circumstances in which people began to use the word “culture” to describe the rational process of individual and social upbringing of the human being. I shall explain how these two terms, which may well designate the entirety of Greek and Roman civilisations as opposed to barbarism, came to be seen as identical.
The second part of this book discusses the way in which the Christian ideal of culture stemmed from Hellenic culture. Here, I shall indicate the roots and characteristic features of the specifically Christian understanding of culture, while also explaining how Christianity both complemented Greek philosophy and drew new conclusions from it. The primary link between the ancient heritage and the achievements of medieval thought was the thought of the Early Church Fathers. Therefore, I shall present the contributions to the humanities of: Saint Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Marcus Minucius Felix, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Cassiodorus, Saint Gregory the Great. Their great contribution consisted in the strengthening of a positive bond between Christianity and Hellenism. However, it is important to remember that their understanding of the Christian paideia was based on the so-called Christian philosophy, which did not distinguish between philosophical and theological aspects but rather saw them as standing in a mutually inspiring relationship. I shall describe this approach in terms religious personalism. Next, I shall prove that the theological and philosophical aspects were separated when philosophy became autonomous, which finally took place in the thirteenth century, thanks to Saint Thomas Aquinas.
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The research perspective adopted for this part of the book will allow us to shift from historical discourse to metaphysical, or more precisely, anthropological discourse. I shall demonstrate that Saint Thomas’ emphasis on the role of the existence of beings in the world made philosophy more realistic and thereby provided philosophical cognition with more direct view of the world and empirical verifiability. I shall present St. Thomas’s notion of the person. I shall explain what it means that the human being is disposed towards personal life and point to those elements which should be actualized within that being. Finally, I shall demonstrate that is thanks to the knowledge of those elements that the human being can rationally and responsibly choose the ultimate purpose of his or her life and form it according to this purpose.
In the third part of the book, I shall present, on the one hand, the reasons and circumstances of the emergence of so-called popular culture, and, on the other hand, the views of the selected authors from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, who opposed those tendencies and championed high culture. As we shall learn, they employed the term “high culture” in a variety of contexts. Among the thinkers who devoted a great deal of work to the issues of high culture is Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), whose collection of essays, Culture and Anarchy, is considered to be one of the first works in English addressing these questions. In turn, authors such as José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), and Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) believed that because of the tendency to remove the division between high and low culture, high culture is virtually brought down to the level of low culture, and, consequently, the former falls apart. Another advocate of high culture was Roger Scruton (1944–2020), who noticed that now, more than any time before, it needs to be saved and preserved. High culture was also addressed by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), whose 1935–1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction became very influential, and later by Theodor Adorno (1903–1969).
After discussing their views, I shall analyse the anthropological and philosophical approach to culture represented by the members of the Lublin School of Philosophy – Karol Wojtyła (the future Pope John Paul II; 1920–2005) and Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec (1921–2008). Although both those thinkers approached the idea of culture using slightly different philosophical perspectives, each of them defined culture as a way of existence characteristic of human beings, which makes it possible to bring the human capability for action to a level on which it is revised to the greatest possible degree, to the optimum potentiae, the highest level. Even if their approaches differ in details, both these thinkers define the human being as the creator of culture. Thus, they meet at the point which ←14 | 15→appears to be the centre of the reflection of culture, namely – the conviction that culture is an indispensable context of human life.
In the Bibliography, I provide both source literature and auxiliary literature. The listed publications include both source texts (of Greek and Roman authors) and later contributions (from the nineteenth century and later). I also list numerous Polish, English, German, French, and Spanish studies concerning the issues discussed in this book. It seems that no one other book so far has provided such a comprehensive elaboration of the problem of philosophical and anthropological foundations of the dispute about culture.
The analyses and insights presented herein can be inspiring for contemporary research on the issues concerning culture. This is even more important given the fact that contemporary studies of culture are dominated by sociology (cultural anthropology) and psychology, which lack a deeper philosophical perspective, let alone one stemming from the realistic tradition.
The metaphysical and anthropological perspective presented in this book provide a new philosophical explanation of high culture as the crowning form of culture as such. I shall demonstrate that, in order to resolve the dispute about culture, one needs to ultimately resolve the dispute about the human being, that is, to find the answer to such questions as: What is the actualization the human being’s potential? And what does it mean to live in a human way? The emphasis on the existential structure of the human being equips us with an objective criterion with which to assess various cultures and cultural forms. This way, we obtain a very elaborate tool for the study of human culture. This tool shall allow us to meaningfully answer the question, which of those forms make us more human, and explain which are a threat to us and why. Therefore, the issues analysed in this dissertation are crucial for the understanding of culture, its various definitions and theories, both contemporary and those developed in the past.
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1 See: W. Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas, trans. Ch. Kasperek, Warsaw 1980, p. 37.
Chapter 1 Classical culture – towards perfection
1. From valour to magnanimity – the way of the Greeks
1.1. THE OLD NOBILITY MODEL OF EDUCATION
What we call culture today has its beginning as early as with the Greeks. They were distinguished by the extraordinary skill of inquiry into the laws governing reality. This skill is visible in all aspects of their lives – in the way they thought, spoke and acted, in various directions of artistic creativity. The Greeks looked for laws in the essence of things and tried to follow them in their lives. They comprehended particular facts in the light of a single vision, which in turn explained their place and purpose as a part of a certain whole. It can be clearly seen in one of the greatest achievements of the Greek genius, namely philosophy. It is an expression of that very ability to notice the unchangeable order which is the basis of everything that happens and changes in nature and in the human world. The philosophical sense of the Greeks consisted in the fact that they were able to discover the universal laws at the basis of human nature and point to the norms stemming from those laws in the fields of personal actions and in the order of the society.
The Greeks used their knowledge of the natural rules of human life and the inherent rights governing its physical and spiritual forces when studying the issues of culture and education. Both of the indicated terms were of similar meaning for the Greeks. At that point, education started to be understood as a type of effort aimed at the specified – everlasting and universal ideal
