Kultura i życie. Z problematyki kultury u Stanisława Brzozowskiego

Abstract

The thesis deals with the conception of culture, this problem being the most important fragment of Stanisław Brzozowski’s philosophy. According to him, culture plays a secondary part in relation to life processes which aim at the reatining of mankind in „extrahuman element”. Therefore an understading of cultural processes is not possible if one does not take into consideration these earlier processes connected with the maintaining of life or if one reduces human activity and psyche only to rational, intellectual motives and essences. An elementary, „vital” attitude towards life based upon biological reactions and connected, with a practical control of the world leeds one better than logical contemplative studies into the depths of „extrahuman existence”. Our intellectual life and cultural phenomena should not be considered as self-contained values. Thought and culture can exist in the world thanks to the „effort of life”. The cathegory of life — in connexion with life philosophy (Nietzsche, James, Sorel, Bergson) — not that of work, is the most important and basic one in Brzozowski’s philosophy. Brzozowski represented also an original conception of culture, according to which all the substances given to humanity, attainable for it (among them nature and cognitive substances) are elements of culture for they are results of human labour and cognizance. An undefined transcendentalism is opposed to such a broad interpretation of culture.