GEERTZ ON ENLIGHTENMENT vs
MODERN CONCEPTION OF HUMANITY
This is a short excerpt from Clifford
Geertz's 1966 paper "The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept
of Man", which was reprinted in his influential collection The
Interpretation of Cultures. It neatly sets a mid-20th
century view of culture in opposition to the typical Enlightenment (1700's)
view that the superficial diversity of culture masks an underlying - and
readily discovered - universal uniformity: the homogeniety of humanity.
Whitehead once offered to the natural sciences the maxim
"Seek simplicity and distrust it"; to the social sciences he might well
have offered "Seek complexity and order it."
Certainly the study of culture has developed as though
this maxim were being followed. The rise of a scientific concept of culture
amounted to, or at least was connected with, the overthrow of the view
of human nature dominant in the Enlightenment--a view that, whatever
else may be said for or against it, was both clear and simple--and its
replacement by a view not only more complicated but enormously less clear.
The attempt to clarify it, to reconstruct an intelligible account of what
man is, has underlain scientific thinking about culture ever since. Having
sought complexity and, on a scale grander than they ever imagined, found
it, anthropologists became entangled in a tortuous effort to order it.
And the end is not yet in sight.
The Enlightenment view of man was, of course, that he
was wholly of a piece with nature and shared in the general uniformity
of composition which natural science, under Bacon's urging and Newton's
guidance, had discovered there. There is, in brief, a human nature as regularly
organized, as thoroughly invariant, and as marvelously simple as Newton's
universe. Perhaps some of its laws are different, but there are laws; perhaps
some of its immutability is obscured by the trappings of local fashion,
but it is immutable.
A quotation that Lovejoy... gives from an Enlightenment
historian, Mascou, presents the position with the useful bluntness one
often finds in a minor writer:
The stage setting (in different times and places) is, indeed,
altered, the actors change their garb and their appearance; but their inward
motions arise from the same desires and passions of men, and produce their
effects in the vicissitudes of kingdoms and peoples.
Now, this view is hardly one to be despised; nor, despite
my easy references a moment ago to "overthrow," can it be said to have
disappeared from contemporary anthropological thought. The notion that
men are men under whatever guise and against whatever backdrop has not
been replaced by "other mores, other beasts."
Yet, cast as it was, the Enlightenment concept of the
nature of human nature had some much less acceptable implications, the
main one being that, to quote Lovejoy himself this time, "anything of which
the intelligibility, verifiability, or actual affirmation is limited to
men of a special age, race, temperment, tradition or condition is (in and
of itself) without truth or value, or at all events without importance
to a reasonable man." The great, vast variety of differences among men,
in beliefs and values, in customs and institutions, both over time and
from place to place, is essentially without significance in defining his
nature. It consists of mere accretions, distortions even, overlaying
and obscuring what is truly human--the constant, the general, the
universal--in man.
Thus, in a passage now notorious, Dr. Johnson saw
Shakespeare's genius to lie in the fact that "his characters are not modified
by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world;
by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate upon
but small numbors; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary
opinions." And Racine regarded the success of his plays on
classical themes as proof that "the taste of Paris...conforms to that of
Athens: my spectators have been moved by the same things which, in other
times, brought tears to the eyes of the most cultivated classes of Greece."
The trouble with this kind of view, aside from the fact
that it sounds comic coming from someone as profoundly English as Johnson
or as French as Racine, is that the image of a constant human nature independent
of time, place, and circumstances, of studies and professions, transient
fashions and temporary opinions, may be an illusion, that what man is may
be so entangled with where he is, who he is, and what he believes that
it is inseparable from them. It is precisely the consideration of
such a possibility that led to the rise of the concept of culture and the
decline of the uniformitarian view of man. Whatever else modern anthropology
asserts--and it seems to have asserted almost everything at one time or
another--it is firm in the conviction that men unmodified by the customs
of particular places do not in fact exist, have never existed, and most
important, could not in the very nature of the case exist. There
is, there can be, no backstage were we can go to catch a glimpse of Mascou's
actors as "real persons" lounging about in street clothes, disengaged from
their profession, displaying with artless candor their spontaneous desires
and unprompted passions. They may change their roles, their styles of acting,
even the dramas in which they play; but--as Shakespeare himself of course
remarked--they are always performing.
This circumstance makes the drawing of a line between
what is natural, universal, and constant in man and what is conventional,
local, and variable extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it suggests that
to draw such a line is to falsify the human situation, or at least to misrender
it seriously. ...[A]nthropology has attempted to find its way to
a more viable concept of man, one in which culture, and the variability
of culture, would be taken into account rather than written off as caprice
and prejudice, and yet, at the same time, one in which the governing principle
of the field, "the basic unity of mankind," would not be turned into an
empty phrase. To take the giant step away from a uniformitarian view
of human nature is, so far as the study of man is concerned, to leave the
Garden. To entertain the idea that the diversity of custom across
time and over space is not a mere matter of garb and appearance, of stage
settings and comedic masques, is to entertain also the idea that humanity
is as various in its essence as it is in its expression. And with
that reflection some well-fastened philosophical moorings are loosed and
an uneasy drifting into perilous waters begins.
back to list of
readings