Word: rationalist
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When the reader meets Martha in the mid-1930s, she is a 15-year-old rationalist who contemptuously understands everything about her parents except how they got that way. Yet by her early 20s, she herself is, by what seems at the time her own choice, the wife of a standard-model civil servant and the mother of a conventional child. Although she has "views"-she disbelieves vaguely in the color bar-she is accepted placidly by colonial suburbia. Then she discovers that she feels as if she were going mad. Older wives smile kindly and say, Yes, that...
...impassioned age cold indeed. Yet these writers played a large part in shaping modern notions of good and evil, pleasure and pain, freedom and tyranny. They are also eminently readable, writes Basil Willey, English-literature professor for 18 years at Cambridge. His engaging little book may well spark a rationalist revival...
...Marburg Disciples' interest in reinterpreting the scriptural message, says Robinson, stems from two landmarks in 20th century theology. One was Karl Barth's famous Epistle to the Romans of 1921, which rejected the rationalist, antiquarian approach of Protestant liberalism to scriptural texts and dramatically hurled at the church a modern interpretation of Paul that tried to capture the spirit instead of the letter of his message. A more immediate source is Bultmann's demand that the Bible must be demythologized-that is, stripped of its fictional heaven-above, hell-below framework, and its message restated in ideas...
Then, in the hospital where he peddles toothpaste and Cokes for the druggist, he meets a mad Jewish orderly named Sammy. Reason or reasons do not seem to exist for Sammy. His role is to drown the rationalist Angelo in humanity, and he rants outrageous anecdotes proving that the perversity and saintliness of the human swarm are inextricably intertwined. In the hospital Sammy is seen acting out his mad parables, caring lovingly for the dying, and hooking complaining patients on the morphine he steals and peddles...
Unamuno's countrymen adored him without ever quite understanding him. And Unamuno, in truth, is not easy to understand. Words often poured from him in a formless rush; he was hostile to reason. The pure rationalist, he insisted, is no more fit to comment on life than the eunuch is fit to judge a beauty contest. In Tragic Sense of Life he wrote, "The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice. In order to understand anything, it is necessary to kill...