Kult kultury

Abstrakt

The cult of culture

European thought, built on the respect for hierarchy and on binary value judgement, generated two competing ideas of culture, ideas forming various alliances with one another. The notion of a broadly defined culture took over the old functions of the “human world;” a narrow definition was used to describe all that was intellectually and artistically creative in this world. Both approaches are children of their time and contain traces of conceptualisation determined by convictions, experiences and state of knowledge at the time. The contemporary cult of change, reducing cultural traditions to their ludic, pragmatic or ornamental functions, may cause either an inconceivable change in the social relations we know or a radicalisation of conservative attitudes.