Search results

Explored are the issues relating to interdisciplinary studies as they arise specifically in the study of culture. It is argued that as "disciplines themselves are unstable & shifting in character, so also is the notion of interdisciplinarity." The central issue that arises is whether the concepts, categories & methods of investigation employed in the understanding of new types of entities that have been brought into being by the activity of men are the same or radically different from those that are used effectively in the understanding of phenomena subsumed under the term "Nature." The world of culture of course presupposes the world of nature, as without it there would be no embodiment of meaning or its transmission from one being to another. But besides nature it also presupposes a creative being who comprehends meanings & values & tries to objectify them outside himself so that he can apprehend them in an objective manner & also communicate to other human beings through such embodied objectivation. The importance of culture in a particular tradition may therefore itself be a function of the importance that objectivation & embodiment enjoy in that culture. The relationship between man & culture is thus as diverse as the ways in which man himself may be conceived. Culture may thus be understood as arising from the dialectic between what one has created & the demand to understand what one has created -- a dialectic that may be said to arise from the very nature of self-consciousness itself. Beyond this, however, is the dialectic between knowledge & action combined with the situation that actions determined by knowledge do not distinguish between falsity & truth of the knowledge concerned, but rather depend more on the degrees to which the belief in their truth is entertained. There is in fact no clear-cut dichotomy between belief about reality & reality itself in the social sciences at least to the extent that it does seem to obtain in the natural sciences. Further, as belief relates to imagination & plays an integral role in the creation of sociocultural reality it follows that imagination is much more central to culture than most people have thought it to be. The central issues about cultural reality therefore seem always to cluster around self-consciousness which not only is enmeshed in the awareness of value but always expresses itself in alternative ways because it is reflexive in character. The understanding of culture therefore is a perpetual challenge to all those who believe in only one way of understanding the world, whether it be the empiricist or the idealist way of of understanding it. Modified AA.

It is argued that there is a radical distinction between the natural sci's, the soc sci's & the humanities grounded in the typal diversity of the phenomena with which they are concerned. Natural sci's are concerned with a realm in which value-considerations are practically non-existent. Humanities study a realm which is the specific creation of men & in which value-bearing & value-embodying aspects are the essence of the matter. Soc sci's deal with a midway realm of human reality arising out of the interaction of men in which the causal & the valuational intertwine in an inextricable manner. This midway positioning of the soc sci's accounts for the continuous temptation of the soc sci'st to regard his subject-matter in completely naturalistic terms, on the one hand, or as analogous to a piece of human art-creation, on the other. The diverse & even contradictory methodologies pleaded for in the soc sci's can be understood in the perspective & context of such a situation. AA.