"Culture" and "civilization" are comprehensively distinguished

Culture and civilization are two important categories in the field of humanities and social sciences, and they are also a pair of terms with similarities and differences, and complex relationships. There have always been different views on the connotation and extension of the two and the relationship between them, or different perspectives, or positions first, and have not formed a relatively consistent and clear understanding. The author tries to discern from a comprehensive perspective.

Definition: Broad and narrow

From a etymological point of view, the original meaning of "culture" is cultivation and farming, and compared with nature, everything that has been processed and created by human beings belongs to culture. Thus, one of the broadest definitions of culture is "culture as humanization", that is, to all human activities and their results. In his book Primitive Culture, the British cultural anthropologist Taylor argues that "culture or civilization, in its broad ethnological sense, is a complex whole that includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, laws, customs, and the abilities and habits acquired by any person as a member of society." He saw culture and civilization as synonymous, referring to it as the overall product of human activity.

Culture in a broad sense can be divided into material, system, customs, spiritual and other levels: material culture, refers to the fruits of manual labor creation; institutional culture, including laws and regulations at the macro level, administrative system and micro level rules, norms, and stipulations; custom culture, refers to customs and traditions and customs that have been passed down through the generations; spiritual culture refers to the results of human spiritual activities with literature and art, history, philosophy, ethics, religion, aesthetics, etc. as the main connotations. Culture in the narrow sense mainly refers to human spiritual activity and its results, which is the fourth level in the above broad understanding. Marxism believes that "a certain culture is the reflection of the political and economic form of a certain society" and regards culture as a certain conceptual form, that is, it belongs to the narrow understanding.

The word civilization is derived from the Old Latin words civis and civics, which originally mean city dwellers, and by extension roman citizenship, which implied a superior living condition over the living conditions of foreigners, especially barbarians, at that time, so that "civilization" was relative to "savage" or "primitive". But the evolution and use of "civilization" in later generations is far more complex. Fukuzawa Yukichi, a modern Japanese enlightenment thinker, pointed out: "The meaning of civilization can be explained in both a broad sense and a narrow sense. In a narrow sense, it is simply to increase the material needs of human beings or to increase the appearance of food, clothing and shelter with manpower. If it is interpreted in a broad sense, it is not only to pursue the enjoyment of food, clothing, and housing, but also to inspire morality and raise human beings to a noble realm. That is, civilization in the narrow sense is limited to the development of the material sphere, and civilization in the broad sense includes the development of the material sphere and the progress in the spiritual realm. In his understanding, man is a higher life in pursuit of meaning, and naturally should not be satisfied with temporary food and clothing; civilization is dynamic, and awakening, independence and enlightenment are the only ways for a nation to attain the state of civilization. In the Chinese Chinese context, the word "civilization" is also understood in a broad sense, such as the "Encyclopedia of China" (Philosophical Volume) interprets civilization as the sum of the material and spiritual achievements of human transformation of the world, and the "History of Chinese Civilization" edited by Yuan Xingpei and others also decomposes civilization into three aspects: material civilization, political civilization and spiritual civilization in its general introduction.

Relationship: Diachronic and synchronic

From the perspective of diachronics, "civilization" is the product of cultural development to a certain stage, and there is a distinction between the two. In a broad sense, culture is humanization, and since there are people, there has been conscious or unconscious cultural creation, but not since there are people, there has been civilization. In this sense, civilization is a concept that is opposed to the obscure and barbaric cultural state and characterizes the state of human history and evolution. This can also be deduced from the Western etymology of both: culture's root cult, whose original meaning is farming, derived from the early human mode of agricultural production, civilization's root civic, its original meaning is urban, civic, derived from the emergence of urban life in later human beings.

The discussion of the symbols of civilization mainly focuses on the following aspects: politically, there are large settlements of urban types, there are magnificent public buildings, there are obvious class differentiation among residents, and the formation of the state; economically, there is a developed social division of labor and commodity exchange, there is a relatively fixed tax system or a regular tribute system; ideologically, there is a relatively unified religious belief of the whole nation, including worship objects and sacrifice ceremonies; cultural education, there is the use of writing and the development of science and technology, and there is a certain form of school. Only in a society that has the above signs and characteristics in culture can it be considered to have entered a civilized society. That is to say, the formation of civilized society requires the accumulation and breakthrough of culture, special conditions and opportunities; civilization is the result of human transformation of nature, society and itself to a certain extent, and is an advanced stage of cultural development.

From the perspective of synchronicity, there are two main types of understanding of the relationship between the two. The first class treats the two as synonyms, which are common and intersecting, and can be broadly understood as human activities and their results, either indiscriminately or biased. The former is like Taylor's understanding in Primitive Culture, and the latter is like Qian Mu's view, "The general civilized culture refers to the life of human groups." Civilization is external, material. Culture is partial, it is spiritual". The second category sees civilization as an aggregate that embodies cultural identity and classifies culture. The American scholar Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Rebuilding of the World Order, argues that "a civilization is the broadest cultural entity ... Civilization is the highest cultural category of man, the widest scope of his cultural identity." This view is more representative in the international academic community, such as Spengler's "The Decline of the West", Toynbee's "Historical Studies", McNeil's "The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community" and so on. Huntington also used religion as the main symbol of different civilizations, dividing the post-Cold War world into eight major civilizations: Christian civilization, Confucian civilization, Islamic civilization, Japanese civilization, Indian civilization, Orthodox civilization, Latin American civilization and African civilization. This is very similar to the establishment of the world's four major cultural circles: the European and American cultural circles with Christian culture as the main body, the East Asian cultural circle with Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism culture as the main body, the South Asian cultural circle with Hindu and Buddhist culture as the main body, and the West Asian and North African cultural circles with Islamic culture as the main body. Comparatively speaking, in terms of title, the "cultural circle" is replaced by "civilization", and the number is expanded from 4 to multiple, and what remains unchanged is that religion is used as the criterion for division.

Application: subjective and objective

Culture and civilization are objective academic terms that do not reflect specific value judgments in themselves. However, in the process of practical application, it is often artificially subjective, and the more representative ones are the "cultural centrism" and the "theory of the superiority of civilization".

Cultural centrism is centered on the "self" culture, and believes that the beliefs, values, lifestyles, and behavioral norms of the self culture are superior to the "other" culture. It may be generated and used either between different cultural groups, different cultural categories, and different cultural regions within the same civilization, or between different civilizations. The former is like huaxia centrism in ancient China, and the latter is like Western-centrism in modern times. The theoretical point of the latter is that the Western culture after the Enlightenment, the bourgeois revolution and the industrial revolution is more advanced and developed than the East in terms of politics, economy, science and technology, and represents historical progress and inevitability.

In response to various cultural centrisms, in the second half of the 20th century, a debate between cultural universalism and cultural relativism arose worldwide. Cultural universalism believes that human truth and value have universality and absoluteness, and human culture has similar purpose pursuits, unified value standards and common development laws, and will inevitably achieve unity under the guidance of advanced and advanced cultures. Cultural relativism is the result of a reflection on the deconstruction of cultural universalism and the phenomenon of multiculturalism, emphasizing that each culture has heterogeneity and independence that others cannot share. Therefore, cultures are relative and cannot be compared according to a unified model. The author believes that culture has both universality and relativity, universality is the commonality of human culture, and relativity is the personality of various cultures. Only by acknowledging the commonality of culture and respecting the individuality of culture can we break away from the shackles of cultural centrism.

The theory of the superiority of civilization is the subjective argument that advocates the superiority of one's own civilization over other civilizations in history or reality. Historically, the most representative is the "white superiority theory" based on racial differences. Morgan pointed out in The Ancient Society: "Of the various branches of mankind, the Aryans and semites were the first to be freed from the state of emancipation... These two communities are essentially the founders of civilization. Since the Aryans and Semitics were caucasians, some Westerners concluded that caucasians created civilization earlier, and thus formed the theory of white superiority. In fact, the four great civilizations of the Ancient East are multi-racial, and yellow, black and white people are all involved in the creation of civilizations. In reality, the most representative is the "stagnation theory of Eastern civilization", which is another form of "theory of the superiority of Western civilization", the main point of which is that the Eastern civilization that has tended to be modeled and stereotyped in the fields of philosophy, literature and art, education and other fields in modern times has fallen into a state of stagnation, and it needs to be stimulated and saved by Western civilization that has constantly achieved fractured rebirth and sharp development. This argument became an excuse for the colonizers to carry out aggressive expansion, such as Fukuzawa Yukichi, who once advocated the war of aggression against China as a "war of civilizations."

In this regard, Marx once put forward the scientific thesis of the dual mission of colonialism in two articles in 1853, "Britain has to complete the dual mission of India: one is the mission of destruction, that is, the elimination of the old Asian society; the other is the mission of reconstruction, that is, to lay the material foundation for Western-style society in Asia." In other words, the colonialists, while doing all the bad things, "acted as an unconscious instrument of history." This is the dialectic of history, not the triumph of the so-called superior civilization.

In short, culture and civilization need to distinguish between broad and narrow meanings according to specific contexts. The relationship between the two can be discerned from the perspective of synchronicity and diachronic time. The theory of cultural centrism and the theory of the superiority of civilization are the results of the subjective application of these two concepts, and should be clearly understood.

(This article is a phased result of the major project of the National Social Science Foundation "History of Oriental Culture" (11 &ZD082))

(Author Affilications:School of History, Nanjing University,College of Liberal Arts, Qingdao University)

Editor: Liu Xing