"Hell is Other People"

So I started with a diagram about something totally different, and ended up with this. Certainly not the most interesting form, I know (props to Caitlin and Pax - must be something at the Inklings theme house that breeds genius) but let me try to explain this.

I decided to surround all my arguments on the way culture is viewed by these theorists. It seems (for most of them) inescapable, but for different reasons. I have culture working in two broad ways: in conflict with the idea of "self" and as seen in the way we comprehend. These two subcategories I broke down even further into two other subcategories. For Self, which I'm using here more to mean the thing for what it really is, is broken into Individual and Natural World. The Individual is obviously just that - the single human being, particularly focusing on the intellectual aspect. The Natural World is both nature and the natural biology of humans, which I'll talk a little bit about later. On the Comprehension side, I've got culture as being necessary in the understanding of a text, and insignificant to understanding. Some of the figures could have crossed into several of these distinct categories, but for the sake of simplicity and not confusing myself, I kept it pretty basic.

Most of these figures are pretty self-explanatory as to why they are located where they are, but I'll note a few of them just for clarification. The fellows under Individual seem to feel than in one way or another, the cultural dictates the way the individual thinks or lives, generally in contrast to the way the individual might choose to think or live for themselves were they outside of culture. Nietzsche I have in Conflict with the Individual self and the articles in the Natural World. Nietzsche argued that studying nature is irrelevant because we can never see the thing in itself, thanks to the lenses we have developed for ourselves through what culture has taught us. Kant doesn't seem to think we can understand anything, so I just put him in conflict with everything. When it comes to Freud and Lacan, the natural human state (the subconscious or the id, whatever you want to call it) is repressed by the social constructions individuals have on themselves, thus both the intellectual individual and the physical one would be at odds with culture. In terms of comprehension, Hume and Schleiermacher both rely on cultural context for understanding. Aristotle's theory of poetry is based on the culture of his time and how a text functions successfully within that realm, and Augustine notes that we need to do a contextual reading. As for those under the Insignificant category, they seem more concerned with the individual than the culture. And that's the basics of it.