Kultūros ir politikos santykis klasikinės tradicijos požiūriu
The relationship between culture and politics from the perspective of the classical tradition

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on the relationship between culture and politics characteristic of the classical tradition. It points to such aspects of classical thought as politeia and diagoge, now being subsumed by the term "culture". Aristotle distinguished the noble pastime of serious leisure from the pastime devoted to play and relaxation. In modern culture, the latter meaning of pastime replaces the former. This in turn brings about the transformation of the political realm, as is evident in the waning of politics and the advent of "political" show and play, processes grounded in trivial thought and popular sentiment. Devaluation of serious leisure and liberal education which, according to Aristotle, should be preferred to the teaching of the merely useful and illiberal, leads to the triumph of the aristotelian banausoi — the base and the ignoble, the purely "mechanical". As a result of this cultural trend, one finds creeping conformism and nothing but "specialists without spirit and voluptuaries without heart" in both the academic and public spheres. Politeia in its classical meaning has disappeared from the realm of culture, reflecting to a degree the decline of the aristotelian diagogė. Modern politics has to a great extent lost its cultural and ethical core; it finds itself heavily weighed on the side of administrative and economic matters. For this reason the waning of politics appears to be not only the triumph of paidia (play) or "banausic" thinking; it also means that the government of men is being successfully replaced by economic activity and the administration of things. The classic relationship between culture and politics is essentially blurred and distorted by the above mentioned trends.

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