Conclusion

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