Culture cycle theory
Culture cycles theories ((also circulatory or cycles theories) give a wiki .: κύκλος , Kyklos ; lat .: cyclus theory, "circle" gr. Θεωρεῖν theorein : watch, look, look) are historical theories , according to which the historical development of individual or all cultures nonlinear , but runs cyclically . After a certain time and certain stages of development, the processes repeat themselves. With this notion, the theories contradict the conventional, usually progressive interpretation of history.
The theories structure the history of cultures, indeed the entire history, morphologically and work out recurring processes. After receiving a new boost in the 19th and 20th centuries, they are now considered obsolete.
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Even if the more optimistic or pessimistic expression is determined by the mental-emotional orientation of the respective representatives, cycle theories usually assume a development from better to worse. Analogous to processes in nature , “cultural cycles” are postulated and how cultures emerge, grow, perish and form anew. Proponents of the theory try to structure the history of cultures and to work out recurring events.
This context also includes the views that assume a cyclical course of the history of states and peoples, nations and humanity without explicitly speaking of “culture”. Theoreticians use the prognostic-speculative element in different forms, while at the same time assuming that they can predict the future.
Culture theory
The synonymous German term of cultural circles , which referred to a philosophical theory and not to an ethnographic method, was coined by Leo Frobenius , even though Conrad Hermann had already spoken of cultural circles earlier.
History of philosophy and literature
Cyclical world and cultural conceptions existed as early as ancient times. Babylonians , Indians and Chinese , Greeks and Romans knew cyclical processes. In the Middle Ages it was thinkers like Johannes Scotus , Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas who represented cyclical and often organistic ideas about the change of historical structures (childhood, maturity, old age).
Niccolò Machiavelli , based on the uniformity of human culture, believed in a cycle of history. By nature she is not allowed to stand still. Even if the culture has reached the stage of the highest perfection, it must sink and later rise again. Since man only follows his nature, all like characters on the stage of the world are driven by passions and can thus be predetermined. So it is easy to influence the future. Cultural structures could be renewed through external misfortune or through prudence and led back to their beginning.
Giambattista Vico gave the most important impetus for the cycle theory . His cycle theory described the rise and fall of peoples and can also be viewed as a theory of the course of human history and culture.
In the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , based on the image of the spiral , there are a number of notions of cyclical processes that take mankind. In connection with the development of his theory of colors , he formulated general ideas about the course of history. Nothing is “standing still”, and with all apparent setbacks, humanity and science must always advance, even if both “should finally complete themselves again”. The circle that humanity has to traverse is “definite enough, and notwithstanding the great deadlock that barbarism made, it has already covered its career more than once. If you want to ascribe a spiral movement to it, it always returns to the area where it has already passed through. In this way all true views and all errors are repeated. "
For Friedrich Nietzsche , the eternal cycle was naturally necessary. Already in the Happy Science , a little later in Zarathustra , the “Teacher of the Eternal Second Coming”, he formulated the thought: What if one day a demon told you that you have to live life countless times, “every pain and every one Pleasure and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small and large. "" The eternal hourglass of existence "is turned over and over again - and you with it, dust from the dust!"
For Nietzsche, the idea of the Eternal Coming is the highest formula of affirmation that can be achieved. It is the counterpart of the life-negating aversion , a pessimistic trait still coming from Schopenhauer , which can be seen in Nietzsche's work. The melancholy of Zarathustra, his long pauses in silence and his terrible dreams are opposed to the life-affirming superman and the “return” in Apollonian style .
In this context, Giorgio Colli speaks of Nietzsche's “great mystical experience”: not only the god of tragedy , but also real people who give existence meaning in all its fullness return. The foundations of this vision are to be sought less in old doxographic reports on a Pythagorean doctrine or in scientific hypotheses of the 19th century than in revived pre-Socratic speculations. They would have pointed to an immediacy that leads out of time and thus abolishes its irreversible single track.
Frobenius conceived of culture as an independent organism in relation to the “human carriers” and regarded every form of culture as a living being that experiences birth and childhood, adulthood and old age. In doing so, he ultimately referred to the term “cultural area” to cultures with certain landscape boundaries, as their shape was tied to certain areas, the “cultural areas”.
The most popular cycle theory in German-speaking countries comes from Oswald Spengler and can be found in his pessimistic downfall of the West . Every culture goes through different phases of growth, has childhood and youth, masculinity and old age and blossoms on the soil of a certain landscape to which it remains bound like a plant. The civilization was the end of development, in the decay pass over.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ HJ Cloeren: Culture cycle crop cycles theory . In: Joachim Ritter , Karlfried founder (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy . Vol. 4, Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt, p. 1350
- ↑ HJ Cloeren: Culture cycle crop cycles theory . In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried founder (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy. Vol. 4, Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt, p. 1350
- ↑ HJ Cloeren: Culture cycle crop cycles theory . In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried founder (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy. Vol. 4, Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt, p. 1351
- ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften II, materials, registers, Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume 14, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 539
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche : Thus spoke Zarathustra. In: Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds.), Critical Study Edition, Vol. 4, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, p. 275
- ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science , fourth book, 341. In: Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (ed.) Critical study edition, Vol. 3, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, p. 570
- ^ Giorgio Colli in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra I - IV, epilogue, critical study edition, Vol. 4, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, p. 415
- ^ Giorgio Colli in: Friedrich Nietzsche: Also sprach Zarathustra I - IV, Afterword, Critical Study Edition, Vol. 4, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, p. 416
- ↑ HJ Cloeren: Culture cycle crop cycles theory . In: Joachim Ritter, Karlfried founder (Hrsg.): Historical dictionary of philosophy. Vol. 4, Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt, p. 1354