Irrational Man

This article is about the book by William Barrett. For the 2015 movie by Woody Allen, see Irrational Man (film).
Irrational Man: A Study In Existential Philosophy

Cover of the first edition
Author William Barrett
Country United States
Language English
Subject Existentialism
Published 1958 (Doubleday)
Media type Print (hardcover and paperback)
Pages 278 (1977 edition)
314 (1990 reprint)
ISBN 978-0385031387

Irrational Man: A Study In Existential Philosophy is a 1958 book by philosopher William Barrett, in which Barrett explains the philosophical background of existentialism and provides a discussion of several major existentialist thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Irrational Man helped to introduce existentialism to the English speaking world and has been identified as one of the most useful books that discuss the subject, but Barrett has also been criticized for endorsing irrationality and for giving a distorted and misleading account of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Summary

Barrett provides an account of the philosophical tradition to which existentialism was a reaction, discussing the views of philosophers from Plato to Hegel, and tracing the development of ideas about being, ontology, and metaphysics. He also attempts to explain how developments in science, economics, and religion provided the background to existentialism. According to Barrett, "With Protestantism begins that long modern struggle, which reaches its culmination in the twentieth century, to strip man naked." In his view, "as the modern world moves onward, it becomes more and more secularized in every department of life; faith consequently becomes attenuated, and Protestant man begins to look more and more like a gaunt skeleton, a sculpture by Giacometti. A secular civilization leaves him more starkly naked than the iconoclasm of the Reformation had ever dreamed." Barrett writes that during the modern period, there has emerged "an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this being who has now to confront himself at the center of all his horizons. The labor of modern culture, wherever it has been authentic, has been a labor of denudation." Surveying trends in art, Barrett writes that the Dada movement was "one of the valid eruptions of the irrational in this century."[1]

Four existentialist thinkers - Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre - receive extended discussion from Barrett, who explains their main ideas and philosophical terminology. Barrett more briefly discusses other existentialist thinkers such as Karl Jaspers, Nikolai Berdyaev, Martin Buber, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as some artists and writers he considers existentialist, such as the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whom he compares to Nietzsche, crediting him with anticipating Nietzsche's insights into the will to power in Crime and Punishment (1866).[2]

Discussing Kierkegaard, Barrett maintains that the Danish philosopher is relevant even to non-Christians because of his "appeal to their own existence." Barrett writes that, "Being a Christian, after all, is one way of being a man - for Kierkegaard personally it was the only way - and to have this way illumined, to be summoned to its tasks, is also to be called on to be a man, however divergent our own choice of a way may be." Barrett adds that, "Kierkegaard stated the question of Christianity so nakedly, made it turn so decisively about the individual and his quest for his own eternal happiness, that all religious writers after him seem by comparison to be symbolical, institutional, or metaphorical - in a word, gnostic. Perhaps the very nakedness of Kierkegaard's statement of faith makes it impossible for Christianity to go anywhere but in the direction of some kind of gnosticism."[3]

In his discussion of Nietzsche, Barrett writes that, "Nietzsche's fate is one the great episodes in man's historic effect to know himself. After him, the problem of man could never quite return to its pre-Nietzschean level." Barrett calls Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1891) Nietzsche's "most lyrical book" and "the expression of the loneliest Nietzsche."[4]

Finally, Barrett applies existentialist thought to the world of the late 1950s, during the Cold War. Irrational Man includes two appendices, "Negation, Finitude, and the Nature of Man", which reprints a 1957 paper by Barrett, and "Existence and Analytic Philosophers", a highly technical discussion of existentialism in relation to analytic philosophy.[5]

Reception and influence

Theologian John Macquarrie considers Irrational Man one of the most useful books that discuss existentialism.[6] In The Ominous Parallels (1982), Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff cites Barrett's work as an example of a prominent philosopher endorsing irrationality, quoting his comment that Dada was one of the "valid eruptions of the irrational" in the 20th century.[7] Philosopher Jon Stewart identifies Barrett as one of many writers who have caricatured, and propagated myths about, Hegel. Stewart deems Barrett guilty of misrepresenting Hegel as a "cosmic rationalist" who, like Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and some romantics, believed in a metaphysical world soul.[8]

Andrew Pulver, writing in The Guardian, comments that the title of the 2015 Woody Allen film Irrational Man is clearly inspired by Barrett's book, which "no doubt formed part of Allen’s self-taught intellectual life in the late 50s and early 60s".[9]

References

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Barrett 1977. pp. 1-35, 40.
  2. ↑ Barrett 1977. pp. 133-234.
  3. ↑ Barrett 1977. pp. 136, 156.
  4. ↑ Barrett 1977. pp. 160, 168.
  5. ↑ Barrett 1977. pp. 251-271.
  6. ↑ Macquarrie 1973. p. 239.
  7. ↑ Peikoff 1982. p. 182.
  8. ↑ Stewart 1996. pp. 306, 381.
  9. ↑ Pulver 2015.

Bibliography

Books
  • Barrett, William (1977). Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-8371-9671-X. 
  • Macquarrie, John (1973). Existentialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-021569-7. 
  • Peikoff, Leonard (1982). The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America. New York: Stein and Day. ISBN 0-8128-2850-X. 
  • Stewart, Jon (1996). Stewart, Jon, ed. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0-8101-1301-5. 
Online articles
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