Culture: Meanings and Values or a Multisensory Orgy?

The article presents a unusual take on the subject of culture not from the point of view its internal, abstract, immeasurable, yet accessible to cognition content, but from the point of view of its vehicles, or artifacts. The author of the text placed language among the most important external manifestations of culture and focused on how the relationship between language and culture works in practice. The article is divided into three parts, each focused on a different aspect of this relationship. The first one presents a series of theories on meaning and the material and immaterial manifestations of culture as discussed in the humanities. The second one is devoted to physical and corporeal meanings of language. The author presents observations in the field of semiotics which were initiated in the classical era and experimentally confirmed in twentieth-century studies. The third part of the article focuses on the issue of meaning as a biological phenomenon. The author deliberates on the meanings in language that stem from the sounds of words, articulation, and their psychological dimension.