After all that has been said about it, what is culture now? We saw it defined in paradoxes, when culture revealed its different faces. These faces are development of human ways of life, or ways of thinking, or dialogue, or message, or creativity, or freedom... This last face is the one I want to concentrate on now.
Culture and freedom presuppose one another in all of their aspects. I mentioned already that an author must feel absolutely free to build his new world. This is true in the respect of ideas, emotions, art forms and techniques, genres, personages, events, chunks of his other works, or of works of other authors, use of language, et cetera. A work of art represents a new world and, at the same time, is a form of dialogue. Therefore, it requires ultimate freedom in that same way as people require and are entitled to freedom of speech. Art represents some new ideas, and/or new assembly of ideas, and/or new form of expression of those ideas, which amounts to the seed of an entirely new virtual world. Art represents new dimensions in understanding of the human way of life, humanity itself, and let us add now the new understanding of human freedom. Why?
A human being is innately a free one. Freedom is one of the definitions of humanity. It's common knowledge that humans value freedom above all else. From history we know about, feel compassion for, and understand people who sacrificed their property, health, and even lives for the sake of freedom.
People constantly try to reach beyond all boundaries of life, no matter how well they have been adapted to current circumstances. An essential aspect of human life is breaking out of adaptation, and we can usually blame culture for this ''inconvenient feature.'' A real work of art, that very cell from which the evergrowing organism of culture is built, always takes us from our world (to which we have adapted) to another, new one (where we have to adapt ourselves from scratch). It demands us to be free to go, to be courageous to go, to stand up and go, and to reach new horizons. This is why, all kinds of tyrants and tyranies cannot come to terms with culture, and therefore hate, and fight it. A Nazi once said, ''When I hear the word culture, I reach for my Browning!" Creators, people of culture, put themselves on the line all throughout history... Remember? - People create regardless of reward or punishment! Likewise, people try to reach freedom regardless reward or punishment! Freedom and creativity bear their rewards and punishments in and of themselves despite outer circumstances. In this sense, culture, creativity, humanity, dialogue, freedom - they are all synonyms.
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