“The life of ordinary people”: Mikhail Lifshitz and Igor Satz on good and evil

Abstract

The article, based on the analysis of archival materials of M.A. Lifshitz and his correspondence with the literary scholar and philosopher I.A. Sats, examines the moral and ethical aspects characteristic of the representatives of the “movement” in Soviet philosophy of the 1930s. Particular attention is paid to considering the desire of Lifshitz and Sats to find intermediary links in the chain connecting word and deed, i.e. Marxist science and revolutionary practice. A look at this “movement” of the thirties through the prism of its understanding of the philosophical ideas and socio-political positions of Socrates, D. Diderot and N.G. Chernyshev¬sky allows the author of the article to take a more specific look at the consequences that this desire had for the fate of its participants, and above all Sats, whose letters are the focus of the article. By referring to the materials of the Lifshits archive in the ARAS, the author of the article traces the connection between the peculiarities of the individual fate of the participants of the “movement” and their general theoretical, Marxist position in matters of ethics and the philosophy of history. It is shown that the participants of the “movement”, starting from the dialectical-materialistic view of the problem of good and evil, considered it from the point of view of the development and formation of free initiative of the individual and the community. Thus, what contributes to this process in the specific circumstances of the time, in their opinion, is what can be called good from an ethical point of view, and what hinders it is evil. It is concluded that, adhering to the historical, Marxist understanding of morality, both Lifshits and Sats defined it as the unification of the simplest, most ordinary, absolutely unremarkable persons by the power of honest, free comradeship.