Editorial: VALUES AND IDEALS. THEORY AND PRAXIS Part IV IDEALS AND VALUES IN RELIGION AND MYTH IDEALS AND VALUES IN ART VALUES AND IDEALS IN SCIENCE AND THE VALUE OF SCIENCE

• Authors: Czarnocka Małgorzata , Tajsin Emily
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This is the fourth of a series of issues of Dialogue and Universalism featuring a selection of peer-reviewed materials submitted to the 11th World Congress of the International Society for Universal Dialogue, held in Warsaw, Poland, on July 11–15, 2016.1 This Dialogue and Universalism issue includes papers on basic cultural forms: religion and myth, art, and science. From a more general perspective, it concerns sophisticated manifestations of human spirit (objective mind). Because it is spirit which seems to be—if one freely follows Hegel’s tradition—a common core of all cultural forms as well as all ethnic, national etc. cultures. In short, cultural forms in a generalized sense. The concept of spirit (in German Geist, in English also: non-subjective mind, collective consciousness) that is taken here into account comes from a sustained philosophical tradition, among others from Hegel’s system of objective spirit. Spirit has appeared as a basis of culture in philosophical conceptions in the past. Its apogee seems to be in Hegel’s monumental Phenomenology of Spirit. The concept of spirit was still used at the turn of the century and in the first decades of the 20th century—in impressive considerations on culture by among others Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel, Max Scheler and Ernst Cassirer. Especially the significance of Cassirer’s now partly forgotten work for the philosophy of culture cannot be overestimated. However, nowadays spirit is predominantly regarded as an anachronistic and unfounded philosophical hypostasis. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to claim that this concept might be restored in new contexts, in modified senses, and then it might serve as an enlightened guideline in comprehending culture in a universal way. Spirit as the objective mind may be regarded as a uniting, and at the same time founding, factor for all cultural forms, or, in other words, for all the manifestations of culture. Its drawbacks—when it is detached from a theoretical context— are excessive generality and, in result, partial indefiniteness. So, it would have to be built in a system of thought to gain a more concrete and definite sense. In recent decades universalistic approaches to culture have been largely expelled from philosophy and intellectual thinking. In fashionable and prevailing intellectual trends, culture has been (and still is) apprehended mainly as a variety of cultural forms, i.e. as a set of ethnic, national, humanistic, scientific and religious cultures which are different from each other, even incomparable. In studying culture, the focus has been on the differentiae specificae of cultural manifestations, while their common attributes, in fact their essence, have been set aside. The highlighting of differences and simultaneous removal of similarities, as well as the common foundation of cultural forms, have serious deficiencies, not only for philosophy but also for collective awareness. They lead, or may lead, to increasing gaps between nations and ethnic, religious, racial, scientific or religious communities—generally speaking, between communities of cultural forms. These gaps, in turn, pose obstacles to intersubjective communication, and, subsequently, to more integration and coexistence between people. While humanity urgently needs a common modus vivendi, and for that a basis of understanding and communicating between different cultural communities. A uniting cultural basis should rather be moved into the foreground—both in collective and individual consciousness and in theoretical investigations. Besides, from a theoretical point of view, only revealing a network of both cultural differences and cultural common features can adequately characterize culture as such, and approach its deepest layer. Therefore, it seems that over the years of propagating radical variants of multiculturalism (cultural particularism, as a matter of fact), philosophy could, or even should, try to return to a universalistic perspective, one in which cultural forms constitute a unity, because all they have—as may be maintained against postmodernist beliefs—a common ground. It is the concept of spirit which is a reasonable, or even the best candidate for an integrating common ground. It, of course, also embraces so-called material culture which is founded by spirit. However, the concept of spirit—apart from being concretized and filled with a precise content—should be adjusted to contemporary philosophical findings. The point is that spirit—seen as the core of culture—may be now restored in the philosophy of culture only when it “comes down to earth.” Culture comes down to earth in two steps: first, by connecting culture with nature, and, second, by immersing culture in the entire human world. In general, the intellectual attitude of our times postulates a bond and mutual conditioning between nature and culture. Today culture is no longer considered a pure sphere of transcendence separated from human biological life. Twentieth- century theories of culture, among others those proposed by Scheler, Plessner and Simmel, negate culture’s lack of animality. The mentioned thinkers, and others, regard culture and nature (animality) as two complementary manifestations of humanity connected with each other by the relations of emergence and constitution: nature (animality) co-constitutes culture and culture emerges from nature. So, the pair culture-nature has been negated as a pair of opposites, and instead is accepted as a complementary unit. In the second step, culture comes down to earth by connecting it with all human activity. On one hand, cultural forms are penetrated by praxis. Praxis, in turn, co-forms art and science, and strongly influences religious systems. Culture deals with all the social and individual spheres of human life. It cannot be treated as an isolated land in the human world; it is its omnipresent layer, affected by, and affecting, the whole human world. This founding feature of culture, i.e. its bonding with human social problems, is seen in most of the papers included in this Dialogue and Universalism issue.

• Publisher: Instytut Filozofii i Socjologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk; Fundacja Filozofia Na Rzecz Dialogu
• Journal: Dialogue and Universalism
• Year: 2017
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 5-7

Contributors

author

Czarnocka Małgorzata

• Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. Nowy Świat 72, 00–330 Warszawa, Poland

author

Tajsin Emily

• Kazan Federal University, Russia