Nature, Culture, and the Lines Between

In a contribution to Judaism and Christianity, Evan Zuesse questions how H. Richard Niebuhr’s analysis of Christ and culture might apply to Judaism. While he recognizes that Jewish responses to culture fit roughly into Niebuhr’s categories, he finds that the whole set-up doesn’t stand up to close analysis:

“if we redefine ‘culture’ to include Torah, so as to accept as much as possible of Niebuhr’s definitions, we must do just the same with ‘Christ.’ After all, all human affairs occur within the medium of culture more broadly understood, even our internal monologues, for culture shapes even the development and specific shape of infants’ nervous systems just as particular types of socialized activities shape the outward body into a human body rather than a four-footed ‘wolf-child.’ Put bluntly, the nature of human nature is to be cultural. Even our most ;private’ self-identity is constructed from our earliest history of encounters with specific others. Jesus as a human being, and ‘Christ’ as a concept or faith-experience, are both socio-cultural constructions. They are constituted by and cannot exist without those contexts. To eliminate culture from them would simply cancel them out” (246).

Then the vertigo: “Niebuhr begins by insisting that ‘culture is the ‘artificial, secondary environment’ which man superimposes on the natural.’. . . this attempted dichotomy is superficial. The division between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural,’ ‘secondary’ and primary, is itself artificial and secondary and serves what it supposedly leads to, the division of ‘Christ’ and ‘Culture.’ Seen more closely, culture is variously sensed by us as something ‘natural’ (‘Everybody does that; everybody thinks like that!’) and something ‘idealistic,’ imposed or unnatural (‘To sacrifice yourself for your country is heroic’), so ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ intertwine and can even change places, but both are essential parts of human nature and society” (246-7).

If the line between nature and culture is a cultural product, then we can never determine what “nature” is in itself – from some culture-free position. And if that’s the case, then we can’t tell where “culture” begins either, because as soon as we ask the question we are already embedded in culture. Here is an aporia; that is not a dismissal, since aporiai appear everywhere. But it does mean that every claim about what is “natural” is a debatable claim, and is itself a claim from within a particular cultural construal.