing, and sectarian affiliation and sharpens the perception of obscured habits of thinking and speaking, of fashionable trends, and of any form of association for convenience. It is no longer possible to be deceived or overlooked; charlatans, gurus, and arrogant reporters no longer have a chance. It is a highly valuable asset, and its name is incorruptibility of thought.

1.2) Cultivation as Historical Consciousness

The enlightened consciousness of the cultured person is not only critical consciousness, it is also characterized by historical curiosity: How did we come to think, feel, speak, or live as we do? At the heart of this curiosity lies the thought: it is possible that everything could have happened differently, for in our culture there is no metaphysical inevitability. Enlightened consciousness is thus a consciousness of historical contingency. It is expressed in the ability to observe one's own culture from a certain distance and to adopt an ironic and playful attitude. This does not mean not declaring oneself in favor of one's own lifestyle. It only means distancing oneself from the naive and arrogant idea that one's own way of living is the most appropriate way for humans to be, more than any other. Such arrogance, which is part of the essence of any imperialism and any preaching or mission, is an unmistakable sign of a lack of culture.

Historical consciousness leads to the need to reacquire the culture in which one happened to grow up. This has much to do with reflection on one's own language. Illuminating the history of ourselves as participants in a certain culture means above all clarifying the history of our words, for we are speaking animals, and nothing contributes more to our cultural identity than the words with which we shape our relationship with nature, with other people, and with ourselves. The ways of life of human beings are shaped by the words in which worldviews are expressed. How we see the world is shown in the central categories around which a language is grouped. How did these categories arise? How have they changed? Categories such as mind, soul, consciousness, and reason quickly come to mind—those words that serve to mark the particularity of the human being, their particular dignity. In this, historical change has been dramatic and has left an insecurity in thought, the recognition of which is part of cultivation.

Similarly, the same applies to ideas of good and evil, guilt and penance, respect and dignity, freedom and justice. The histories of words show how differentiable, diffuse, and fragmentary what lies beneath the surface is. Words like cruelty and sorrow, happiness, and serenity are examples of how cultural self-portraits crystallize in a few words. In the language of feelings, how the participants of a culture see themselves is expressed. Often, ways of life and their valuations are expressed in determining metaphors, and one has not arrived at a culture until one masters the language of tenderness, swear words, and obscenities until one knows the taboos of language.

Understanding a culture means knowing its conceptions of moral integrity thoroughly. We grow up with certain moral commandments and prohibitions; we breathe them in the air of our parents' house, in the street, in the movies, and in the books that move and shape us—they shape our moral identity and determine our moral feelings such as indignation, resentment, and remorse. At first (and this is due to the seriousness of morality) we take these things as absolute; we do not learn them as an option among several. The process of cultivation then consists in becoming aware that people think and feel differently about good and evil in other parts of the world, in other societies and ways of life; that our moral identity is also contingent, a historical accident; that, for example, the conception of sin and humility cannot be found as such outside monotheistic religions; that revenge and retaliation are not abominable everywhere; that one can think very differently about suffering, death, and happiness; and that in other places one deals with physical and moral evils without having to resort to the thought that one has the last word and that there will one day be a final reckoning.

For the believer, cultural cultivation can mean a shock. To learn that there are billions of people who evidently do not have the right faith: that must be a shock. And of similar difficulty is accepting the obvious: that what I believe, that the liturgy I profess, is the fruit of a geographical and social accident—and, likewise, how my morality looks. Because it is part of religious faith that it cannot depend on historical contingency. This would threaten to devalue faith; religion would be a toy of cultural contingency. This is why cultivation is subversive in terms of worldview. It makes one aware of the relativity of any form of life. Totalitarian ideologies, even the church, systematically attempt to stifle this aspect of cultivation, hence the prohibitions on books and travel. In Islam, apostasy is punished with death. Cultivation dissolves totalitarian metaphysics and understands religion as an expression of a form and a way in which people want to give meaning to their lives. Religion, therefore, has nothing to do with metaphysical truth but with the shaping of one's own identity, with the question of how we want to live. The knowledge of alternatives only apparently takes away its value; the value can be experienced even more since it is no longer a matter of a destiny over which one has no control, but of a free choice. One could say: only those who know and recognize the contingency of their cultural and moral identity have truly become adults. One will not have fully assumed responsibility for one's own life as long as one allows external instances to dictate what one should think about love and death, morality and happiness.

The consciousness of historical contingency encompasses many other things: first, knowledge about different political and judicial systems, but also things like conceptions of intimacy, what is a matter of shame, the relationship with the body, forms of courtesy and dignity, how to celebrate and how to dress, the relationship with drugs, forms of joy and tenderness, when to cry or smile, forms of humor, expressions of mourning, burial rituals, what is offensive, how one eats, what is despised, how men and women approach each other, and forms of flirtation. Here too, being cultured means understanding diversity, having respect for the strange, and knowing how to retract from an initial arrogance.

If I am cultured in this sense, I have a certain kind of curiosity: wanting to know what it would have been like to develop with another language, in another region and at another time, also in another climate. What it would have been like to be familiar with another profession, with another social class. I have the need to travel awake, to extend my internal limits. Cultivation makes one addicted to documentary films.

2) Cultivation as the understanding of the human life

So far, I have defined cultivation as orientation in the world, as enlightenment, and as historical consciousness. Now I add my favorite definition: the cultured person is the one who has the broadest and deepest possible understanding of the different ways of living a human life.

2.1) Cultivation as the Ability to Articulate

The cultured person is a reader. But it is not enough to be someone who knows a lot and is a bookworm. There is (however paradoxical it may sound) an uncultured scholar. The difference is the cultured person knows how to read books in order to change.

Does humanism not protect against anything? asked Alfred Andersch, thinking of Heinrich Himmler, who came from a bourgeois family cultured in humanism. The answer is that it only protects those who do not merely consume humanist writings but internalize them; those who, after reading, become different from what they were before. It is an unmistakable sign of cultural cultivation: when knowledge is considered not as a mere collection of information, not only as entertaining diversion or as social adornment, but as something that can mean internal change and expansion, that can translate into actions. This is not only valid when it comes to matters of a moral nature; the cultured person is also transformed by poetry. This is what distinguishes them from the "cultured" bourgeois. The textbook reader has a chorus of voices in their head when seeking the correct judgment on a certain matter. They are no longer alone. And something happens to them when they read Voltaire, Freud, Bultmann, or Darwin. Afterward, they see the world differently, can speak about it in a different and more nuanced way, and recognize more interconnections.

The reader of literature learns something else: how one can speak about the thinking, wanting, and feeling of humans. They learn the language of the soul. They learn that it is possible to feel about the same matter in a different way than they are accustomed to. A different love, a different hatred. They learn new words and new metaphors for psychological events. As their vocabulary and conceptual repertoire expand, they can speak more nuancedly about their experiences, and this in turn allows them to feel in a more differentiated way. Now we have a new definition of cultivation: the cultured person is the one who knows how to speak about the world and about themselves in a better and more interesting way than those who only repeat fragments of words and thoughts they once encountered. Their ability to articulate better allows them to deepen and develop their self-understanding, knowing that this never ends, because there is no arrival at an essence of oneself.

2.2) Cultivation as Self-Perception

People are characterized by the fact that they become a problem in terms of their opinions, desires, and emotions, and that they can occupy themselves with them. Cultivation is something that connects with this ability. Even if someone has a very good education and a very large orientation, if they do not know how to confront themselves in this way and do not know how to work on themselves, then they do not have cultivation in a full and prosperous sense of the expression.

It can be about cultivation as self-perception: instead of just believing, desiring, and feeling certain things, I can ask myself where they come from, what origin they have, and on what reasons they are based. In the case of thought and opinion, this generates second-order knowledge, which has already been discussed. But now I also reflect more on my will and my emotions: how did I come to them? What awakened them, and how well-founded are they? It is about understanding oneself in thought, feeling, and desires, instead of simply letting them happen. It is about the interpretation of my past and the transparency of my sketches for the future; in short, it is about the creation and modification of self-portraits. And the cultured person, even beyond this, reflects so much that they ask: how do I know that my self-portrait is not a chimera? Do we have privileged access to ourselves? Are self-portraits discovered or invented?

The cultured person—and this will be my next definition—is someone who knows about themselves and knows the difficulty of this knowledge. They are someone whose self-portrait can, with attentive vigilance, be left in suspense. Someone who knows about the fragile diversity within themselves and who does not naively assume any social identity.

2.3) Cultivation as Self-Determination

In the process of cultivation, it is not only about expanding one's self-understanding. It is also about valuing one's own thinking, feelings, and will, identifying with one part, and distancing oneself from the rest. This is the creation of a psychological identity. In this way, we carve a psychological sculpture of ourselves.

I can be dissatisfied with my will, my thoughts, and my feelings for different reasons: because they lack perspective and internal consistency, because I often stumble outside, and because I feel strange this way. Then I need, in the broadest sense of the word, an Ă©ducation sentimentale, that type of cultivation that was once called the formation of the heart: based on a growing understanding of the logic and dynamics of my psychological life, I learn that thoughts, desires, and feelings are not an ineluctable destiny but something that can be shaped and changed. I experience what it means to become self-determining not only in what I do but also in what I want and in what I live. This self-determination cannot consist in locking myself in an internal fortress to escape any influence from others that might contain the poison of external determination. What I learn is something else: to distinguish between an influence that alienates me from myself and one that makes me freer because it brings me closer to myself. Any form of psychotherapy that goes beyond mere conditioning and deconditioning contributes to this type of internal cultivation.

Self-determination in this sense does not occur from an internal vantage point from which the direction of psychological events is conducted. "I" is nothing other than the same set of psychological events. That I determine myself can only mean that there is an endless process of weaving, unweaving, and reweaving the web of psychological episodes, states, and dispositions of what I am, a planning, discarding, and reconstructing of my self-portrait, in which I measure what happens inside me. The cultured person is someone who decides for themselves about their psychological form because they admit a continuous process of self-evaluation and endure the uncertainty linked to it. That is why they become a subject in the emphatic sense.

2.4) Formation as Moral Sensitivity

Sentimental education, that is, the formation of the heart, can also signify something else: the development of moral sensitivity. From the understanding of the contingency of one's own cultural identity emerges a sensitivity, not the formal tolerance of the unfamiliar, but a genuine and fundamental respect for other ways of life. This is not always easy. It is particularly challenging when the unfamiliar clashes with one's own moral expectations.

What do we do with cruelty that enrages us but is an accepted part of life elsewhere? Formation is the difficult art of balancing the recognition of the unfamiliar with the insistence on one's own moral vision. It is about enduring this tension: formation demands fearlessness.

We have already seen: the better one masters the language of experiences, the more nuanced one's perception and feelings become. This, in turn, enriches relationships with others. This applies especially to what we call the capacity for empathy. It is an indicator of cultural formation: the more cultured one is, the more adept one becomes at understanding the situations of others. Formation enables precise social imagination. It is this imagination that reveals hidden forms of oppression and illuminates the cruelties one has committed without realizing it. In this sense, formation is truly a bulwark against cruelty. To do what Himmler did, one must suffer from an unimaginable lack of imagination.

2.5) Formation as Poetic Experience

Education is always oriented toward utility: one acquires know-how to achieve something. The formation we are discussing, however, is valuable in itself, like love. It would be wrong to say it is a means to happiness because happiness cannot be pursued in a planned manner. And of course, it is also not true that there is no happiness without formation. But there are experiences of happiness that are intimately connected to the facets of formation we have discussed: the joy of understanding something better in the world; the liberating experience of shedding a superstition; the happiness of reading a book that opens a historical corridor; the fascination with a film that shows how different life can be elsewhere; the exhilarating experience of learning a new language for one's own life; the joyful surprise of suddenly understanding oneself better; the liberation of leaving behind old patterns of experience and, in exchange, experiencing greater self-determination; the surprising realization that one's inner radius expands as moral sensitivity grows.

Moreover, formation opens the door to a new dimension of happiness: the intensified experience of the present when reading poetry, observing paintings, or listening to music. The luminous intensity of words, images, and melodies fully reveals itself only to those who understand their place in the multi-layered fabric of human activity we call culture. No one who has experienced the intensity of these moments would confuse cultural formation with education and mutter that cultural formation is about making us fit for the future.

2.6) Passionate Formation

The devotee is recognized by their vehement reactions to anything that hinders formation. These reactions are vehement because everything is at stake: orientation, enlightenment, and self-understanding; imagination, self-determination, and moral sensitivity; art and happiness. In the face of obstacles erected deliberately or through cynical negligence, there can be neither tolerance nor indifference. Sensationalist newspapers, which out of sheer greed destroy everything I have spoken of, can only provoke the deepest disgust. Generally, it is the devotee who feels disgust toward certain things: the deceit of advertising and election campaigns; empty talk, clichés, and all forms of insincerity; euphemisms and the cynical military information policy; all forms of pretentiousness and opportunistic partisanship, as still found in bourgeois newspapers that believe themselves to be places of formation. The devotee sees every detail as an example of a greater evil, and their vehemence grows with every attempt to minimize it. Because, as we have said, everything is at stake.