Editorial postscript Vol. 14

Reflecting on their contributions to the roundtable, the authors’ collective effort has significantly deepened our understanding of the science of culture in the 21st century. Their work spans various disciplines, including the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, with specific fields such as biology, semiotics, computer science, philosophy, and Earth system science represented.

A shared understanding is beginning to take shape, which I would like to summarize in this postscript. This is my personal perspective, and I would like to express my gratitude to all the authors who shared their insights with us. In my opinion, the roundtable establishes a research paradigm that merits further development into a more precise and systematic research program. The Cultural Science journal will promote this agenda in the future.

Let me share my perspective on the history of cultural science as a starting point. Although only a few contributions explicitly state this, I believe that the concept of ‘more-than-human’ does not represent a radical departure from earlier traditions of exploring culture, particularly those from the 19th century. This idea is echoed in contributions that emphasize Charles S. Peirce’s role in moving away from anthropocentric views of culture today (Winfried Nöth and Lucia Santaella, Thomas Hünefeldt). In a previous article in this journal (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018), I suggested that ‘cultural science’ is rooted in the tradition of Wilhelm Dilthey’s formulation of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften,’ a term that does not have a precise English translation. In Germany today, the term ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ is often used instead, which translates to ‘cultural science’ but differs significantly from the Anglophone concept of cultural studies. In English, Geisteswissenschaft encompasses all the humanities (and not just the subfield of cultural studies), implying a focus on the ‘human.’ However, the true essence lies in understanding ‘Geist’ as more-than-human. In other words, I claim that the study of more-than-human culture can be traced back to 19^th century Geisteswissenschaft.

This understanding could only be reflected in English if we used ‘spirit’ as a technical term of Hegelian philosophy, which would be anachronistic. However, the critical point needs recognition that Geist relates to human creative expression but is more-than-human in terms of its evolution and the ways it feeds back on these expressive acts. So, Geist is certainly human in the sense that it unfolds in the human domain, hence excludes other species, but it is also more-than-human as it cannot be reduced to human dimensions, such as individual human minds. Geist materializes in human creations, which live their own lives, such as literary creations, works of art, or architecture. A similar distinction was made by Karl Popper (1979), independent of Teutonic philosophy, in his conception of the ‘three worlds,’ with world 3 representing the creations of human minds, which should be distinguished as ‘world 2’, the realm of the mental.

Such views are not uncommon in modern social thought. One prominent figure that comes to mind is economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously stated that the market operates ‘by human action, but not by human design.’ He described the market as a type of supercomputer that guides human actions, while emphasizing that it cannot be reduced to individual human intelligence (Mirowski and Nik-Kah 2017). For Hayek, the market is ‘more-than-human,’ meaning that accepting market logic requires setting aside the very qualities that make us human—our emotions, empathy, and personal worldviews. This perspective is also rooted in 19th-century traditions, particularly Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between community and society. Tönnies viewed society as a ‘hyperobject’ in Morton’s parlance that abstracts from the flesh-and-blood realities of human existence, defining it within a capitalist framework where the market serves as the medium of abstraction (Basso and Herrmann-Pillath 2024). Hayek criticized any humane evaluations of the market as remnants of community feeling and thinking. Hayek is by no means alone in envisioning of the economy as ‘more-than-human’: for example, the system ontology seminally promoted by sociologist Niklas Luhmann sharply distinguishes humans from the systems they live in.

Money serves as a prime example of a cultural construct that was examined through a more-than-human perspective at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century by two influential thinkers, Georg Simmel and Max Weber. While money is created through human actions, once it enters the world, it gains universal transformative powers, which are further enhanced by other artefacts like accounting ledgers. Their theories anticipated modern ideas about material agency and the performativity of artefacts (Malafouris 2013). Cultural phenomena often possess qualities that surpass human control and understanding, highlighting the complexity of new forms of life that are emerging. In other words, viewing culture as ‘more-than-human’ is akin to how Hegel approached the concept of spirit—understanding it as an independent ontological realm that unfolds according to its own logic. It is important to note that Marx’s analysis of capitalism, society, and culture also aligns with this ‘more-than-human’ perspective.

Cultural science, methodologically speaking, can draw upon the extensive range of cultural analysis that has developed since the 19th century. However, it extends this analysis beyond just the human domain as the reference of research: This move radically breaks with a central theme of 19^th century Geisteswissenschaft. This transition is highlighted in the contributions to this roundtable which point to the significant role of semiotics as a precursor. Emerging in the 19th century from two main traditions—Saussure and Peirce—semiotics has evolved into a rich field of research that encompasses numerous disciplines (Chandler 2022). Despite this breadth, semiotics is often regarded as a specialized subfield within these disciplines and is generally overlooked as a foundational approach that could unify them. Semiotics is concerned with signs as material objects that mediate actions and engage interpreters, who generate information through their actions. This definition highlights why semiotics is not just ‘more-than-human’ but is distinctly neutral, or ‘a-human’. Therefore, it is misleading to classify subfields of semiotics, such as ecosemiotics, as part of ‘environmental humanities’ or to label semiotics as belonging exclusively to the humanities, even though it is certainly central to the Geisteswissenschaft, as previously introduced.

In my definition of semiotics, I also used the term ‘information’. Similar to the concept of signs, especially in Peirce’s understanding, the term ‘information’ is ‘a-human’ and applies across all scientific disciplines. This view has gained considerable acceptance, particularly following the rise of computers. The computer, as a non-human metaphor, plays a crucial role in understanding markets as ‘more-than-human’. Cybernetics has laid the groundwork for systems ontologies like Luhmann’s. Today, it is widely accepted that information is not solely a human concept and, therefore, not limited to the humanities. The same must apply to semiotics.

What makes culture a distinct semiotic phenomenon that is not exclusively tied to humans? Our contributors agree on several key points (in explicit relation to Peirce’s semiotics, Thomas Hünefeldt).

First, subjectivity is important. This concept does not always relate to a human subject; rather, it refers to the difference between interpreting the world from a specific standpoint versus an ‘objective’ perspective as the ‘view from nowhere’. Consequently, culture embodies the diversity of interpretive views and their coexistence.

Second, interpretations within culture can be shared among entities that occupy different positions, meaning that culture encompasses various forms of mediation.

Third, culture can be transmitted over time among entities, even if those entities have limited lifespans.

Fourth, this transmission is inherently imperfect, yet it also involves cultural creativity and the emergence of novelty.

Finally, culture helps define boundaries between different groups of interpreting entities, thus influencing their identities as they perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others.

If we adopt this general definition, it becomes clear that animals, like many existing forms of machines, possess culture. As Bronislaw Szerczynski argues, we can even extend this concept into the physical domain. Ellie Rennie shows that blockchain technologies have features of culture in distinguishing in-group and out-group nodes in terms of reliability.

Limiting the definition of culture to humans alone is not scientifically sound; it is a cultural phenomenon in its own right, a cultural parochialism. Human culture can be defined by its distinct emphasis on boundary-making, which takes two forms. The first is the distinction between culture and nature, which defines humans exclusively as cultural beings. The second form involves reserving the term ‘culture’ for certain humans, while relegating others to a so-called ‘barbarian’ or animal-like state. Therefore, cultural science should be reflexive and critical of mainstream anthropocentric views of culture, which are themselves cultural and not objective in a scientific sense (Braidotti 2019).

Debunking anthropocentrism in cultural science does not mean we should marginalize humans. This is important, especially considering the methodological challenge I just highlighted: our research on culture is itself a cultural activity. Therefore, a central question arises: how can humans access and understand cultures that are ‘more-than-human’? This inquiry is essentially a non-anthropocentric version of a fundamental question in the humanities: How can we understand cultures that are different from our own?

One important lesson from the humanities is that there is no truly ‘objective’ view of the cultural other. Our understanding of different cultures relies on translation, which is inherently a subjective interpretation. This means, for instance, that we cannot approach the culture of other animals in an ‘objective’ way. However, we can establish a shared cultural framework, or, as Cédric Suer describes it, a co-culture. Cultural studies have long celebrated hybridization, moving away from the idea of a coherent and monolithic ‘culture’. Like semiosis, culture consists of a continuous flow of interpretive actions and bricolage. In other words, studying non-human cultures involves creating ‘more-than-human’ cultures that include both humans and other beings. Anthony Milligan and Lena Springer argue that we should avoid ontological commitments in assigning specific forms of cultural agency to entities but adopt a pragmatic approach to interacting with these entities, inspired by another Peircean idea of the ‘economy of research’.

For instance, we may come to understand that machines possess culture once they are able to communicate with each other, thereby creating distinct identities within collectives. Today, engineers are already confronting fundamental limitations in their ability to understand AI performance, particularly in clearly identifying the causal relationships between inputs and outputs. This challenge highlights a defining aspect of subjectivity as an objective reality. Consequently, we can only gain insights into this by fostering co-cultures with machines, such as by combining human and AI creativity in the arts and music, as Sebastian Trump discusses in his contribution. Similarly, we cannot access animal Umwelts as objective facts, but we can engage with animals to create co-cultures, which is a central concern in zoosemiotics, as elaborated by Nelly Mäekivi. Drawing from these two examples, we recognize that co-cultures can also emerge without human involvement—between species and even among machines and animals.

An important conclusion from this discussion takes us back again to 19th century scholarship, which influenced the 20th century through the work of John Dewey. This scholarship reinstates key concepts of the humanities in a perhaps unexpected manner. German idealism placed the arts and sciences on an equal epistemological footing as distinct forms of knowledge generation, a notion also supported by Dewey (2005). The creation of co-cultures is primarily an artistic endeavour, as there is no absolute ‘view from nowhere’ that can definitively determine which co-cultural creation accurately reflects the pre-contact non-human culture. Additionally, artistic approaches to understanding cultural others foster knowledge through mutual understanding. Putting science and art on an equal epistemological footing meets the demand expressed by John Hartley to include even the domain of physics in the scope of cultural science, recognizing its cultural essence.

Building co-cultures requires a distinct ethical approach toward others. This presents a paradox, as we typically define culture by establishing boundaries, whereas co-culture involves breaking those boundaries down. Therefore, cultural science must be grounded in a generalized ethics of recognition and relationality, as emphasized by Ronald Trosper, who draws upon the rich resources of Indigenous knowledge and practices in relation to the more-than-human world. This ethical stance can significantly influence our cultural creativity, allowing cultural science to inform human culture as well. For instance, Stanislav Roudavski offers an ethical framework for designing cities, buildings, and other human-made environments with a focus on more-than-human considerations. Such a co-cultural approach also enhances our understanding of different cultures by fostering experiences that allow us to respond to and engage with them meaningfully. The cultural figure that reflects this stance is not the scientist or engineer, but the gardener, as Astrid Schwarz points out forcefully.

This observation emphasizes a productive dialogue between anthropocentrism and its alternative, such as posthumanism, within the humanities. Since non-anthropocentric research on culture is conducted by humans, we ultimately cannot escape ethical anthropocentrism unless we relinquish the core idea of human autonomy, as upheld by German idealism. This suggests that we need to adopt an ethics of inquiry that encourages a transformative approach to exploring the relationship between the human and the more-than-human. Richard Grusin exemplifies this by arguing that when we study the lives of trees, we can also redefine our own cultural identity to become more “tree-like.” Martin Bohle asserts that culture plays a vital role in the Earth’s system and its broader physical dynamics; thus, humans must accept the responsibility of shaping their culture accordingly.

Cultural science ultimately transcends the traditional boundaries of science as they were established in the 19th century, a time when it became separated from other fields of human knowledge that were still integrated within German idealism. This philosophical framework maintained ‘natural philosophy’ as a fundamental science grounded in a universal notion of spirit. In the term ‘cultural science,’ the word ‘science’ does not imply a reduction of cultural research to mere scientific analysis, as seen in approaches like evolutionary psychology. Instead, the ‘cultural’ aspect draws the ‘science’ into its sphere, thereby overcoming the divide between the two cultures of science and the humanities, famously articulated by C.P. Snow (2018). Jason Pott’s theory of embeddings provides the formal structure of this reintegration.

What does the fusion of the ‘two cultures’ mean in practice? Don Ross’s work in comparative cognitive science suggests an illustration. On one hand, we can scientifically investigate how specific environmental conditions have shaped the cognitive similarities between elephants and humans in a distant evolutionary past. On the other hand, by understanding how this cognitive convergence manifests in different forms of memory, communication, and social behavior, we can examine collaborative creative actions that relate to elephants. We can even envision employing artificial intelligence to create personas of individual elephants, making their culture more tangible to us. This aligns with the increasing number of projects that use AI to foster connections with other species (Bridle 2022). Cultural science is the discipline that encompasses and frames such endeavors. Let us move on!

References

Basso, Frédéric, und Carsten Herrmann-Pillath. Embodiment, Political Economy and Human Flourishing: An Embodied Cognition Approach to Economic Life. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024.

Braidotti, Rosi. Posthuman knowledge. Medford, MA: Polity, 2019.

Bridle, James. Ways of being: beyond human intelligence. London: Allen Lane an imprint of Penguin Books, 2022.

Chandler, Daniel. Semiotics: the basics. Fourth edition. The basics. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. Perigee trade pbk. ed. A Perigee Book. New York, New York: Berkeley Publ. Group, 2005.

Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten. „Dilthey and Darwin Combined? 19th Century Geisteswissenschaft for 21st Century Cultural Science“. Cultural Science Journal 10, Nr. 1 (10. Juli 2018): 42–53. https://doi.org/10.5334/csci.108.

Malafouris, Lambros. How things shape the mind: a theory of material engagement. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2013.

Mirowski, Philip, und Edward M. Nik-Khah. The knowledge we have lost in information: the history of information in modern economics. New York City: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Popper, Karl R. Objective knowledge: an evolutionary approach. Rev. ed. Oxford [Eng.] : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1979.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Eastford, Connecticutt: Martino Fine Books, 2018.