Abstract
When H. Stuart Hughes sketched the outlines of the pan-European cultural formation he called the “generation of 1905,” he described it in terms of a heightened awareness of the subjective and provisional character of all knowledge and a questioning of reason, often to the point of irrationalism. He cited Henri Bergson as the generation’s “tutelary deity,” but recognized pragmatism as its most durable philosophical expression. Yet, for him its most important legacy was literary, not philosophical. Confronted by the specialization of the social sciences and the narrowing of the domain of formal philosophical investigation to the value-free and scientifically knowable, the generation’s most representative figures turned increasingly to imaginative writing. In the philosophical novel, he argued, they found a means of exploring speculative questions affectively and metaphorically and of reaching a wider audience with their work.2
You can turn away haughtily and aloofly as if you have other, higher, more philosophical things on your mind. Or—
Or we can speak.
—Karel Čapek, 19321
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Notes
H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 337–41, 395–401, 404–11.
David S. Luft, Robert Musil and the Crisis of European Culture, 1880–1942 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 15–17.
Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 338–41; Luft, Robert Musil, 17. See also Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 232. Although Wohl concerns himself with a slightly younger group of writers than Hughes or Luft, there is significant overlap between the generation of 1905 and the generation of 1914. Wohl reaches an even starker conclusion than Hughes and Luft with respect to this cohort’s political inclinations. “It is fair to say,” he writes, “that Fascism was the great temptation of the generation of 1914.”
Communist propaganda cited in Věra Olivová, The Doomed Democracy: Czechoslovakia in a Disrupted Europe, 1914–38, trans. George Theiner (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972), 189.
See Václav Kapoun, Silvestrovská aféra Karla Čapka (Prague: Nakladatelství Melantrich, 1992).
See Viktor Kudělka, Boje o Karla Čapka (Prague: Academia, 1987), 95–143 and Štěpán Vlášín, “Bojovník proti fašismu,” in Kniha o Čapkovi, ed. Štěpán Vlášín (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1988), 346–59.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” in Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities, ed. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan, trans. Régis Durand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 341.
See, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) and Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
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© 2013 Thomas Ort
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Ort, T. (2013). Conclusion. In: Art and Life in Modernist Prague. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077394_7
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