By Clara H - We come into the world naked, and the culture that welcomes us dresses us in a certain way. We put on, we impregnate certain habits of life, which have been transmitted from the depths of time, to become cultural beings. The natural condition of man is akin to a state of prematurity. It’s in culture that Man becomes human. We’re beings of culture.
Man, according to Cassirer, is only his works. That’s to say, Man cannot be defined by any inherent principle which would constitute his metaphysical essence. It’s his work that characterises him. That is to say the system of its activities : language, religion, science, art, … What is valid for a man is valid for the rest of humanity. It is difficult to give a substantial definition for the human being. But let's just say it's better that way. We are men and women because we live the world by creating it at every moment. We are artists. And we are what we create.
Thus, each society, each people has been able to develop its own culture. However, it’s easily observable that peoples throughout the world have never ceased to meet, to exchange, to enrich each other. But also to hate each other, to make war on each other. Why does the other, the difference, frighten some people? It’s possible that it is the fact of being stripped of one's own culture, of one's own works, so what can make me feel like a man, precisely, which can be scary. We can observe, throughout history, many tragic events that were aimed precisely at one culture taking over another (colonisation, genocide, etc.). We can also see many examples where cultural exchanges have enriched certain societies in a very beautiful way.
But this is a delicate subject. Multi-culturalism can be seen in a very beautiful way, but for some peoples for whom this notion has been imposed, or who have had to fight for hundreds of years not to see their culture reduced to nothing, it would seem let it be seen in another way. The culture of a people has been built over a very long time. It is also an identity.
Multiculturalism shouldn’t be forced, imposed. It must come from curiosity, benevolence, the desire for encounters and exchanges.
Temple of Garni - Armenia - February 2022 - Faced with this monument dating back almost 2000 years, bringing together influences from different cultures in terms of its architecture and history, we can ask ourselves several questions: how are different cultures influenced? What are they willing to keep from each other? Why such aspects are kept and others rejected?