Word: cartesian
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...Dies suggest a civilization with terminal cancer. The suffocating womb becomes a death trap: the urns encasing the characters in Play, the mound of earth piled up to the heroine's neck in Happy Days, the ashcans of Endgame. One critic has called a Beckett hero a perverse Cartesian: I stink, therefore I am. Actually, the degradation and mutilation of the body are Beckett's image for the withering away of the soul...
This is what French Novelist Michel Tournier has done. The beautifully translated result, though, is far more than a Cartesian blueprint fleshed into creaky fiction. Like Crusoe I, but more elaborately in Tournier's version, Crusoe II shakes off despondency by creating a makeshift England, complete with fertile fields, full storehouses, a church, a fortress and an elaborate code of law and punishment with which to govern himself...
...Cartesian Logic...
...French are rarely consistent, but they are usually logical-in their fashion. From the lycée onward, millions of Frenchmen are exposed to the classic symmetrical syllogisms of cartesian logic; as a result, a Frenchman tends to dismiss whatever he disagrees with not because it is intrinsically wrong but because it seems wrongly reasoned. "C'est pas logique."-roughly, "No one in his right mind would think like that"-is a favorite saying. To the vast numbers of middle-aged who feared continued social upheavals, to the little old ladies in black who considered the old ways best...
...reach advanced students there to give them any great feeling of nationality. A desparate teacher shortage has kept French instructors in control of nearly all the secondary schools, and much of the say over what is going to be taught still comes from Paris. The lycees teach more Cartesian logic than Ivoirian problems, dispensing much that means little to life so far from France...