Two a LOCK CONSTRUCTED from a CONCEALED SPIRITUAL

Two

A LOCK CONSTRUCTED FROM A CONCEALED SPIRITUAL DISTINCTION

1. The Intellectual Backdrop

Expounding his views on the nature of culture, the Viennese cultural critic and writer, Karl Kraus, once offered a ribald illustration. He remarked that he and his Viennese compatriot, the architect Adolf Loos, despite their different pursuits, were engaged in the same endeavor. Both of them, Loos practically and he “grammatically,” had done nothing more than show that there is a distinction between an urn and a chamber pot and that it is this distinction, above all others, that provides culture with elbow room. The others, those who fail to make this distinction, are divided into those who use the urn as a chamber pot and those who use the chamber pot as an urn.1 Wit and sarcasm aside, Kraus was attempting to provide insight into the essence of culture as an expressive spiritual enterprise, by contrasting a ceremonial cultural artifact with a practical utensil belonging to the amenities of civilization. The aim of the contrast is to illustrate what in philosophical discourse we are apt to classify as “a metaphysical difference” in two kinds of activities pursued by human beings, which is exemplified in this case by the use of certain manufactured utensils. It is described by Kraus as a “grammatical” distinction that is embodied in the concepts of culture and civilization. In drawing it, Kraus was expressing a philosophical desire to discriminate clear- ly between two central features of human life, manifested respectively as the spiritual and the material, the aesthetic and the functional, the ceremonial and the practical, or the ethical and the instrumental. The aim of this endeavor on his part was twofold. First, to demonstrate that an important difference emerges between practices and objects in human life that have religious, artistic, emotional or ethical value and purpose, and practices and objects, the value and purpose of which lies in their being useful and helpful in some practical or instrumental sense. Second, to castigate cultural trends and inno- vations that blur this important difference. The oblique manner in which the distinction between culture and civilization is illustrated through an insightful and humorous aphoristic example, as well as the way in which it is described as a “grammatical” rather than a “metaphysical” difference, both demonstrate Kraus’s injunction that the pro- found spiritual meaning of various aspects of human life can be expressed in art and religious ritual, but not explained through philosophy by means of a formulated metaphysical theory. Thus, a work of art—which demonstrates how an artist experiences the world and interprets it in a personally meaning- 94 WITTGENSTEIN ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT ful way—is an expression of something that cannot be meaningfully asserted and explained by means of metaphysics. It manifests the artist’s spiritual atti- tude toward life and what it encloses. Hence, the grammatical distinction between objects and practices to which Kraus refers as “culture” and those that he refers to as “civilization” is not abstract. It is not formulated through some philosophical explanation of a metaphysical difference between the spiritual features of life that embody culture and the instrumental features of life that embody civilization. Instead, it is shown by means of a striking example that provides what later, in the context of his remarks on the meaning of words, Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “a perspicuous representation” of the “grammar” of our language.2 In this way, by providing immediate philosophical insight, the illustration of the contrast is rendered into both a philosophical and an artistic achievement. It demonstrates a metaphysical difference between spiritual practices that provide for culture and instrumental practices that provide for civilization. This difference is perceived at once, without its having been ex- plicitly stated. The philosophical advantage of this aphoristic method of demonstrating the distinction between the concepts of culture and civilization is obvious. For, of course, once we try to state the distinction in an explicit way, we are forced to explain and support it. It may then become apparent that instrumental practices and objects are often conjoined to aesthetic ones, as may be seen in styles of building houses, making furniture, fashioning clothes, etc.—all this despite Kraus’s doctrinaire efforts to separate the artistic from the instrumental, due to concealed metaphysical assumptions about the spiritual essence of cultural practices. Oswald Spengler distinguished between culture and civilization in a different way.3 His distinction was drawn within a metahistorical discourse, where it played a central role in what turned out to be a very ambitious at- tempt to formulate a new historical overview (or grand theory) of human life. This view emerges by comparing different historical periods in that to which he referred as “the great cultures” that human beings have created. In Speng- ler’s view, a great culture is the spiritual orientation of an historical group of people which achieves a unitary conception of its world, oriented on a dis- tinctive conception of the physical space in which the people live and act. This orientation informs all their activities: in art, religion, philosophy, science, politics, economics, and ways of waging war. The conceptual scheme put forward by Spengler purported to provide a grand historical overview, regarding different periods of spiritual development through which such great cultures inevitably pass. He claimed that, like the seasons of the year, they divide into four consecutive periods. Of these, the first three are different subperiods of culture, the last one a period of civilization. Periods of culture, according to the view expounded by Spengler, are a spiritual stage distinguished by creative, artistic, religious, and scientific en-