The Organism, Meaning and Culture

Abstract

This thesis looks at the relation between biology and culture. It argues that culture is a biological phenomenon, but that culture cannot be reduced to biology. It attempts to situate culture within the wider order of living things and to suggest how culture emerges from this organic realm. Based on the premise that the concept of culture refers to meaning, its main argument is that meaning is immanent in all forms of activity and experience. This fact provides a point of commonality between the lives of human beings and other creatures. It implies that the webs of meaning that characterise human existence are extensions of those in which other living things are entangled. Thus meaning does not merely reside in words, concepts or ideas, it inhabits all human activity in the world. The thesis begins with the idea that a person, while a cultural being, is also a biological organism. It discusses what sort of thing an organism is and how it is related to the world in which it lives. It argues that experience, and life more generally, are 'integral' and cannot be divided into discrete parts, and that being in the world involves a constant movement, transformation and unfolding of life; a process that occurs at different levels, involving evolution, learning and the everyday activity of a person in the world. Culture and meaning are immanent in this unfolding of life.