Word: existentialist
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RIGHT YOU ARE. Luigi Pirandello is the philosopher king of 20th century playwrights, an existentialist before Sartre and Camus, an absurdist before Beckett and lonesco. This 48-year-old intellectual whodunnit has scarcely a grey line in its script, and the APA troupe has obeyed the playwright's commandment: "to convert the intellect into passion...
...tricks borrowed from older New Wave directors-abrupt switches from black-and-white to color, for example-to have won this year's Cannes Festival Grand Prix. But his does-she-or-doesn't-she story, banal to begin with, sounds like nothing so much as an existentialist "Dear Abby" column in which sentiment has melted into sentimentality...
Hocking might not have quarreled with that description. He proudly con curred in Poet John Masefield's con tention that love and beauty are uni versal gateways to truth and agreed with Existentialist Gabriel Marcel that all of experience is a divine summons, exalting passion. He never wavered from the tenet of his first book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), that "the world, like human self, has its unity in a living purpose. It is the truth of the existence...
Speculative Intelligence.Steiner's thesis, presented in language that Existentialist Author Simone de Beauvoir calls in her introduction "neither pathetic nor indignant but with a calculated coolness," is that there should have been a lot more revolts like that. "Certainly," Steiner writes, "there was a share of cowardice in the attitude of the Jewish masses who preferred to endure the vilest humiliation than to revolt." He seems to believe that something in the Jewish character produced the victims' resignation to their fate, says that "death does not have for the Jew the definitive character that it has in general...
Activity v. Self. The professionalist may vaguely believe in God, may even go to church, but "religion plays no important role" in his professionalist attempts to find a meaning in life. Ethically he is a relativist, an existentialist who prefers Tillich to St. Thomas, who reads Camus rather than Marx. His intellectual style is "anti-ideological, pragmatic and empirical," much in the mainstream of American tradition. But he does have tensions, a sense of uneasiness, a vague feeling of disquiet, and they are rooted in his strivings to reconcile two separate parts of his existence, "his public and his private...