This chapter is a methodological retrospective on the philosophy of culture as one of the most important modes of Western philosophical discourse. It is also an exposition of a critical attitude towards historicism, as well as of efficiency and its presuppositions. The significance of such problematics (which prima facie belong to intellectual historiography and therefore are thoroughly professional) is now evident. Lithuania faces the need to perceive its own culture and its own political and philosophical consciousness. The realization of the need to identify herself in terms of belonging to a Western philosophical tradition, followed by the creative attempts reflectively to remap against that background her own metaphysical tradition, is in direct proportion to the level of the intellectual and cultural maturity to which it ardently aspires.

The guidelines for an authentic political, ethical and philosophical consciousness are rooted in the phenomena of spiritual existence that emerged during the inter-war period. During the first Independent Republica Lithuania’s philosophical visage appeared to be determined by the speculative cultural-religious discourse shaped by a desperate search for means of politico-cultural self-identification. Taken as a whole, Lithuanian philosophy, conceived as a vital move toward self-identification, turned out to be a successful reinterpretation of the Western intellectual tradition. By and large it was a productive succession and combination of problems raised by, on the one hand, neo-Thomism and, on the other by the philosophy of culture (Kulturphilosophie). The intersection of problems raised by the German (and Russian) tradition of the philosophy of culture and by the Catholic philosophy of religion continued to be the most important and conspicuous characteristic of inter-war Lithuanian philosophy.

Therefore it is not surprising that the realistic methodology that underpinned the traditional philosophy of culture was reanimated and reinterpreted also in the second, post-soviet, republican era. Restored together with national, inter-war independence it offers to play a leading role in both the analysis of social existence and cultural-intellectual self-reflection. However, nowadays the "most powerful historical experience" is the heritage of "dialectical" Marxist attitudes and its received habits of thinking. The overwhelming potential of the latter shows itself in the conscious and strenuous efforts to overcome those vestiges of the recent totalitarian past. With few exceptions, however, the will to be rid of them is based not on authentic self-limiting criticism or defensive liberal tolerance, but rather on the ideological pressures of the political conjuncture. And because both restituted and restituting trends, that is, the inter-war intellectual mainstream geared to neo-Thomism and Kulturphilosophie, and the Soviet tradition enthroned in dialectical materialism, are frankly foundationalist, realistic and monologically oriented, at the beginning of the 21st century the predominance of those methodological postures is sure to become even stronger.

That is why I believe the importance of critical reflection on the philosophy of culture and its polemic today exceeds the narrow professional limits of philosophical historiography and invades the vortex of culturological, socio-political and even economic discussions.

I will begin with a few observations that point to the main characteristics, which predetermined not only the stance of the philosophy of culture, but the nature and evolution of philosophical discourse in the West as well. My point is to disclose the methodological gist of Kulturphilosophie as a foundationalist stage and medium that stimulated ultra-radical social myths, induced senseless political projects, and endangered not only the moral, but even, to a definite extent, the conceptual collapse of post-Socratic philosophical discourse itself.

Greek philosophy, having laid the basis for the Western philosophical tradition, substantially preordained both the problematics and the methodological layers of present-day philosophical controversies. The first act is linked with the name of the Miletian school, the second one with the name of Socrates. Pre-Socratic Greek philosophy gave shape to the vocabulary of philosophical discourse and, most importantly, legitimized the constructive rules for the articulation of a specific philosophical vocabulary, i.e. defined the principle of theoretical abstraction that necessitates the reconstruction of natural language into the first human "artificial" — philosophical — secular language. In addition, it fixed fundamental epistemological and ontological distinctions (epistémé-doksa, human being-nature, quality-quantity, material-logos, nomos-physis) and finalized the term philosophy itself.

Authorship of the first philosophical Copernican revolution should be attributed to Socrates. He installed philosophical reflection, thereby making dialogue and discourse an axis of any philosophical move. The moral dimension of the ever-questioning and arguing individual becomes an indispensable prerequisite and normative standard for doing philosophy dialogically. It is the rational essence of morality that enables the properly philosophical — epistemological, ontological, or socio-political — discursive attitude. Knowledge of the good, according to Socrates, implies conforming to it, i.e. philosophical knowing by the same token already is a moral behavior. Truthful knowledge is good and therefore valid knowledge, and truth itself is possible only as a dialogical discovery predetermined by the specifically moral human condition.

Contemporary Western philosophy then has taken its start from Socratic discourse or more exactly from the birth of a person, a responsible questioner, whose position is, in the words of Habermas, a performative, communicative interaction from now on. The individual and always the dialogically questioning attitude is in charge of the authentic ability to self-identification and truth. Such an attitude, positing itself in honesty, integrity and openness, demonstrates itself as a public process of self-re-cognition, self-knowledge and self-manifestation. That means: having loaded oneself with theoretico-moral self-accountability the individual finds oneself as an asking and answering center of public philosophical discourse. The dialogization of philosophy means its individualization, personification and perfomatization. Thus philosophical enterprise was transformed into res-publica, — legalized as a public liberal space and filled with multi-voice discussions about questions that matter for mature human beings.

In this sense philosophy that transcends moral reality was disqualified — true knowledge cannot be immoral. Knowledge, considered as theory and truth, lost its pre-Socratic moral immunity. It became an object of moral evolution and a medium of establishing moral righteousness. An intellectual act of an immoral, or para-moral person was purged out of dialogical public philosophy. An ethical dimension of a person was discovered not only as the source of his ideal public self-articulation, but also as a possibility to act, to have valid ideas and to argue. It is only as an infant or being mentally deranged, i.e. before and after one is able to understand oneself as a self-accountable being, that the person is immoral and has not yet gained or already lost the possibility of leading a moral life. But a person as zoon politicon and Homo Philosophicus can make one’s life sensible only by being a moral or amoral creature — immorality is left with stones, sea, and animals, i.e., with non-persons. It is for this reason, that erudition, which has been conceived in the public spontaneity of Socratic dialogue, is so often (although unfortunately not always) accompanied by tolerance, liberal values and directed against any form of physical or intellectual aggression. As a matter of fact, from then on we have the option of holding onto the post-Socratic tradition of, emancipated, immoral philosophical discourse.

However, the concept of individuality, a Latin equivalent of a Greek atomon and an indispensable characteristic of the modern persona, became a central philosophical term only in the 18th century. Thus Fichte, interpreting the Leibnitzian concept of the individual monad and Kantian individual spontaneity posited as a result of transcendental individual judgement, coined the notion of introspective self-knowledge and self-building as a central productive principle of world structure. Rousseau pointed to accountability as the basic coordinate of theoretical investigation and personal identity, although he cultivated that notion mainly within the boundaries of socio-political and ethical discourse. Kierkegaard linked individual accountability with the imminence of personal choice, i.e. he made individuality the starting point of religion, philosophy, ethics and culture. In the first half of the 20th century existentialism discovered the principle of dialogic and therefore socio-moral individuality as an inevitable and effective temporal existence. Finally, in the second half of the century analytic philosophy gradually came to the conclusion that semantic and syntactic analysis cannot be satisfactory without taking seriously the socio-pragmatic dimension of linguistic social interaction. The predominance of the principles of performance, social interaction and moral accountability leaves us with no doubts that the Socratic theme of self-accountable dialectics has become the core of the postmodern theoretical controversies.

The earlier dissemination of the principle of accountable individuality had been hampered by other methodological constants, which are especially clearly distinguished in the 19th century tradition of Kulturphilosophie. Socrates’s claim that ratio must be a criterion of truth and morality in the short run already turned into radical questioning of the principle of personal accountability in Platonic thought. The irony (though not out of the blue) is that one, who had deliberately worked on the notions of Socratic philosophy, ended up creating a methodology that in the end thoroughly negated the self-accountable and thereby self-limiting spirit of its tentative prototype. Of course, the irreducibly controversial nature of philosophical discourse always was among its indispensable conditions. However Plato, who considered himself a faithful disciple of Socrates, ended with the annulment of the most precious discovery of his teacher — "I know that I don’t know".

Methodological essentialism could be conveniently interpreted in terms of nihilism and serve as a solid basis for an open apotheosis of anti-humanism. Plato created the first theoretically grounded secular Utopia to legitimize spiritual and political totalitarianism — the social myth founded on the supreme authority of philosophical discourse. Plato’s State not only proclaimed the "natural" inevitability of being a slave, the collective "well-being" deduced from such an essentialist statism nipped in the bud the principles of individual responsibility, freedom of choice, self-restricting reflection and doubt. By disallowing the virtue and right to individual understanding, by the same token it outlined those principles of methodological realism, which stand for irrationalism and anti-humanism. This omniscient panegyric to immoral violence in the name of "supreme order" or "ultimate nature" nolens volens questions the possibility of philosophical discourse itself, which is simply impossible without individual freedom to speak, to listen and to self-accountable argumentation. The claim to work out the final, i.e. ultimately true, theory or even to postulate the logical possibility and necessity of such a theoretical construction is nothing more than an endeavor to end the history of philosophy and free discourse. This pretentious vision assumed a variety of forms, from Plato’s State to contemporary communism and Marxism; in the last few centuries it became a native resident of our philosophical discourse.

Western philosophy of culture rests on methodological realism and its pretentious offspring — historicism. By historicism I mean a methodological principle of an analysis of the social world and its evolution, which (a) takes the whole of historical manifestations to be a derivative of some causal, functional or theological trans-historical reason, and which (b) interprets discursive rules of such a derivation in terms of impersonal and therefore immoral laws of development. Taking into account its historicist underpinning, Kulturphilosophie could be seen as the most radical negative expression of Socrates’s philosophical discourse. It is radical because it proclaims the end of intrinsically indefinite Socratic discourse due to its pregiven and already revealed "reason" and unmasked structure. To the extent that such claims are doomed to failure, they always enact critical argumentation and thereby adversely serve as an important guarantee of the further development of philosophical discourse. However the need to criticize the philosophy of culture arises not only as a natural development of a free philosophical polylogue: the need of criticism transcends the boundaries of philosophy and is needed as a form of social protection, i.e. as a political or ideological outpost of individual freedom in the dangerous presence or even aggressive siege of totalitarianism.

The oldest form of the methodological antipode of essentialism and ipso facto of modern historicism could be traced back to Greek skepticism or nominalism. Having arisen as early as in the fourth century BC and being a nucleus of methodological opposition to Platonic realism, it left its own markings on the future progression of Socratic values. It was Antisthenes, Socrates’s disciple and persistent opponent of Plato, who settled nominalism as a rational argumentative bedrock against essentialism. Antisthenes, a man who paced in front of confounded Eleans in order to prove the falsity of their argument of the non-existence of motion, refused the claim of essentialist narrative to be a vademecum of everyday life or its essential practical corrective. Historically such a possibility was uncovered thanks to the problematics articulated by the new sophistic movement. The latter emphasized the theoretical potential of the distinction between nomos and physis (law-nature), which had been envisaged already by pre-Socratic philosophy. This nomos-physis antinomy enacted the nominalistic project proclaiming not only the moral, but also the ontological primacy of individuality.

From then on the nominalistic attitude, molded by numerous interpretations in the course of the millennia, developed into a significant part of Western philosophical culture. Among the most important contributions in shaping contemporary nominalism, we find the well-known Medieval dispute concerning the ontological status of the universals, as well as the methodological work of Scotus, Hobbes, Occam, Locke, Hume and Berkeley. It is of the utmost importance that nominalistic methodology did not confine itself to epistemological problematics (mainly because the same must be asserted concerning methodological realism and historicism). Namely, those who defended the nominalist approach proved to be most consistent in rejecting the claims of any dictatorship and in grounding individualistic concepts as normative principles for socio-political criticism. The sequence of such developments can be traced in the philosophical controversies of the 20th century, including ongoing modern-postmodern disputes. In short, the parameters of the Western philosophical discourse continuously cultivated the polemical dichotomy built into the tension between Platonic and Antisthenian methodologies.

Though methodological realism and historicism had influenced the problematics of philosophical discourse and the ways of solving them; though their influence on different cultural spheres and most regretfully on politics, is undoubtedly significant; and though some concepts, matured by historicism, already have been transformed even into "self-evident" truths of common sense in a considerable part of Western oikumene, which undoubtedly covers Lithuania — the prospects of contemporary philosophy promise to reduce their influence.

Our existence is not aimed at the past. On the contrary, it is focused on the future, i.e. we are future-conscious self-accountable beings. This existential presupposition can and should be taken as an optimistic promise and obligation. Given an individual, who has the possibility of making his own choice and perceiving alternatives, the triumphant march of historicism and essentialism can at least be slowed down. That is the meaning of the famous existentialist’s idea: Werde, was du bist (be as you are able to be and already are), make yourself a person capable of envisaging and constructing your future existence. Turn your future into reality and reality into your past, strive for the future with all your might and hopes. Only you yourself can perceive your potential; there isn’t any recipe or prophetic vision powerful enough to foresee your potential and the mechanism of its realization.

In the next part of this article let me dwell on few questions, which are extensively discussed in the voluminous literature of Kulturphilosophie and are bound up with the problem of its origination in philosophical historiography.

Kulturphilosophie as a specific discourse on the specificity and logic of evolutionary developments of different stages of cultural worlds, originated not earlier than the beginning of 19th century. As follows from its basic methodological assumptions, it so relies on the modern philosophy of history that it obviously deserves to be conceived as a cultural variety of the latter. However, numerous studies, including those published in Lithuania, usually mention Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) as the "patriarch of modern historiosophy and cultural criticism" and thus volens nolens trace back the methodological beginning of Kulturphilosophie as early as the beginning of modern philosophy itself.

It is the latter thesis that I want to question. Such an attempt "to age" critical philosophy of culture is much more a matter of romantic insight than of a thorough analysis. In short, a belief that Vico began German philosophy’s historicism and therefore Kulturphilosophie is simply wrong. My argumentation is twofold. Firstly, critical philosophy of culture is methodologically impossible without the postulate of the historical pre-determination of individual (self-) consciousness, its fundamental historical limitedness. Secondly, there is not, and cannot be, such a point in Vico’s conception. While criticizing Cartesian skepticism towards history as a trustworthy science, the author of New Science could not hold such a conception of historical pre-determination, because he understood transcendentally, and not historically, the status of the ultimate historical object as well as the general methodology of its proper investigation.

1. Should Kulturphilosophie be understood as a study of cultural evolution, then one is sure to note an etymological dependence of cultural philosophy on the history of philosophy or historiosophy. Historiosophical discourse must not necessarily be based on historicist methodology. It can, as happened, for example, for the analytic tradition in the second half of 20th century, confine itself to a purely methodological study of history as a specific academic discipline. Nevertheless, in the 19th century it was an evolutionist methodology of historicism that turned into the methodological gist of Kulturphilosophie.

By and large, the inception of historicism in Western philosophy can be traced back to a Heraclitian vision of the formation of the cosmos. In post-Socratic philosophy the methodological paradigm of modern historicism was further anticipated by Platonism and its varieties. These promoted a kind of cosmocentric historicism, i.e., a reduction of the structures of social and historical existence into the architectonic equivalents of the speculative eternal existence of ideas. Gradually this was changed by the Christian theocentric historicism. The latter attempted to reduce the basics of human existence and co-existence to the translation of trans-human reality, predetermined by the transcendent reality. The successive ages of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, having risen against the domination of the theocentric paradigm, gravitated towards a new anthropologically oriented methodology. Nevertheless, historicity as an independent theoretical outlook and as an autonomous discursive field no longer harbored by cosmocentric or theocentric methodology, was not had in the Renaissance or Enlightenment. The Renaissance undoubtedly reanimated the old, practically-oriented conception of history, but such a reanimation was not supported by a substantial, theoretical backing: historical discourse was valued only to the extent of its capacity to advise people lost in the vortex of the contingencies of everyday life (and even this was granted as only a deliberative voice). It is symptomatic that Descartes, though he acknowledged the importance of commendable "scientific" history, considered the latter as ultimately an impossible enterprise because of the lack of available data. In other words, if the Renaissance searched for a methodology which should install historical discourse on the joint basis of anthropocentric applicability and theological transcendence, the Enlightenment added to that an equally sub specie aeternitatis corpus of quantitative analysis.

It was Romanticism which cleared the space for anthropocentric historiosophical discourse sui generis. Although one can come across the ideas of historical progress as well as the irreplaceable value of alien cultures already in the writings of Rousseau, the rise of modern philosophy of history must be linked with the name of Herder, who disputed the cosmopolitical and theological anthropocentrism of the Renaissance and rejected the Enlightenment’s conception of a panchronic, immutable essence of human nature. Declaring the historical evolution of individual consciousness and its immediate dependence on its cultural context constituted of its linguistic, national and "spiritual" socio-cultural milieu, Herder provided historicism with the modern methodology of Romanticism and thus established historiosophical reflection as a candidate for an all-embracing, consistent and self-dependent theoretical vision of human life. That is how modern historicism, nurtured by the Romanticism and classical German philosophy, — first of all by the works of Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Spengler, and (recently) Toynbee — has been turned into a powerful resident of the modern philosophical edifice and achieved its apex in the second half of the 19th century.

From a retrospective vantage point, modern anthropocentric historicism can be seen as one of the first archeological projects of individual moral consciousness, realized, inter alia, by the reduction of personal accountability and freedom to the anonymous structures of historical conjunctures understood as manifestations of the absolute spirit; the collective consciousness of class, nation, civilization or epoch; evolutionary tendencies of matter; or monadic structures of culture. In that, romantic historiosophy stands in direct opposition to the critical character of Kantian transcendental rationalism. Whereas Kantian criticism was intended to unveil the scale of rational knowledge and thereby to acknowledge the productivity of moral and scientific cognitive potential, modern historicism takes criticism to be an unmasking of the intrinsic impotence of rational knowledge, foreordained by its social and historical situatedness, and a validation of radical intellectual feebleness. The critical character of anthropocentric historicism reveals itself in the reduction of the individual constitution of meaning and truth to a function of irrational interactions and processes. Thus historicism manifests itself as the historical imprisonment of homo liberalis, as the depersonalization of individual rationality, its self-reflection and authenticity. It thereby deprives itself of the imperative of discursive Socratic accountability and eventually of the moral dimension as a whole. Modern historicism can acquire different shapes ranging from systematic Hegelian panlogism and Marxian historical materialism to the arbitrary eschatological prophesies of Oswald Spengler. Translated into the intellectual core of the ideological vocabulary, it already proved to be a constant threat of spiritual and political totalitarianism. Indeed, the history of the 20th century could unfortunately serve as a threatening display of the practical efficiency of such a translation — in the case of Lithuania its domination covered almost all four generations.

2. The realistic, but at the same time theocentric, orientation of Vico’s methodology, is related to modern anthropocentric historicism and follows from the way he uses the key notions of eternal and ideal history and language:

The sameness of ideas shared by the nations not in contact with one another must be supported by the common basis of truth. . . . The Common Sense of Mankind serves as a criterion inspired by Providence. . . . That is the source for the Rational Vocabulary, explaining the origin of all differently articulated languages — it is due to this Vocabulary alone that we can perceive the Eternal Ideal History, which provides us with histories of all the nations and periods (8, XIII axiom).

 

Such "rational vocabulary" or "rational language", according to Vico, "homogeneously grasps the essence of the objects, which are encountered in the social world. . . . This can be seen in proverbs . . . which are interpreted by all nations basically in the same way" (ibid., XXII). The existence of an eternal language, compounded of invariable concepts, is an ontological, panchronic kernel of individual consciousness. The historical evolution of humankind is not identical with that of individual consciousness. Providence, having determined the direction of humankind’s evolution by the single act of the Creation, is not the only transcendent corrective of social reality. The human being is the master of his or her free will and self-consciousness, and is not left alone before historic and cultural contingencies and social co-existence. The essential links of individuality are far from being horizontal — a person is not interpreted merely as a member of society and as a straight product of its interactive evolution. The source of cognitive productivity is localized in the vertical relations between the individual consciousness and transcendence. The warrant of true rational understanding and reliable interpretation rests with the possibility of direct divine help — benediction. The truthfulness of the outcome of historical interpretation, i.e. of the successful reconstruction of a genuine history of mankind, depends, firstly, on a pregiven ability to perceive and to identify the scheme of history that is established by Providence, secondly, true understanding, according to Vico, is directly dependent on divine inspiration, which lifts the veil woven of human vices that impedes human reason, first of all the veil of "national conceit and human haughtiness".

The first — reconstructive or identifying — move of the new historical interpretation is methodologically legitimized by Vico’s famous principle of the convergence of truth and creation: verum et factum convertuntur: Such a convergence is sustained by a methodological recognition of a kind of Platonic world of ideas. The concepts (ideas) enabling the comprehension of cultural phenomena reside in the reservoir of natural language and give sense to human behavior, human existence and historical development. One is capable of identifying and adequately interpreting any artifact or any action of some other person only because the perceiver and the object perceived are guided by the same bundle of values and notions. Vico does not conclude to the possibility of mutual understanding as a result of un-preconditioned inductive analysis or empirical acquaintance. On the contrary, it is derived from the pregiven system of codification — "Rational Language" (ibid., XXI) — that provides a proper understanding of action (creation) and its explanation (truthful interpretation). The latter would be impossible without the essentialist presupposition of the theocentric origin of a uniform human nature and the apodictic existence of Providence. Thus a perennial, a-historical "Rational Language" appears to be the principal methodological prerequisite and organon of historical discourse (ibid., XXII). This not only enables historical knowledge, but as a pregiven conditio sine qua non is indispensable in order to ensure the adequate results of any discursive activity. As a received hypostasis from the source of understanding, the Sensus Communis (ibid., XI, XII, XIII) enables us to dialogue and achieve mutual understanding. When properly recognized in philological, philosophical and, certainly, theological discourses, it authorizes true and reliable knowledge. Consequently, Vico’s New Science, methodologically backed by the maxim "verum et factum convertuntur", does not comply with a discipline of scientific history as established by modern historicism. Rather it turns out to be an effective backup of a theocentric methodology in a proper interpretation of obscure folios, social practices and theoretical discourses. In other words, verum et factum convertuntur is intended to signal the maximum expansion of the theocentric paradigm, not to question its value and reliability in favor of anthropological historicism.

The second methodological component of Vico’s New Science — divine incitement — is a theocentric amendment to Francis Bacon’s project. Bacon, the author of the famous theory of "idols" as obstacles impeding understanding, at the same time allowed for the possibility of getting rid of them altogether. After a successful therapeutic wiping clean of the impediments of the mind, a scientist with cognitive ability cleared of pre-judgements, i.e., tabula abrasa, could confidently resort to the new inductive-experimental method and thus perceive reality in a proper, non-biased way. Vico, resorting to the Baconian theory of abrasa, reiterates the necessity of divine blessing: he insists on the transcendent interference to "transform passions into virtues", which is equivalent to the erasure of the idols of national complacency and scientific "haughtiness". Nevertheless, the purification of soiled consciousness by realizing the widespread and deeply rooted mistakes of reasoning is possible not alone by the help of God. A human being, who enjoys a free will, cannot be reduced to an obedient mouthpiece of public opinion, so irrevocable existential necessity and finitude are not the only reason for the factual imperfection of human spirit. One can at least try to get rid of the veil of vices without any exogenous assistance.

Does this mean that in such a carefully erased mind there remain no residua whatsoever. If so, perhaps Vico conceived such a corrected consciousness not only in terms of the Baconian tabula abrasa, but also of the Lockean tabula rasa? The answer is no, by no means. After the self-cleansing of the mind, it is not transformed into an empty vessel, ready to accumulate empirical material in a Lockean way. It is rather transfigured into a saturated organon of universal understanding. It finds itself filled up with rational structures of the eternal divine language, which contains not only intersubjective meanings but also the productive rules of the proper articulation and application of the latter. It is only because we possess this universal code of language that we are able to find a truthful interpretation of the diverse empirical data of human past, present and future. In practice, the path to true knowledge leads through the proper use of natural language, which in turn means bringing it near to the semantic and syntactic paradigm of the eternal language. The process of true understanding presupposes a gradual approximation, targeted at the ideal homomorphism of the (scientific) natural and (divine) eternal language. Thereby Baconian induction, matured by a careful search and collection of historical data, is subordinated to the Christian theocentric paradigm. Correspondingly, the Scienza nuova of Vico communicates not the beginning of de-theologized anthropocentric historicism and a modern philosophy of culture, but a humanistic application of theocentric hermeneutics.

Therefore the widespread statements that Vico’s New Science should be treated as the "beginning of the paradigm of historicism" (8, p. 196), and that historicism, "as a peculiar type of historiographical and socio-philosophical reflection and as an independent paradigm of humanitarian reflection . . . appears in Vico’s 18th century vision of mankind and history" (ibid., p.197), should be treated only as a romantic expression of a temptation to fortify the historicist approach by way of reference to a presumably ancient and therefore highly honorable origin. Apologists of historiosophy often resort to humanists in support of the righteousness of their pretentious anti-humanist claims.

Referring to the authoritarian intents of Philip of Macedon, who threatened individual freedom and democracy, Demosthenes observed: "There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust." (Second Philippic, section 24). Philosophical discourse still remains a place where one can, without fearing authority, express any objections and doubts. The more thoroughly a philosophical arena is imbued with received truths and unquestioned pre-judgements, the more important becomes a free exercise of critical thought.

However, given the unchallenged prevalence of cultural collectivism and endemic repulsion of rational cosmopolitanism, which has uninterruptedly dominated our culture from the end of 19th century, this is not an easy task. The rediscovered intellectual heritage of Lithuania is part and parcel of the philosophical, cultural and political tendencies that dominated the European continent in the first half of the 20th century. It’s romantic anti-individualism was then outspokenly expressed in public discourses and academic Lithuanian philosophy, which to a large extent was a tripartite fusion of historicist Kulturphilosophie, neo-Thomism and personalistic Catholic philosophy. That is why the post-communist revival of the intellectual inter-war heritage eo ipso happens to strengthen essentialist methodology. From a methodological point of view, the contemporary revitalization of the suppressed national culture does not contradict, but, on the contrary, only consolidates the collectivist values and methodological patterns that were cultivated during the decades of Communist occupation and, nolens volens, stimulates their social and political application. If not hampered, the applauded processes of reconstruction could conveniently serve as a basis for the revival of authoritarianism. To counter these tendencies we need a critical (though not in the sense of a "critical" philosophy of culture) retrospective discourse.

This urges the premises of scepsis and rational individualism, though of course such an appeal, proclaimed in the close vicinity of the essentialist philosophy of culture, risks the fate of remaining only a rhetorical incitation to radically rethink our cultural and philosophical heritage on the single ground of the moral imperative: avoid everything that can do harm for yourself and your freedom, your "cogito" and your "dubio".

1. E. Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to Philosophy of Human Culture (London, 1945).

2. J. Habermas, in: XVIIIth World Congress of Philosophy. Book of Abstracts, Brighton, U.K. 21-27 August, 1988.

3. K. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, v. 1-2 (London, 1966).

4. K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1967).

5. Diogenis Laertii, Vitae philosophorum, v. 1-2 (Oxford, 1964).

6. A. Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik. Kultur-Philosophie (Muenchen, 1960).

7. R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946).

8. D. Vico, Scienza nuova (Leningrad, 1940). (Russian translation).

9. L. Donskis, Crises of Culture and Their Philosophical Reflection (In Lithuanian, Ph. D. manuscript) (Vilnius, 1990).