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Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, by William Barrett
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Doubleday, 1962, Anchor, Good., Paperback. 314 pages. Light cover wear. [Philosophy, Existentialism] Out-of-print and antiquarian booksellers since 1933. We pack and ship with care.
- Sales Rank: #56320 in Books
- Published on: 1990-01-01
- Released on: 1962-07-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .73" w x 5.22" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 314 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Still a Classic
By Michael J. Benedict
Irrational Man by William Barrett is a classic book on Existentialism. It served us well when my generation was in college. I highly recommend it now as historically accurate and still a delightful read.
32 of 35 people found the following review helpful.
Between the immediate and the theoretical
By Robert E. Morrell
Nothing is more exhausting than the search for meaning. Every question has a thousand answers, each claiming to be correct. And each can be challenged by a thousand objections. Evermore we come out the same door as in we went, and return to -- ourselves. We alone are unavoidably the final arbiters of our personal beliefs and values. Occasionally we have the good fortune to find a guide through the jungle of perplexing philosophical questions who can explain issues clearly, distinctly, and quietly, without forcing his personal conclusions on us. But how do we know the guide is reliable? Before we have heard what he has to say, we don't. And if we chose to believe that he is reliable, that is our choice.
I agree with the many readers of _Irrational Man_ that Barrett is a remarkably persuasive guide. Not that I agree with him completely -- nobody's beliefs can totally correspond with those of another. No matter. Barrett has his feet on the ground, and one gets the feeling when reading him that however convoluted the explanation -- and some (but not all) explanations are necessarily convoluted -- Barrett is not playing with smoke and mirrors. My recommendation is to read a few pages of what he has to say as critically as you please, and then decide for yourself.
William Barrett (1913-1992) grew up in the generation just before and after WWII. His memoir _The Truants: Adventures among the Intellectuals_ (1982), recounts his early days at _Partisan Review_ and his associations with such figures as Delmore Schwartz, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and Philip Rahv. Very interesting as biography; no philosophy. The book is out of print but can be found for a ridiculously low price. [This author's middle name was Christopher, I think, although he uses neither the name nor initial to identify his writings. He is not to be confused with William E. (Edmund) Barrett (1900-1986), the novelist, and at least one other William Barrett, who appears to be a psychoanalyst.]
_Irrational Man: A study in Existential Philosophy_ (1958) is credited with being largely responsible for introducing existentialism to America. Two years earlier Barrett edited and published a work that might be described as the first attempt to provide a serious philosophical rationale for the post-war "Zen Boom": _Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki_(Doubleday Anchor, 1956). Both books are still selling well, a half century later. But Barrett, like many others, was put off by the pretentious antics of the Beat Generation:
`Twenty years ago, . . . I played a small part in introducing Zen to this country, and I have not always been happy with the results. American youth acquired another vocabulary to throw around. The "mindlessness" that Zen recommended was pursued by the young in the haze of marijuana and drugs. They forgot, if they had ever learned, the prosaic and magnificent saying of the sage Hui-Neng: "The Tao [the truth] is your ordinary mind." In recent years I have let myself forget all about Zen, and probably have been nearer to its spirit. Stick to your ordinary mind, reader, and forget the tabs. Find your own rocks and trees.' (_The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization_ , 1978, , p. 371)
Judging from Amazon's book listings, Barrett's later works do not sell as well as his early ones -- which is not to say that they are not worth our attention. Philosophical popularity is rarely a measure of worth. The rather substantial (392 pp.) _Illusion of Technique_ was followed by _Death of the Soul: From Descartes to the Computer_ (1986), a rather slight volume summing up his conclusions.
Barrett taught philosophy at New York University, 1950-1979, but was no "ivory tower" intellectual. He was well aware of what may be called the gap between phenomenalism and scientific materialism. He lucidly explores the issues, but offers no easy answers. If you are interested in ideas, see what an involved thinker has to say.
Readers may be interested to know that in 1962, four years after _Irrational Man_, Barrett teamed up with Henry D. Aiken to produce a 4-volume set called _Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: An Anthology_. (Random House) -- an anthology of extracts with extensive introductions. Vol. Three, Part Four (Phenomenology and Existentialism), pp. 123-450 !!, returns to the topic, this time with the inclusion of Camus and Bergson. As of this writing, Amazon lists the set under two numbers, but ASIN: B000AQLUMQ (which can be typed in as a title) has an extensive list of dealers with sets and individual copies at good prices. I highly recommend checking them out.
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
We exist. Deal with it.
By Vincent Poirier
Years ago, this book convinced me to throw Atlas Shrugged out the window. It is on my top ten list of works that have personally influenced me. Along with George Orwell's essay Notes on Nationalism, Irrational Man has instilled in me a deep distrust of systems that provide easy and simple solutions, but it did so without turning me into a cynic.
Why are we here, what's it all for, what's the meaning of life? Are these empty questions? I think they are but where does the obsession to answer them come from? What can we do to satisfy this urge? The Existentialists sought to answer these questions and now their program is pretty much over, but did it fail or succeed? I'd say both.
Existentialism fails utterly in providing a clear picture of what Man is. It doesn't resolve our angst, it doesn't tell us where we fit in the universe. On the other hand, Existentialists had the courage to ask these questions out loud at a time when physics and engineering seemed to be making us Masters of the Universe.
Barrett first makes a successful case for modern art. Abstract art was quite controversial even as recently as the 50s but Barrett argues that artists could not have produced anything else. Certainly they could have copied the styles of the Renaissance masters, but such work would have been stale, limp, lifeless. We then are shown the limits of reason. When politicians were extolling the virtue of the "clean" hydrogen bomb and when all accepted the assertion, something just had to be wrong. We had mastered things but finding we were on the brink of self destruction and that it was our own fault, could we say that we had we mastered ourselves?
The next section looks at four philosophers that represent Existentialism as it stood in 1957: Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche particularly deserve our attention. They lived through, in the 19th century, their own personal angst ridden existential crisis, well before the malaise spread to more and more people in the 1940s and 1950s. They were not academic philosophers but they had mastered academic technique and it is by choice and necessity that they expressed themselves as passionately as they did. Their answers were diametrically opposed: Kierkegaard's was to have Faith, while Nietzsche's was that God was dead.
Heidegger had many years of active life left to him when Irrational Man was published, so perhaps Barrett can be forgiven his enthusiasm for this pseudo-philosopher superstar. At least he does a good job of explaining clearly what it was that bothered Heidegger:
"... a table is an article of furniture; articles of furniture are human artifacts; human artifacts are physical things; and then, with the next jump of generalization, I can say of this table merely that it is a being, a thing. "Being" is the ultimate generalization I can make, and therefore the most abstract term I can apply to it, and it gives no useful information about the table at all."
If Heidegger had stopped there, everything would have been fine. Arguing about the meaning of the copulative verb "To Be" yields no wisdom at all. Instead of accepting this answer Heidegger throughout his career deconstructed language for thousands of pages, trying to convince us that this most general of abstraction needs to be abstracted again, that we must go back 2500 years to the dawn of philosophy and change our minds. That's tripe. Verbiage isn't an answer and Heidegger belongs in the dustbin.
Sartre, another philosophy superstar, fares better. As an academic philosopher he was as guilty of meaningless drivel as Heidegger was, but as a playwright and novelist he illustrated the angst of his time with force and clarity.
Barrett does close with an answer and to my mind it justifies the entire Existentialist project. He relates the story of the Furies from the plays of Aeschylus. Orestes killed his mother to avenge her murder of his father, but the primal instinct against matricide is older than society and reason so the Furies, being ancient earth goddesses, move to tear Orestes apart. Apollo intercedes on behalf of Orestes, but the parties find themselves in a stalemate. Athena intervenes to resolve the issue. Orestes is saved but humbled before the Furies. We must respect these ancient urges and instincts within ourselves; we must acknowledge our animal nature rather than repress it. We cannot reason away our urges.
The existentialist project doesn't tell us who we are or what our place in our universe is. I think no philosophy can do that; such questions are unanswerable. But it does tell us what we can do. We exist, we must deal with that.
Vincent Poirier, Tokyo
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