Crisis of Intellectual Culture: on Issue of Approaches to Studying the Problem of Typology

Abstract

The article is devoted to studying the problem of typology of intellectual culture crises. It proves that the intellectual culture as a historical process represents itself as an endless change of cultural forms, in which case each of the forms once emerged, reached its flourishing and died, being replaced by other cultural forms. It emphasizes that crises are intertwined into this process; they appear in cultures inevitably, under certain conditions - when the potential of the former cultural form has not been exhausted yet, and the struggle for its future form is only outlined, but the crises themselves take a short period of time in this process, although they have a complex nature. The article focuses on the fact that the typology of crises should be built, on the one hand, in conjunction with the typology of intellectual cultures and, on the other hand, with the typology of the historical process; there can be a number of such typologies, and this proves that cultures and crises can be classified in a variety of ways. It notes that the typology is a method used to study, compare and describe a variety of processes, including intellectual cultures and their crises, but this method does not exist in a vacuum, it is formed in an environment of idealism and materialism, dialectical and metaphysical methods. The peculiarities of modern typologies stem from the fact that, since the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, they are under the pressure of the metaphysical method, hence there is their internal need for the culture unification on the grounds close to their ethnicity: the idea of the unity of the cultural process is rejected with the help of these features, and the understanding of the process itself is reduced to the individuality of its cultural forms.