We often utter the word ‘culture’ but rarely try to define what it is that we call that word. It is one of those things whose existence is certain but whose definition is difficult. It would be especially important to clarify what ‘culture’ is, especially for us, who are contemporaries of the great hunger, the lack of higher impulses that is manifesting itself everywhere.

What is ‘culture’? Could it be simply a set of mental activities? Should we not refer to ‘culture’ any custom that finds its fixation not in a thing, but in a word and an image? In this case we could talk about ‘the culture of flour millers and brewers’, ‘the culture of washing hands before eating’, and even ‘the culture of waltz or two-step’. Some people do so nowadays, but the ‘culture’ so broadly defined is losing its shape. ‘Culture’ becomes both everything and nothing. To find something more definite, one has to look in a different direction.

Let us try to search in a Socratic way, by the method of questions and answers. Let’s ask Socrates himself for help:

— When we affirm something as adherents of a certain culture, do we do it under the influence of our passions?

— No, Socrates, but under the influence of other motives.

— What kind of motives? Do we know in advance what is good and true, and call what we like good and true?

— No, Socrates. We only feel what our soul considers ‘good’, but we move towards the truth by touch, depending on the experience we acquire.

— Do we consider good what is easy and pleasant and convenient for us? Or that which helps to defeat our enemies? Or that which helps to win the love of all?

— No, Socrates. We would be like children if sweet things, or pleasant things, or desirable things — like making friends or defeating our enemies — could inspire our opinions.

— Doesn’t this mean that culture, though dependent on our wishes, fears, or affections, is ultimately based on things independent of us? And that, by embracing culture, we become fellows, if not of Good or Truth themselves, then of something that is closer to Good and Truth than we are?

— Really, Socrates, you have reasoned well!

So let us accept that culture does not lead us to heaven, but it takes us to certain heights, and therefore it is above the habits of mind or word. Was it not art that our wise interlocutor had in mind? Art is undoubtedly a part of the higher; its task is to awaken the soul; ‘good thoughts’ and ‘good morals’ are often nourished by art…

And the labour of the writer — high, quiet, continuous, flowing (contrary to common opinion) not at all at the writing table, but anywhere and everywhere, under the sky of every day? Every day we try to catch the thoughts flying endlessly over our heads, and their flow has no end, is willful, lawless… ‘The search for metaphors’, ‘mastery of words’ — all these are weak and unsuccessful definitions of the labour of catching words from the invisible golden stream. In the net of literature, as in the net of fishermen, the catch comes of its own accord — we only need to keep up the effort. If we become lazy, the stream of thoughts will not dry up, but will pass by…

Much can be said of the golden labour of the word-catcher. There is much of passion in this labour; we do not own it, but it guides us, and one could even say of writing that it is like sin, it is like hearing, it is like love. Here Plato’s Eros speaks to our soul, and for our directed attention gives us unexpected gifts, for good or for ill.

The wise woman Diotima (according to Plato) said: ‘A great and dangerous love awaits anyone entering the edifice of Philosophy’. This does not apply only to philosophy. All creativity involves the creator in a great and dangerous love affair, which both promises our soul untold riches and threatens its good at the same time. The soul, as such, is easily convertible to good and to evil. The soul can listen to God; the soul can admire itself; and in any case it will shine to us ‘like the full moon’ (as Khodasevich said).

When we turn to the soul, we rise above the sea of thoughts, aspirations, fears — to a purer, clearer image of ourselves, and nothing more. The soul is not the image of God: the soul is only a perfect image of myself. The worship of the soul is another kind of idolatry; it is the sin of the poets. Even for vice they find a captivating and ideal expression, because they speak, in fact, not of vice, but of the soul propensities which in our world led them to vice.

The worship of one’s own soul leads to a kind of daemonism — a conscious and clear sublimity, a complete animation, a transparency of the inner life without bowing to a higher power or, in reverence for that power, to constant pleading for forgiveness without the desire to change. The daemon is not a soulless creature at all; he is further from the animal than the average man; his difference lies in his unwillingness to submit to a higher power, in his desire for boundless freedom. This is the way of the poets, and Pushkin and Dostoevsky followed this path — even though they repented, even though they begged for forgiveness.

The difficulty of culture, understood solely as ‘striving for the high and the beautiful’, is precisely that a cultured person, more than any other, is characterised by a bifurcation between knowing the good and doing the bad. Such a culture includes a variety of sensations, as well as the capacity for free perception — i. e., one that does not enslave the personality to a new, recently experienced mental or sensual flavour — and, ultimately, does not prevent the destruction of the personality, but only protects it from gross temptations, making it more vulnerable to subtle ones.

There is something even higher than art — something good and complex that we also call ‘culture’. I just don’t know how to express it. Let me put it this way: there is a kind of mental life (the most dear to my heart) that is not worthwhile without self-deprecation, without humility of mind, without the thought of a judge who is outside us and does not depend on us. Science itself retains humility and reverence for truth only as long as it retains the spiritual fitness received in the Christian ages. Scientific cowardice — i. e., the readiness to lie down for the sake of a favourite theory; to defame an opponent instead of defeating him in an argument — is the greater the distance between the conscience of the scientist and the Christian conscience. (It is possible, however, that the expression ‘Christian conscience’ is a tautology, for it is the religion of the Bible that has taught us to be ashamed.)

This culture, standing on a Christian (or, to put it more broadly, religious) foundation, is leaving us. It combined high personal development and a humble willingness to humble oneself before the truth (Herzen, a hater of the Church but a Christian by temperament, spent his life talking about humility before the truth). But culture is not a gift to God, nor is it a gift from God; culture is a gift to us from ourselves, with all the divinity of the abilities we put into it. At the same time, culture (with the same caveat: ‘higher’ or ‘true’ culture) has little in common with ‘self-expression’. It requires, if not ‘objectivity’, then still the recognition of known values and rules of truth-seeking. There is no solitude or ‘circle of the chosen’; cultural creativity is not about ‘me’ or ‘my circle’, but about our thoughts in the light of certain fixed luminaries.

This culture is akin to religion in the sense that (like religion) it teaches us to see the judge of our aspirations and actions outside of us. However vague the notion of ‘true culture’ may be, it is inseparable from the subtlety of judgement whose condition is humility. Loudness of voice, desire for victory at all costs, arrogance and contempt for the opponent are the traits of the uncultivated personality. There is no culture without recognising the incommensurability of our personality — and the truth we seek, find and defend. Among the many kinds of self-deception is, of course, false culture, fuelled by pride, vanity, loud voices, and the belief that the truth is all ours, without remainder.

The defining feature of the higher or ‘true’ culture could be expressed in words: education of the mind. Without this education, which gives judgements fidelity without pretension, there is no that higher, most luminous, most ennobling part of culture to which I have tried to lead the reader. If we agree to call ‘culture’ only that part of mental life, the sublime and elevating part, connected with conscience and nobility, we shall see unexpected things.

Namely, we shall see that much of art and the lion’s share of science have nothing to do with the object of our conversation, ‘true’ or ‘higher’ culture: they require only technical skills, without making any demands on our personality, its morality or will, and if art is non-moral, science is directly immoral. I say this without wishing to offend them, but for the sake of clarity and precision of definitions.

What does it mean to ‘judge morally’? It means to ‘judge a tree by its fruit’, whether it is good or evil. The intentions of the actor are not taken into account. But don’t we judge art or science by its fruits? What about books, paintings, inventions and improvements? We measure them either by the yardstick of beauty or by the yardstick of utility — in either case far removed from the yardstick of good and evil. In saying this, I am not proposing to abolish libraries and close printing houses (as some have suggested before), but only to point out that much part of mental activity makes no other demands on the personality than technical ones, and therefore leads it nowhere.

The condition for the development of the personality is to make demands on it today that exceed those made on it yesterday. This is the difficult but happy path along which the higher culture, of which so little remains today, used to lead us. ‘He that gathereth not scattereth’ is a well-known truth, and there is no way forward or upward without silent demands directed to the individual, not from the individual.

Of course, as Socrates would say, ‘this truth would seem madness to anyone but one who seeks the good of his soul’.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

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