Publication Details

Abstract

In the paper the author deals with the relation of culture and value and the relation of culture and civilization. In the historical succession she examines philosophical evaluation of culture and cultivating process, starting from the admiring presentation of human work creating culture, with the sophists and the tragedians, especially with Aeschylus and Sophocles. The first shock caused by the negative consequences of culture is found with Plato. He is above all disturbed by negative effects of seafaring which destructed forest for construction of ships and thus transformed the coastal wooded mountains into the waste land. As a counterpart the author points at the speech of Pericles, praising Athens, in Thucydides’ History. She pays attention to high evaluation of human activity, forming culture, and simultaneously she enumerates all constituents of the content of culture in the period of Renaissance. In this connection she mentions the significance of Comenius. She considers the contemporary disquiet, caused by negative effects of human transformation of Nature and by the fear of civilization, to be a typical characteristic of contemporary capitalism. Yet the harmful consequences of human interference with Nature may also appear in socialist countries. In the end the author deals with efforts to remove the damage in Nature and she delimitates possibilities of philosophy in this process.