Like other animals, man has also reproduced ways of living in a community, in addition to having developed ways of survival and defense. However, it did this in the most complex way possible, producing societies, values, customs, in short, producing culture. If, on the one hand, there are human skills that can be given by instinct, there are others that require training, learning, assimilation of knowledge. These, certainly, cannot do without an education process, be it systematic (as seen in school), be it less formal, promoted by parents, family members, social and cultural environment in which the individual is inserted.
Human cultures created specific ways to interact with nature so that men could meet their own needs, as well as so that they could interact with each other. In this way, this learning is transmitted across generations, through the processes of socialization and social interaction. This means to say that a condition of total isolation from any of us, from birth, would prevent the development of characteristics considered in fact human.
In isolation, only the most instinctive reactions would be guaranteed. This is the case of the character in “The enigma of Kaspar Hauser”, a film by the German Werner Herzog, produced in the 1970s. This cinematographic work tells the story of a man who from his birth to much of his adult life was isolated, facing the most diverse difficulties in a late process of socialization. When being socialized, he leaves a situation of total alienation from the reality around him, becoming someone with critical points of view in relation to the context in which he was inserted. In other words, if he didn't know or assimilate the codes of society before (or any kind of knowledge or knowledge that would actually make you a social being), starts to understand them, to the point of having an opinion about they. One of the main difficulties faced by Kaspar Hauser was his inability to communicate with the world around him. This makes us think of the enormous importance of language, as well as of symbol systems as a whole. Symbols and interactions are important for the transmission of knowledge through communication.
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Man tries to dominate the world around him by developing skills, attributing meaning and meaning for things, in addition to mastering the notions of time and space so fundamental to the organization of their life. In this sense, human cultures are created which, roughly speaking, consist of systems of thought, customs, of specific knowledge and knowledge for the organization of life, and that vary and change between the societies.
From this interaction with the world around him, man produces and reproduces knowledge and information, an exercise that allowed the birth of science as a product of human thought, the result of this eagerness to know, to want to explain, to know, to dominate, to want to transform. We can say that the knowledge produced by man begins to be a tool for life, to overcome obstacles. But how do we produce this knowledge over the centuries? Although man-made, is science always in your favor? Would this production have followed the same criteria all along? Are information and knowledge the same thing? Considering the consequences to modern life of such an accelerated development of science, as well as the aggravation of some problems social in capitalist society, we may or may not reassess the directions of production of human thought and the desires to dominate the nature? Worth the reflection.
Paulo Silvino Ribeiro
Brazil School Collaborator
Bachelor in Social Sciences from UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
Master in Sociology from UNESP - São Paulo State University "Júlio de Mesquita Filho"
Doctoral Student in Sociology at UNICAMP - State University of Campinas
