The word "culture" comes from the Latin term meaning tillage, as well as education and development. Initially, it was associated with the rural way of life and interaction with nature. Based on this meaning, the concept of culture in philosophy means both a specific way of organizing and developing human life, represented by the products of material and spiritual labor, and a system of certain socially determined norms and spiritual values. Culture is also often called the totality of people's attitudes towards nature, society and themselves. For convenience , cultural forms are divided depending on the historical stages of development - for example, the ancient, Renaissance and so on, from groups or communities of people - national, ethnic or multi-ethnic, world, individual culture ...
The term “civilization” also has a Latin origin, however, its meaning is not of the agrarian, but of the urban background, and is associated with concepts such as citizenship and the state. Culture and civilization in philosophy can be close in meaning - for example, the word "civilization" is often used as a synonym for culture. But, as a rule, in the more strict sense of the word, civilization is the degree of development of a society that follows “barbarism”, and is also divided into historical stages of development (ancient, medieval ...). We can say that both of these concepts are two facets of one whole.
However, until the XVIII century, the scientific community actually lived without the terms “culture” and “civilization”. Philosophy introduced them into the vocabulary quite late, and at first they were considered synonyms. However, representations close in meaning to these concepts have long existed. For example, in China they were traditionally designated by the word “jen” (Confucius), in ancient Greece - “paideia” (good manners), and in ancient Rome they were even divided into two words: “civitas” (the opposite of barbarism, civilization) and “humanitas” ( education). Interestingly, in the Middle Ages the concept of civitas was more valued, and in the Renaissance, humanitas. Since the eighteenth century, culture has increasingly been identified with the ideals of the Enlightenment in the spiritual and political fields — rational and harmonious forms of government, science, art, and religion. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Turgot and Condorcet coincided in the judgments that the development of culture corresponds to the development of reason and rationality.
Have the thinkers always been positively perceived by culture and civilization? The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a contemporary of the Enlightenment, gives a negative answer to this question. He considered that the further a person departs from nature, the less real happiness and natural harmony in him. This criticism also influenced German philosophy, whose classics tried to comprehend these contradictions. Kant put forward the idea that the problem, culture or civilization, can be solved with the help of the “world of morality”, the German romantics Schelling and Genderlin tried to do this with the help of aesthetic intuition, and Hegel believed that everything is decidable within the framework of the philosophy of self-consciousness of the Absolute The Spirit. Herder believed that contradictions are generally characteristic of the history of culture, since it develops by type (Eastern, Antique, European), each of which reaches its maximum, conveying the achievements of the following. Humboldt suggested that one of the most significant features of national culture is the language that forms the national spirit.
However, classical German philosophy most often considered the development of culture as a single-line process, and therefore its position did not cover all the diversity that world culture and civilization provides. 19th-century philosophy (especially the Neo-Kantians Rickert and Weber, as well as representatives of the "philosophy of life") criticized this position. Neo-Kantians recognized the world of values ​​as the main essence of culture , which urge a person to do his due, and influence his behavior. Nietzsche contrasted the Apollonian and Dionysian types of culture, and Dilthey opposed the discursive and intuitive, calling the first "liquefied fluid of the mind." Marxism sought in culture and civilization a material basis and a social-group (class) character.
From the end of the 19th century, the study of culture from the standpoint of anthropology and ethnography (Taylor) also began, a structural analysis of culture as a system of values, semiotics and structural linguistics (Levi-Strauss) was created. The twentieth century is characterized by such a direction as the philosophy of culture, the essence of which was represented by symbols (Cassirer), intuition (Bergson) or archetypes (Jung). Philosophers of culture, as well as existentialists and representatives of philosophical hermeneutics, saw in each local culture the universal meaning that is revealed when decoding its symbols. Although there is such a position that rejects such a thing as world culture and civilization. The philosophy of Spengler and Toynbee considers polycentric cultures as proof of the absence of generally accepted and universal laws in different civilizations.