[8]

II -- Thurs., Sept. 29, 1955 I suppose that some of you didn’t make it last Thursday, so for their benefit I want to repeat some of the technical arrangements of these lectures. ... I want to review briefly the main line of thought of the first lecture. I said that the two subjects, religion and culture, are very large ones and must be limited to those points in which all the different cultural functions become religiously relevant. In order to make this understandable, we have to discuss first the meaning of culture^a, and then the meaning of religion, and on this basis, relate them to each other during the lectures of this and the next semester. By the way, this brings me to another technical problem. I have been asked whether it is possible to take this [course] only for one semester, either for this or the next semester. I believe there is no difficulty of doing so because this semester will mainly deal with a special group of cultural functions, in contrast to those with which we will deal next semester. The organization of the lectures is identical with the organization of culture. Perhaps you remember that I defined culture^b as the creative encounter between a subject and its object, in which something is produced which has the power of independent being--which has an independent power of being^c. Now to this I got a typed question, and I think a very good example. Please don’t hesitate to do that, from lecture to lecture--or, if vou are very courageous... raise your finger... (which really should not take much courage!)... QUESTION: When you explained that creativity ^dis involved whenever you have an object capable of exising in an independent way, what did you mean by "capable of existing in an independent way"? Dr. TILLICH: Now this is a very good and certainly a very necessary question. The idea was the following. If we have the subject (who is a poet, let us say), and have the English language ^e(which is the material object this poet encounters), then in a cultural creativity he is able to make, out of this object, something new which is neither he alone nor the English language alone, but is something new created out of the encounter^f between him as subject, and the English language as object. And this encounter produces a poem. Now all of you have made poems, in their life, but not all of these poems have the power-of-being^g! [laughter] and a cultural creation in the realm of poetry ^his a poem