Guide to Existentialism
FITCH, ROBERT E.
here, l o maintain his sanguine fancy Cummings must further rigidly bisect the world: poets become "true men" because they imitate flowers or birds (or rabbits? ) ; the rest, most people, are ugly...
...Moreover, in his frequent references to the "Oriental" in religious thought, he simply follows the modem mode in identifying the "Oriental" with Taoism, Zen Buddhism and certain forms of Hinduism...
...At the moment, whether you call it positivism or existentialism, we have only one eye—the inward eye...
...Thus Cummings's memorial for the Hungarian Revolution trickles into undirected unpleasantness : "uncle sam shrugs his pretty pink shoulders you know how and he twitches a liberal titty and lisps 'im busy _ right now' " Still, it is hard to stay angry with Cummings...
...There of modern history" in the West "is must be many civilized folk who will unquestionably the decline of religion," then this is because he chooses to define religion in feudal and medieval terms...
...The problem of "really and truly" is the whole of the problem for metaphysics, and for value theory, and for logic...
...278 pp...
...And a horizontal eye to1 look out...
...In our time, as Barrett re-vivid style of writing, a sensitivity minds us, man has become a stranger to so much excellence in art and not only to God, nature and society, , letters and religion, and a widebut even to himself...
...Certainly let us flee from the land of "abstractions": from the rationalist abstraction which is positivism, from the romantic abstraction which is existentialism...
...This absolutely excludes all of Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto...
...In conclusion there flashes of insight that illuminate the is a chapter on "Integral vs...
...There is, to me, a Man," which seems to leave us • provocative and disturbing interpreneither integrated nor rational...
...Or else it is James Joyce who gives us "the banal gritty thing that we live," or Faulkner who offers us "the concrete feel of that world...
...Here is the philosophy which truly points to reality...
...December 15, 1958 Guide to Existentialism Irrational Man...
...He then considers • telligence which shows so much the sources of existentialism in the discernment in pointing out the Western tradition, with especial atmain features of the picture suggests tention to the Hebraic, Hellenic and a hope for genuine wholeness...
...Indeed, some critics the end of the road has itself disap might add that, if philosophers were peared...
...We may find it in Hemingway, with his ability to break through abstractions "to see what it is one really senses and feels...
...On what grounds are we to believe that the existentialist can say what one really senses and feels, or that the positivist can say what one truly knows and understands...
...Dean, Pacific School of Religion...
...Husserl summons us "to the things themselves," and Heidegger attempts to "let the thing speak for itself...
...A defect in any of these three ranges of vision must blind the others...
...existentialism is the failure of nerve in romanticism...
...Rational whole writing...
...Barrett's estimate of the im-There is a linking of both the U. S. portance of his own profession at and the USSR to a common heritage this moment in history is an exceed-from the Enlightenment...
...There is a shrewd discriminalosophers...
...Kumrads and trade-unionists get mangled together...
...A,nd while Barrett does well in his distinction between the Hebraic and the Hellenic heritages, he is surely premature in his assumption that the Hebraic is losing its hold today...
...There is an is followed by two brief appendices ; excellent section on Pascal, as on which polish off the analytic phi-Sartre...
...But, alas, all this is just what the argument is about...
...It may be de-Furies...
...he is possessed by the ; on in our world...
...This i tation of Protestantism...
...The attack on positivism is what marks the maverick quality of this book...
...He declares that sharp insight into a Hemingway or philosophers today are busy mainly a Faulkner, a swift judgment in one with disputes in the inner circle, that sentence upon a Tillich or upon a they have little contact with the in-Malraux...
...We do not win the argument simply by appropriating the honorifics...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch By William Barrett...
...Once he pricked the ridiculous pretension of "radically defunct periodicals," Cambridge ladies and politicians...
...And one pauses from time tellectual ?lite outside the Academy, to time over a single sentence: "It is and that, if they were oandid, they this treasure at the end of the road would recognize that they have less that has disappeared from the modern and less influence upon the minds horizon, for the simple reason that around them...
...Surely ours is the Age of Un-skill in philosophy with a flexible, reason...
...Sympathy is also needed to blink the increasing nastiness of Cummings's satirical work...
...Tolstoy can help us to stand "face to face with life itself...
...Usually his determination to remain lyrically, individually himself distracts our minds from what he is often correct in viewing as a sordid a,nd gloomy world...
...There is ingly modest one...
...As for a function in the cultural context: "Positivist man is a curious creature who dwells in the tiny island of light composed of what he finds scientifically 'meaningful,' while the whole surrounding area in which ordinary men live from day to day and have their dealings with other men is consigned to the outer darkness of the 'meaningless.' Positivism has simply accepted the fractured being of modern man and erected a philosophy to intensify it...
...His most ambitious chapter, the third, is a careful discus-Quite apart from whether or not sion of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, we accept the main arguments of Heidegger and Sartre as the four Barrett's thesis, it is impossible not existentialists who most fully reveal to be set alight and aflame by the to us our plight...
...5.00...
...Faced with a cosmology both simplistic and arrogant, can a reader seriously consider Cummings's "ideas" more than convenient airy platforms on which he strikes graceful poetic poses...
...of modern art portrays man as "a creature full of holes and gaps, face-Barrett begins with a description less, riddled with doubts and negaof the present age in its encounter [ tions, starkly finite," but the inwith nothingness...
...On the other hand, the impression is inescapable that Barrett is espousing as well as expounding existentialism...
...He is not guided [ ranging acquaintance with what goes by reason...
...influence now even upon themselves...
...author, "Decline and Fall of Sex" IT IS a sound instinct which leads i find delight in reading a book which William Barrett to discuss Irrational I exhibits the combination of technical Man...
...Indeed one could present quite an argument that it is just in the 20th century that the Hebraic categories are at last triumphing over the Hellenic in Western civilization...
...he pressing to learn that the testimony exists only in fragments...
...Some of us, indeed, would argue that both positivism and existentialism are the two symptoms of a common disease: Positivism is the failure of nerve in rationalism...
...Barrett has given us a suggestive metaphor in the section on "The Flight from Laputa...
...There must also be a vertical eye to look up...
...the rest, most people, are ugly unmen blighting god's (and Cummings's) bright bubble...
...Christian sources...
...He delights as few contemporary poets can—sufficiently, maybe, for another National Book Award...
...kikes and niggers are patronizingly tolerated— if they's alive...
...Barrett accuses this philosophy of "keeping its gaze riveted on minute logical matters that lie in the foreground" while denying the existence of its own preconceptions which are allowed to sink into the background...
...Doubleday...
...Neither one can give us the whole man...
...As for the eyes that one needs in his head, the actual requirement is for three, not for two, nor for one...
...It is Barrett's treatment of religion However, Barrett's own per-that is most unsatisfactory...
...tion of three varieties of atheism...
...If he is formance in Irrational Man arouses able to assert that "the central fact new hope for the profession...
...Doubtless there must he an eye to look within...
...The reader is compelled to really candid, they would recognize see with the author even when the that they have ceased to have any reader does not agree with the author...
...more and more he has come simply to pummel targets selected not for their affectation, but by his own political and social prejudices...
...He is no longer whole...
...But I wonder if it is not more heroic to face up to tragic revolutions, not as excuses for malice, but as opportunities for humane sympathy, for singing of Olaf, "whose warmest heart recoiled at war," for examining the realities of life and love and death that Cummings so adroitlv dances about...
...Strangely, the hates of this bohemian individualist now approximate those of what Dean Fitch might call the "hipsters" of the Right...
Vol. 41 • December 1956 • No. 45
