times are bad for the Renaissance man

Из эссе Стивена Тулмина об Артуре Кестлере (S.E. Toulmin, "Koestler's Act of Creation", Encounter, July 1964):

"This is a bad time for polymaths. The old jibe about a Jack-of-all-trades being master of none has bitten deep into our minds, so that few people will admit to an intellectual grasp of anything more than a narrow range of experience. In a fragmented culture, everybody is expected to be a specialist: so men cling to the professional standards of their guilds as the lifebelts which will keep them afloat on a sea of general ideas which they have lost the capacity either to swim in, or to plumb. ... Natural scientists, again, look with suspicion at those colleagues who stray too far outside their specialisms, and for the most part they shut their eyes to the very existence of philosophy. In return, the philosophers have made their craft a "profession" of its own: a professional philosopher no longer needs to understand even the broadest ideas of contemporary natural science -- to say nothing of its factual discoveries.

To use a phrase of Pascal's, ours is an age dominated by the esprit géometrique. Narrow precision and deductive exactitude carry the palms: analogies are distrusted, virtuosity suspect."

"I never loved Eva Braun"

Кестлер, сторонник эвтаназии, заключил пакт суицида со своей третьей женой, и даже привел его в исполнение. Сам он страдал болезнью Паркинсона, но жена была на тот момент абсолютно здорова. А вот Жорж Батай состоял в секретном обществе поклонников человеческого жертвоприношения и даже собирался совершить ритуал над своим любовником.