Non-classical philosophy and the lost generation literature

The era of 1930-1940s is closer to barbarism than the V-IV-th centuries B. C. because the joyful world's perception is lost. Z. Freud's psychoanalysis replaces the lively feasts in honor of Bacchus and Dionysus. The Europeans thinking complacently of their own fate resemble walruses or sheep which are led to slaughter. The sale of Europe, the gods' shapeless twilight, human rights' faded banners represent the European social and political situation before the Second World War [19, p. 88; 129]. The era of total lies is the epoch of the counterfeiters wearing masks of good and hiding the essence of evil. While building military plants and concentration camps the political fraudsters and gangsters pretend to be the humanity saviors [19, p. 130]. The Reich's killing of “the inferiors” indicates a moral decay of the Germans. The spiritual achievements of Th. Gutenberg, S. Brant, J. Goethe, L. Beethoven, A. Barbusse, B. Brecht, S. Sweig seem to have sunk into oblivion.

The first half of the XX-th century is the era of migration and emigration. An emigrant's being is analogous in its scope to the Earth's being. Our planet is compared to the Sun's emigrant [17, p. 56]. The emigration attains such dimensions that the human pain reaches space proportions. The first half of the XX-th century can be named the era of bitter irony, “an unwilling, absurd irony, marked by the past technical success and degradation of culture” [17, p. 134]. Another name of the epoch mentioned above is the age of paradoxes when falsehood is called the truth and evil is regarded as a good thing [17, p. 177]. A person seems to be “inside a cable car” [17, p. 211] hanging between the devalued past and a misty future. A man's uncertainty is akin to his unpredictable danger - a man is “a rope stretched between a beast and an overman” [10, p. 12].

The era's paradox is in the words: “A man is always and never alone” [19, p. 66]. Slaves cannot be friends while despots cannot have friends [10, p. 59]. However, in times of tyrants and the deprived a man can be supported by “a worried heart of the other person” [19, p. 253]. A totalitarian era's man's trouble and charm is, on the one hand, in the human ideas' grandeur but, on the other hand, in frailty of the ideas' implementation [19, p. 80]. A man is both excused and condemned. Life is given not only to explore the meaning of life because “misfortune is the most common thing in the world” [12, p. 38] but also to avoid actions increasing evil.

The process of thinking is the worst illness because it is incurable [18, p. 153]. A man can't help thinking. On the other hand, thinking is risky because it is free. However, not everyone gives birth to an independent deep thought relevant to modern life's comprehension: “You become a melancholic while thinking of life and a cynic is born when you see what most of people make of life” [18, p. 134]. The Lost Generation authors raise the question “how to combine ... books, poems and philosophy with the Nazi storm troopers' inhumanity, ... with killing of the innocent” [13, p. 210].

The same question can be asked in relation to Russia that gave birth to such phenomena as A. Pushkin's poems and Stalin's regime. The researched literary works answer: “. everything has its antithesis: nothing can exist without its opposite like light and shadow, the truth and a lie, illusion and reality. All these terms' pairs are not only interrelated but inseparable” [14, p. 203]. Nietzsche claims fairly that “in love there is always a little madness. And in madness there is always a little mind” [10, p. 41]. Love and hatred, war and peace, childhood and adulthood represent objective description of the being.

A Soviet writer's statement about children's ability to be sober-minded [5, p. 60] sounds like a desperate attempt to discover and protect needs of a child's inner world in the 1920s. Children are “the only courageous philosophers” [5, p. 116]. Any thinker has to wonder like a child asking fundamental questions, for example of development and its phases. According to the Marxist-Leninist ideology the 1917 revolution is a last and decisive point in the world's history. The declaration of this sort stops the historical process, which is absurd inherently. The idea of impossibility of future revolutions is also preposterous.

A child's unsophisticated question - what is next? - is in exact proportion with a philosophical understanding of not a fragmentary but a general being with contradictions as the next stage's beginning. As A. Camus notes, “. if there were the only one true revolution there would not be history” [8, p. 200]. The reality is “an endless process of formation fraught with some fruitful conflicts which are ended invariably with a higher synthesis giving birth to its antithesis and thus ... moving history on” [8, p. 272].

The problem of man is a central one in the Lost Generation writers' works. “A personality who is linked inseparably to acts accumulates something inevitably” [23, p. 102]. Reliable personalities transform the reality constructively taking the voluntary responsibility for their deeds. Such personalities remind us “the eternal Faust who is striving for breaking through the borders of here and now yes-being” [26, p. 152]. It should be noted that the human race has not undergone substantial changes since Adam and Eve's times because people are not freed from envy, aggression, greed and vanity. Besides, “the power is a contagious disease spoiling people mostly” [19, p. 79]. On the one hand, the mankind has created the immortal works of art. On the other hand, the humankind “was not able to provide each man with enough bread” [18, p. 290]. Indeed, the gap between economically prosperous countries and poor ones is widening. Among the XXI-st century global problems are famine and diseases as well as man-made and environmental disasters, illegal emigration and terrorism.

Camus's statement is still actual: “Sooner or later there comes the time when you need to choose between contemplation and action. This is called to become a person” [9]. A free man's responsibility is conscious as the person realizes the freedom's necessity in the human world: “A man is only the thing he makes of himself' [21]. A lot of factors encourage men's “moral idiocy” (N. Berdyaev). For instance, blurring criteria's distinction between good and evil, impersonal morality, abstract politicians' slogans, desire to have some out of experience painless truth that is given once and for all. It is proved by the history that books' burning results in men's burning. Throwing books away causes the acquired knowledge's depreciation. However, the opposite is true. The modern man's loneliness is a problem existing under the conditions of the destroying nature, diversity of religions and the high-speed Internet.

Indifferent disunity of the human community is in lack of responsibility and loss of nobility, the moral foundations' vagueness, unwillingness to penetrate into the heart of things and discover the own inner spirit. Parody, vulgarity, dullness and illusory carnival of our time is in total commercialism and absence of honest courage to call a spade a spade. Goethe's words concerning the relation between the universal and an individual are still actual nowadays: “The general tolerance will be reached only when every person or a nation is given a chance to keep their own characteristics. However, both a person and a nation should remember that the distinctive feature of true virtues are in their belonging to the universal” [3, p. 411].

Non-classical philosophy and the Lost Generation literature hate executioners. Fascism and stalinism as the phenomenon of haughty ignorance and total violence can be revived if distrust and limitations prevail. The Lost Generation writers' works as well as non-classical philosophy warn the XXI century humanity about the dangers of war and loss of the Self. Schopenhauer's words full of “sadness and pity” [27, pp. 320, 395] concerning the necessity of resistance are still relevant to moral challenges of modern people's being. Moreover, the opposition to be and to have, which is still actual nowadays, is in favour of the first concept in the works of non-classical philosophy's founder [27, p. 221]. The humanistic tendencies of the non-classical philosophy resonate with those expressed in the works of the Lost Generation writers.

We believe that for further research there should be important to investigate some concepts mentioned in the paper with regard to measure as a philosophical category. Measure is brought by form which restrains and set boundaries [1]. For example, as A. Camus states, creativity gives form to a destiny [21]. The notions of harmony and disharmony, proportion and disproportion, order and disorder are connected with epistemological and axiological aspects of the contemporary public problems. Among the urgent social questions are the ratio of global and national, virtual and face-to-face communication, freedom-for- myself and freedom-for-the other, etc. The problems of a social influence and a personal space, possession and belonging, education and self-education are of great scientific interest nowadays, too.

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resistance ideological dogmatism

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