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The Meaning of Culture by John Cowper Powys

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The Meaning of Culture by John Cowper Powys I THE MEANING OF CULTURE by JOHN COWPER POWYS FIRST PUBLISHED 1930 SECOND IMPRESSION 1930 THIRD IMPRESSION 1932 FIRST ISSUED IN THE TRAVELLERS' LIBRARY 1936 ISBN 978-1-4067-9453-3 CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 9 PREFACE II PART I: ANALYSIS OF CULTURE CHAPTER I. CULTURE AND PHILOSOPHY 15 II. CULTURE AND LITERATURE 34 III. CULTURE AND POETRY 58 IV. CULTURE AND PAINTING 74 V. CULTURE AND RELIGION 94 PART II: APPLICATION OF CULTURE VI. CULTURE AND HAPPINESS 127 VII. OBSTACLES TO CULTURE 145 VIII. CULTURE AND LOVE 158 IX. CULTURE AND NATURE 174 X. CULTURE AND THE ART OF READING 21 7 XI. CULTURE AND HUMAN RELATIONS 260 XII. CULTURE AND DESTINY 29 1 AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO WARWICK G. POWYS INTRODUCTION It will quickly become clear to readers of this volume that it was written by an Englishman domiciled in the United States. This qualifying and conditioning fact does not, however, affect to any appreciable degree the general trend of the discussion. The nature of this evasive thing that has come to be known as 'culture' must, the writer feels, be pretty much the same from China to Peru; and while certain social, psychological, and economic conditions render its attainment more difficult in many particulars in a young civilization, it can hardly be denied that other conditions, no less powerful, handicap its harmonious growth in the countries of the old world. The aim of this book is to narrow down a vague and somewhat evasive conception, which hitherto, like 'aristocracy' or 'liberty,' has come to imply a number of contra­ dictory and even paradoxical elements, and to give it, not, of course, a purely logical form, but a concrete, particular, recognizable form, malleable and yielding enough and relative enough, but with a definite and quite unambiguous temper, tone, quality, atmosphere, of its own. The book may be regarded as a calculated and guarded offset to many disintegrating tendencies of our day, tendencies which seem naturally to follow from that commercially orientated life of which the 9 THE MEANING OF CULTURE psychic temper of the United States is, so to speak, the advancing wedge. Discerning readers will discover in it an attempt to integrate the traditional 'quietism' of a long line of mystics with a certain stoical hardening, a certain aesthetic and moral ascesis, in the presence of so much modern confusion and distraction. It seemed to the writer that the fine word 'culture,' in spite of its having acquired so many priggish and even ludicrous associations, might lend itself to an easy, humane and liberal discussion - a sort of 'one­ man' Platonic symposium - and even turn out to contain, among its various implications, no unworthy clue to the narrow path of the wise life upon earth. To a man stricken with a mortal disease the mere pleasure 'which there is in life itself' becomes some­ times indescribably heightened. In the same way to an exile from the sensuous and imaginative contacts of his own country there may occur a natural intensi­ fication of these advantages, which, if he could express it in words, might at least be a warning to his luckier fellows not to take so much of their good fortune for granted I In this age of the collapse into wind-blown confusion of so many religious and moral unifications any tentative essay in mental reconstruction, if it be passably clear-cut and yet flexible, deserves the con­ sideration of the judicious. Such consideration, taken with as large a pinch of Attic salt as the individual may think proper, is all that the writer asks. J.e.p. 10 PREFACE It is perhaps unwise to attempt any single dogmatic definition of culture; but by approaching the subject first from one angle and then from another it seems as though in a gradual process of elimination and selection a general attitude of mind to this complicated subject may emerge, which being at once more fluid and more comprehensive than any rigid statement, may bring the problem into regions of concrete experience such as would be impossible of attainment even by the most carefully worded theory. One rather felicitous definition runs as follows­ 'Culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn' - and in this sally you get at least a useful warning against associat­ ing culture too closely with the academic paraphernalia of education. IT PART I ANALYSIS OF CULTURE C H t\ PTE r, I CULTURE A1\O PHILOSOPHY THE long personal pilgrimage of culture begins with the formulation of one's own philosophy and ends, if I am not mistaken, with an attempt to express this philosophy in such a form and to such a purpose that it may definitely influence, even if only to an infinit­ esimal degree, the life of the nation to \vhich we belong. Between these two extremes we have to examine, as warily as we may, what culture actually is; and then, again, what it will cost us, in concentration and organized effort, to practise it amid the pell-mell of life. In considering those obscure motions of the mind, wherein our individual consciousness, ceasing to be content with blind responses to its environment, begins to look before and after, it is important to remember that behind all the great controversial names, such as 'will,' 'behaviour,' 'soul,' 'first cause,' 'the one, the many,' 'universe,' 'multiverse,' 'good and evil,' 'substance,' 'essence,' 'immortality,' there lies some actual feeling or sensation or experience; which, under a quite different name, or perhaps under no name at all, must still exist, when the logical fashion 15 THE MEANI~G OF CULTURE of the hour, refusing to use such traditional expressions, has moved on and away. In attempting to deal with the living emotions, with those nameless subjective feelings which underlie such historic words, it seems wiser to direct the introspective mind towards each particular feeling rather by means of the older symbols than by means of the newer ones, just because these traditional names - 'will,' 'souls,' ,.Ul1lverse, ,e na t ure, " ego, , an d so lOrtC h - h ave by Iong use on the highroads of human intercourse acquired such a rich, thick, emotional connotation that, however mythological they may be, they are more suggestive of what lies behind all words than the newer, more logical terms, coined by clever modern thinkers, so puzzlingly obscure except to the initiated, and of necessity so abstract and thin. The art of self-culture begins with a deeper aware­ ness, borne in upon us either by some sharp emotional shock or little by little like an insidious rarefied air, of the marvel of our being alive at all; alive in a world as startling and mysterious, as lovely and horri ble, as the one we live in. Self-culture without some kind of integrated habitual manner of thinking is apt to fail us just when it is wanted most. To be a cultured person is to be a person with some kind of original philosophy. And thus the difficult problem arises­ how is this philosophy to be developed? It is clear that there must be a will to philosophize at the very start. This implies a desire to focus such imaginative reason as we possess upon the mystery of 16 CULTURE AND PHILOSOPHY life. The subtle and imperceptible stages, however, by which this will to think condenses and hardens into a will to live according to one's thought are not always easy to articulate. Our innermost self, as we grow more and more conscious of it, surprises us again and again by new explosions of feeling drawn from emotional, nervous, and even chemical reactions; but for all its surreptitious dependence on these impulses, its inner report upon its own nature is that it is a clear, hard, enclosed, secretive nucleus with a detached and independent existence of its own. Our reliance upon this intro­ spective report may easily be shaken by logical argument; but it is not often that any argument, however plausible, disposes of the feelingof this interior identity, of the feeling of this integral' I am I,' under­ lying the stream of our impressions. The truth is that every man and every woman has, consciously or unconsciously, some sort of patched-up, thrown­ together philosophy of life, a concretion of accumulated reactions gathered round this nucleus of personality. What, however, denotes the cultured person is the conscious banking up of this philosophy of his own, its protection from disintegrating elements, the guiding of its channel-bed through jungles of brutality and stupidity. The more culture a man has, the more austerely­ though naturally with many ironic reserves - does he abide by his own taste. It is ever the mark of the parvenu in education to chafe and fret till his opinions 17 THE MEANING OF CULTURE correspond to the last word of modish sophistication. Culture, however, like aristocracy, goes its own way and does not bother about justifying itself. Why should it justify itself? Thus, in real culture, scope is allowed for the most extreme idiosyncrasies of philo­ sophical opinion. Half-educated people permit their personal vision to be interfered with, to be smoothed out and flattened out, by a slavish respect for modern science or by a conventional respect for traditional religion. The cultured person takes both these dog­ matic authorities with a considerable pinch of salt. Science is not everything - nor is religion I The last word is with a certain free poetic humanism that uses both science and religion for its own purposes and is not dominated by either.
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