"The second fundamental feature of culture is that all culture has an element of striving"
About this Quote
Huizinga’s line lands with the cool authority of a historian who has watched civilizations rise not just on tools and laws, but on restless appetite. “Striving” is a deceptively plain word here: it smuggles in ambition, discipline, competition, and the ache of incompleteness. Culture, in this view, isn’t a decorative layer atop “real life.” It’s the engine that keeps a society reaching beyond mere survival, turning necessity into aspiration and routine into ritual.
The specific intent is corrective. Huizinga is pushing back against definitions of culture that treat it as a museum of finished achievements - art on walls, texts on shelves, traditions safely preserved. He wants culture understood as a verb, not a noun: an ongoing project that demands effort and creates stakes. The subtext is almost moral, but not pious. If culture is made of striving, then it is also made of friction: standards to meet, status to contest, meanings to negotiate, futures to argue over. That reframes culture as inherently dynamic and, crucially, unequal - not everyone gets to define what counts as “higher” or “better.”
Context matters. Writing in the shadow of early 20th-century mass politics and mechanized war, Huizinga had reason to distrust complacent narratives of progress. Striving can produce cathedrals and symphonies; it can also produce nationalism, purity campaigns, and the brutal demand to outdo rivals. The quote works because it refuses the comforting idea of culture as mere refinement. It insists that wherever humans build meaning, they are also reaching, grasping, and often wrestling.
The specific intent is corrective. Huizinga is pushing back against definitions of culture that treat it as a museum of finished achievements - art on walls, texts on shelves, traditions safely preserved. He wants culture understood as a verb, not a noun: an ongoing project that demands effort and creates stakes. The subtext is almost moral, but not pious. If culture is made of striving, then it is also made of friction: standards to meet, status to contest, meanings to negotiate, futures to argue over. That reframes culture as inherently dynamic and, crucially, unequal - not everyone gets to define what counts as “higher” or “better.”
Context matters. Writing in the shadow of early 20th-century mass politics and mechanized war, Huizinga had reason to distrust complacent narratives of progress. Striving can produce cathedrals and symphonies; it can also produce nationalism, purity campaigns, and the brutal demand to outdo rivals. The quote works because it refuses the comforting idea of culture as mere refinement. It insists that wherever humans build meaning, they are also reaching, grasping, and often wrestling.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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