Word: rationalist
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...laid plans went awry, he seemed to fit the classic case of the man who falls because of too much pride in his rationality. Yet there is another side to the story and to the man. Obscured by his veneer was an underlying, undeniable warmth of personality. The cold rationalist by day loved parties and lively talk, and he danced endlessly at night. He was the favorite dinner companion of the Kennedy wives. In public, he would berate an imprecise subordinate: "Don't give me your poetry." In private, he read poetry avidly...
...down, complete with stale jokes, and the author's defensive bid for us to accept him as a hip sophisticate. ( His stories, he quickly points out, are Humphrey Bogart and Dennis Hopper... whoopee-do!). There's a biography of Nathan Pusey, which explains the "bitter man" as an evangelical rationalist; it is followed by a rogue's gallery of Pusey's administrators that includes some very outdated photographs and uncritical thumbnail biographies (MacGeorge Bundy's "academic speciality was American foreign policy," we are told...
...Throughout your article on the New Genetics, one perceives a great uneasiness that maybe all this knowledge is a bad thing, that man is necessarily being forced into a moral dilemma. Being a rationalist, I cannot believe that it is better to be an ostrich than to be the thing that most distinguishes man from ape, a seeker after knowledge for the sake of itself. Misuse of knowledge results from ignorance. To believe otherwise is to believe that being out of contact with reality is less likely to lead to bad effects than is sanity. If man fails the evolutionary...
More than a decade ago Norman Mailer predicted that the cultural hero of the future might be the "philosophical psychopath." That future has arrived, for Miss Lessing is not alone. To a psychiatrist like R.D. Laing, madness, the rationalist's despair, has become a romantic last hope. "Perhaps," agrees the French antinovelist Marguerite Duras, "a madman is a person whose essential prejudice has been destroyed...
...able to get the six million-plus cash backing for the film only because of his last work: the dreadfully successful To Sir, with Love. If not for his track record, he would not have been able to make a full-blown medieval epic whose hero is a rationalist mercenary who urges idealists to kill if they want to preserve any happiness and falls in love with a Satan-worshipper. And Clavell went straight to major financing: ABC pictures and its affiliated Cinemara releasing company. It reminds one of the runaway productions made by "hot" directors in the fifties...