Dirbinio rastis ir tvermė

• Pirmoji serijos knyga: Steigtis ir sauga Vilnius : Baltos lankos, 1996.
• Knygos Steigtis ir sauga vertimas į anglų: Initiation and preservation: modes of cultural philosophy New York: Nova Publishers, 2015.

LTKultūros vyksmų ir darinių šaltinis yra asmens ar asmenų veiks­ mai, darantys didesnį ar mažesnį, ilgalaikiškesnį ar trumpalaikiškesnį poveikį socialinės kultūrinės bendrijos pobūdžiui ir pačiai jos būčiai pasaulyje. Esamybės akiratį peržengiantis kūrybinis pradas, steigties veiksmas, išradimas ar atradimas duoda pradžią ir įterpia į bendrijos gyvenimą naujovę, nebūtą dalyką. Tačiau esmiškai svarbus ne tiktai šis pirminis veiksmas, kurio reikšmė ir pasekmės paprastai išryškėja ir skleidžiasi su laiku, žvelgiant atgal, bet ir jo sauga, įtvirtinimas bendrijos atmintyje bei paradigmatizavimas, pavertimas šios bendrijos narių sekamu pavyzdžiu. Veiksmas, ypač istoriškai reikšmingas veiksmas įsiterpia į bendrijos gyvenimo vyksmą, tampa jo savastimi ir daugiau ar mažiau jį keičia abiem šiais būdais — tiesioginėmis savo pasekmėmis ir kaip vis iš naujo minimas bei sekamas pavyzdys. Sekant tokiu pavyzdžiu, kartojant tokį veiksmą, formuojasi tam tikra bendrijos gyvensena, mąstysena ir veiksena, užtikrinama ir plečiama taki jos tapatybė, tvermė. Knygoje Steigtis ir sauga nagrinėjau, kaip pavyzdiniai ir kartotiniai veiksmai lemia bendros žmonių egzistencijos, socialumo pavidalus, kloja labai skirtingų istorinių bendrijų — senosios Graikijos, senojo Izraelio ir kitų, kitokių — pamatus. Sekdami vienu ar kitu reikšmingu praeities pavyzdžiu, gyvieji jį aktualizuoja, įdabartina. Šitaip dabar būva tai, kas įvyko, buvo nuveikta kadaise, padarė stiprų įspūdį, buvo papasakota, aprašyta ar atvaizduota (p. 11).

ENThis book is the second volume of Studies in the Philosophy of Culture, the first volume of which was Steigtis ir sauga (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1996; Initiation and Preservation: Modes of Cultural Philosophy, New York: Nova Publishers, 2015). The volume characterised human existence as endurance in the horizons of the world and time, and the fundamental intentionality of being as lack and desire, with the effort to overcome them, in order to examine the initiation and preservation of a cultural community. Thematically, the examination focused on paradigmatic acts: acts that set examples to the community to safeguard the profiles of the community’s constantly changing identity. This book uses the same approach to examine the problematics of the craftworks birth and endurance in the context of the creation and life of material culture. Nourishment and erotics are characterised as the most direct human interactions with nature, which are, however, discovered to comprise unnatural elements: insertions of different, sometimes alternative, cultures of a wide range from askesis to boundless indulgence. These insertions gradually expand with the intensification of human intervention into nature and the simultaneous formation of material culture from hunting and gathering to cultivating crops and breeding livestock. Subsequent mediation of relation between the human being and nature manifests as the making of craftworks in the course of the crystallisation of the sphere and various fields of material culture.Greek philosophers, first of all Plato and Aristotle, examined the making of craft works in terms of following examples or protoimages that belonged to the otherworld, interiority, and (or) discourse and sketch. Judaic and some other archaic cultures (of Mesopotamia and Egypt) conceptualised this practice in terms of the holy scripture or other authoritative texts, while also drawing on concrete universals, that is, the utterances of daily language, and their metaphorisation. Solid analytics of making a craftwork - analytics that laid the foundation for the entire Western thought-is found in the so-called second philosophy of Aristotle, his consideration of the relations between physics (biology) and technics, and the notion of hylemorphism. Craftworks are made not only for pragmatic, but also symbolic, religious, aesthetic, and expressive reasons. They constitute a broad field of works, characterised as material culture.The making of craftworks ensures their birth by integrating them into the context of the initiation of culture, while their safe-keeping, cherishing, and repair extends the theme of the preservation of culture into the material sphere. By tracing the development of thought on the making of craft works in the history of Western thinking, the book discovers its transformation into the production of the product in Modernity and the supply of supplies in Postmodernity. The present contemporary culture is increasingly taken over by the problematics of the limits of technics, the universalisation of technical thinking, and interiorisation (personal self-understanding, self-enaction, and self-creation), as well as “the end of nature” and global recycling as the new, now anthropogenic drive. Other aspects of thought on making a craftwork emerge in the integration of it into the Aristotelian architectonics of the origins of beings (comprising natural beings, craft works, artworks, and the possibilities for beings to move within this framework) and the subsequent juxtaposition of this ontological scheme with the perspectivist, projectionist, and interpretative thinking devel­ oped in Modernity (by Leibniz, Nietzsche and others).