Pojęcie kultury politycznej w realiach postoświeceniowej racjonalności

Abstract

Political culture is a narrower part of a larger whole known as culture. The meaning of this
concept has evolved over time and acquired new meanings, which influenced the understanding
of the concept of political culture. In this process, the changing understanding of human
rationality was critical. In the classical concept, rationality meant the ability of the human mind
to recognize truth, good and beauty and the related objective standards of excellence in each
of the areas of reality around man. Recognizing and implementing these standards, a person
was to rise to a higher and more rational level, which was to determine his cultural development
and achieving successive levels of cultural progress. The change in the understanding of
human rationality brought about by Descartes consisted in the fact that what was the content
of human reason began to be recognized as rational. The consequence was the emergence of
a multitude of different concepts of reality, none of which was able to demonstrate its superiority.
Recognized standards and methods of rational justification have proved insufficient to
distinguish what is true from what is false and what is rational from the irrational. In the face of
a multitude of different visions of reality, the only thing left was to take the position of relativism,
which became the basic criterion of rationality and the main determinant of the level of political
culture.