Word: rationalists
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Just how far the pendulum has swung is evident in Available Light, which travels to the Brooklyn Academy of Music later this month. Childs, who collaborated earlier with fellow avant-gardists such as Composer Philip Glass and Theater Artist Robert Wilson, is a cool rationalist who favors organizational clarity over overt emotionalism. The repeating patterns that ripple through her dances are imitated and finally dispersed like waves spreading across a pond. There are no kicks, leaps or pronounced extension. Childs' dynamic level rarely rises above a whispered pianissimo...
...course, arrogant, a fallacy of rationalist optimism, to imagine that all differences in the world can be settled by well-meaning conversations. Neville Chamberlain went to Munich entertaining that notion. Not every human conflict is ripe to be settled in the court of reason. Still, certain kinds of tragedy have become intolerable in the world as they never were before: the lushly cataclysmic plot development that history could once absorb (even to the extent of permitting two "world wars") will no longer do. When the world has so armed itself as to make the use of those arms a stroke...
...possibly because Foreman views Don Juan as "a radical with no place to go" in a corrupt society. Molière's Don Juan is radical only in his supreme egoism. He is a law unto himself, a one-man Fifth Estate. He is as cool a rationalist as he is hot a hedonist...
...Providence would do just as well. The religious mind, with a more orderly or merely fatalistic sense of the universe, tends to ascribe to Providence (however mysterious its intentions) events that the more worldly credit to luck, good or bad. People who believe in luck aren't particularly rationalist either, however, since scientific rationalism has as much trouble dealing with luck as theology does. The best it has to offer is Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is absolutely impossible to predict the exact behavior of atomic particles. Luck is a weird, pagan, primitive business...
...could one imagine a connection between Santayana and Jones's cult? Santayana--the philosopher of the American consciousness, the dissector of our spiritual heritage; the rationalist Harvard professor, the ascetic hermit; the half-Spanish, half-Boston Brahmin writer who knew the spirit of this country so well yet found it troubling and oppressive--what did Jim Jones see in his words? Surely there is some subterranean meaning in this strange confluence of philosophies...