Word: cartesians
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...look." For expressionism was largely an ethical matter, a display of exemplary anguish. It was one of the last convulsions of northern romanticism; and like all romantic painting, it was essentially an art of subject matter. The expressionist attitude lay at the opposite pole of experience from the sensuous, Cartesian quality of French art. At the time Kirchner painted his self-portrait in conscript's uniform, France had also experienced-from the other side of the trenches-the horrors of total war. But nothing by a major French painter in those traumatic years resembled Kirchner's paroxysm...
...certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint-the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward-across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town of the Cartesian odalisque...
Seaver can be forgiven these slight excesses, however, since his purpose is to impart an enthusiasm of discovery like his own to the unfamiliar reader, not to confront him with the airy abstractions like "The Cartesian Centaur," "The Metaphysics of Choiceless Awareness," and of course, "Waiting for Beckett," so favored by critics. Seaver shunts critics aside: "The point to remember is that, with or without exegesis, Beckett is great fun." As usual, Beckett says it better: "If people have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin...
...every look-ma-no-hands schoolboy cyclist knows, the shortest distance between two points should never be a straight line. Take the 3,000 miles across the country, and this week 2,000 bikers are doing exactly that. Instead of pumping along in the breakdown lane of some Cartesian interstate, they are savoring a cyclist's delight, a 4,250-mile route that meanders through two U.S. parks (Yellowstone and Grand Teton), five major historic sites, 25 national forests and just about every one-air-pump hamlet from Astoria, Ore., to Williamsburg...
...Nietzsche, humanity's theological license had expired, and man could either plunge into nihilism or freedom. This now classical alienation from faith became Heidegger's concern. In his seminal work, Being and Time, he set out to investigate the nature of existence. He tried to discard the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter. Heidegger's man is "thrown" into the void. Confronted by dread, this "authentic person" lives in the full awareness of his extinction; between sentience and death he can find freedom and purpose...