Existential Man
Peters, Robert Louis
Existential Man Irrational Man: a study in existential philosophy, by William Barrett. Doubleday. 278 pp. $5. Reviewed by Robert Louis Peters TVTilliam Barrett, a professor of " philosophy at New...
...Artists as well as philosophers are affected by this loss, and it is Barrett's comprehension of the role of the arts to stimulate and present the advanced thought of an age that gives his study its special completeness...
...Reviewed by Robert Louis Peters TVTilliam Barrett, a professor of " philosophy at New York University and a former editor of The Partisan Review, writes with considerable verve in this fine study of the "irrational," or "existential," man...
...In his first section, "The Present Age," he demonstrates the appropriateness of an existential view to the contemporary scene...
...On the Greek-essentialist side, emphasis is on knowledge received through the mind and the disciplined emotions...
...Among the most stimulating of his pages are those discussing the accomplishments of Dostoevski, Picasso, Hemingway, Joyce, and Giacometti...
...It may at first appear surprising that the movement has been so historically persistent...
...the significant phenomena in "the irrational man" are the degrees and kinds of anxiety fostered by each side of the split...
...This separation is a traditional one...
...Barrett's thesis, no less chilling for being familiar, is that we are again at the proverbial crossroads...
...in the third section, "The Existentialists," he evaluates the contributions of the chief modernists: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre...
...on the existentialist side, whatever knowledge man acquires is through his flesh and bones...
...Barrett maintains that the modern thinker experiences an anxiety keener than any his predecessors knew and that he has almost totally abandoned faith in reason, in "abstractionism," and in formal religion...
...Irrational Man is both history and warning, and deserves to find many readers among both laymen and specialists...
...We may persevere in our anxious flight from the "furies," from our earthly, tormented natures, through an intensified reliance upon technology and upon our escape into an amorphous, abstract mass...
...Readers seeking consolation for their own "lostness" should be warned that they are not likely to discover here the sedation they may seek...
...In this case we will accept our anxieties and our finiteness, and will allow more scope for intuition than the rationalists traditionally have...
...in the second, "The Sources of Existentialism in the Western Tradition," he traces the existential spirit to the Hebraic "man of faith" and the Greeks before Plato, and pursues the movement through such Catholic thinkers as Augustine and Aquinas, through Descartes and Pascal, Swift and Dostoevski, and into our own century...
...if this happens, Barrett feels, there is no hope for the survival of any profound individuality...
...The alternative is one that the author himself prefers (even though he fears that before it is chosen man may drain to the lees "the bitter cup of his own powerlessness"): we may come to take inspiration from the more helpful existentialists, from Heidegger in particular...
...for Barrett's persistent theme is that whatever force the individual brings to confront the abyss must derive almost wholly from his self and from its unique capabilities...
...but if we accept Barrett's distinctions between the "existential" and the "essential" approaches to life, the development is clear...
...the static, logical, Platonic mind will take its rightly subordinate place behind the more passionate truths of existence and change...
...Whereas the "essentialists" maintain that a supreme immutable fact exists beyond man in a supernatural or Platonic universe of perfection, the "existentialist" holds that man is totally finite and that any perfection he is to know must emerge from within himself...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
