Stanisław Brzozowski’s “enormity of culturological work” as the beginning for the study of cultural transformation programs

Abstract

The first use of the word “culturological” (kulturoznawczy) in Polish literature belongs to the critic Stanisław Baczyński, who in his 1923 sketch Conscience of the Polish Intellect used the adjective in the characterization of Stanisław Brzozowski’s writings. Therefore, the semantics of what is culturological, which preceded the post-war formation of the Polish academic discipline of culturology in the 1960s and 1970s, referred to the observable relation between the level of critical discourses and the transformations of self-knowledge of cultural participants. The contemporary semantics of what is culturological in the Polish language refers also to the silent residuum of knowledge about the “structural incompleteness of culture,” which calls for new cultural inventions and new cultural practices. This semantics also implies a more conscious attitude towards values and norms defining the positions of different actors on the cultural scene.