Polemiki: Kwestia kultury w nowoczesności, czyli co widać z Olimpu, a czego nie widać. (Uwagi do Lecha Witkowskiego)
Dialogues and polemics: The Issue of Culture in Modernity: On What May, and What May Not Be Seen from the Olympus. (A Dispute with Lech Witkowski)

Summary/Abstract: Our essay is a polemic with Lech Witkowski’s philosophy of culture; with his thinking about the essence of the era known as “modernity,” and with the role he assigns to the education and the individually designed spiritual development, conceived of as a search for encounters with cultural authority. By analyzing a number of key themes touched upon in the work of the author of the “Saga of Authorities” and by watching how his central concepts and assumptions operate, we make a series of critical statements of which the common denominator is our suspicion that Lech Witkowski’s theory of culture is too elitist in nature. Moreover, we criticize his paradoxically conservative reaction to the progress of modernity which not only removes the traditional divisions between higher and lower culture, but which above all imposes a necessity to “get one’s hands dirty” through the confrontation with the system of education (including teachers at all levels of education), which imposes the necessity to face the ambivalence (in the sense of understanding the irreversibility of the simultaneous ending of the old and opening of the new ways of being in culture) of the new world and a new type of man characterized by mass syndrome.

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