Consequently, all such
totalistic, undifferentiated indictments of reason as a whole fail to account rationally for their own evaluative presuppositions, and so appear to their opponents as arbitrary assertions incapable of claiming a wider validity beyond their own idiosyncratic presuppositions.
These groups are: 1) authoritarian; 2) communal and
totalistic; 3) aggressive in their proselytizing; 4) systematic in their programs of indoctrination; 5) relatively new in the United States; 6) middle-class in their clientele.(11)
Drawing upon an impressive range of texts -- from the elite writings of Henry Adams, William James, and William Faulkner through popular fiction, industrial relations treatises and reform exposes, to Buster Keaton's silent film One Week, anthropometric data, and Sears Roebuck readymade houses -- Banta has fashioned a collage to show that "my good ending may be your bad one." (327) She firmly rejects
totalistic tendencies within literary criticism, finding in Taylorism "a paradigm for contemporary socioliterary theory .
Herman Roth's "absolutely
totalistic notions" (127) spring from the monolithic self with which his son's metamorphic one collides.
The inferiority label imposed upon those of the female sex is frequently intended to be a
totalistic notion encompassing almost every aspect of the woman's being--physical, mental, and emotional.
In no other area of human endeavor, with the possible exception of religion, do we succumb to such
totalistic, all-or-nothing thinking.
Understood in this way, Barth's conception of theology and most of his actual practice are indeed |totalitarian' in an obvious, though unwonted, sense: properly done, theology is
totalistic. Its scope is the whole; it aims at (though of course never in practice fully achieves) an interpretation of all life and reality, and so necessarily engages in critical dialogue with, rather than staying at |one remove from', the spirit (or spirits) of its time.
Rasmussen once implied that "when faced with the problem of energy, we are facing ourselves." (5) This is why conventionally, energy security conceptualization has been shaped in accordance with "logic of war, subsistence and total security logic" and provided legitimacy for
totalistic energy security policies.
There has been a norm, developed gradually over the centuries, that politics is not a
totalistic spiritual enterprise.
The
totalistic nature of sincerity, whether on the right or the left, profoundly threatens the slow, patient courtesy of liturgical world construction.
