Phenomenology of intellectual culture: general characteristic

The peculiarities of the intellectual culture phenomenon are studied and observed in the scientific research. Intellectual culture is determined as aspects of intellect. They possess qualitative expression in personality characteristics connected with the cognitive orientation of the personality. As a psychological phenomenon intellectual culture has two forms of existence - public and personal. Every person is involved in the social-historical experience of a given community, which includes ways of thinking, of mastering knowledge and means of transferring information. Samples of intellectual culture are mainly fixed in theoretical forms of public consciousness. They are personified for the individual in one or another way and exist through the activities of people who are the original compilers of social experience. Intellectual culture of a society always reveals to individuals in its personified form. The individual does not only take a part of this experience, but also enriches it. Intellectual culture can be considered as a level and characteristic of a set of cognitive properties of people that ensure their process of creativity. These properties are both realised through activities and are connected with the ways the world frames and makes sense of people's own actions. Intellectual culture turns into the personal mode through the primary characteristic of intellectual operations that are used in activity settings. At the individual level of public life intellectual culture performs a cognitive role - organization of knowledge and its accumulation, preservation and application. However, there is no knowledge without understanding its sense. Therefore the basic function of intellectual culture is the guidance by and transfer of the general forms of knowledge into personal understanding through the change of its parameters: deepening (inward direction) and expansion (within the outer zone of possible understanding). Understanding, which is repeated along with deepening and expansion within the zone, influences the person. The regulative function is an important one for intellectual culture. The person's need to understand other people and to be understood by them sets up the communicative function of intellectual culture.

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