Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
by William Barrett
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Book Summary Information
Author: William BarrettEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-01-01
ISBN: 0385031386
Number of pages: 314
Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday
Book Reviews of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Book Review: We exist. Deal with it.
Summary: 5 Stars
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
Summary of Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist Philosophy, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett discusses the views of 19th and 20th century existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre and interprets the impact of their thinking on literature, art, and philosophy.Philosophy Books
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