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In a recent Theater of Ideas discussion considering the question “The End of the Rationalist Tradition?” Leslie Fiedler is quoted as saying,
Reason, although dead, holds us with an embrace that looks like a lover's embrace, but turns out to be a rigor mortis. Unless we are necrophiles, we'd better let go. Where Eros has so unsatisfactorily displaced Id, Id shall flourish again.1
Julian Beck, director of the Living Theater, is quoted as follows:
All forms of the theater of lies will go. Shakespeare with his Anglo-Saxon heroes, those model heroes with all the wrong values, who rationalize and reason. We don't need Shakespeare's objective wisdom. His ignorance of collective joy makes him useless to our time.
In fact, the whole theater of the intellect will go. The theater of our century and centuries past is a theater whose presentation and appeal is intellectual. One leaves the theater of our time and goes and thinks. But our thinking, conditioned by our already conditioned minds is so corupt that it is not to be trusted.2
In an article titled “The End of the Great Tradition” Peter Schrag writes:
Computers do the reasoning, and human beings feel. The book enslaves, entraps, deludes, equivocates. “I don't want to read Augustine,” says the young student to the professor, “because I don't like Augustine.” The youngster
New York Times, March 2, 1969.
New York Times Magazine, October, 1958, p. 102.
Page 160is a feeler, he already knows. History is a cop-out. The liberal arts are dead or dying because we have begun to lose faith in rational possibilities.3